The honeycomb patterns which are often found in salt deserts in Death Valley and Chile, among other places, look like something from another world. Researchers, including those from TU Graz, explain the origin of the mysterious patterns for the first time. Honeycomb patterns form in salt deserts all over the world, for example in the Badwater Basin of Death Valley in California or in the Salar de Uyuni in Chile. These enigmatic salt structures attract tens of thousands of visitors…
… confirms existence of a new family of quantum matter. Like finding a hidden world, physicists dialing up the magnetic field on a semiconducting material have discovered the first in a new family of matter that flowers from the bizarre realm of the quantum scale. In what researchers dubbed the bubble phase of composite fermions, pairs of quasiparticles – particle-like entities arising from the interaction of particles – align in a crystalline pattern, allowing electricity to flow along the edge of…
A liquid nitrogen spray developed by Washington State University researchers can remove almost all of the simulated moon dust from a space suit, potentially solving what is a significant challenge for future moon-landing astronauts. The sprayer removed more than 98% of moon dust simulant in a vacuum environment with minimal damage to spacesuits, performing better than any techniques that have been investigated previously. The researchers report on their work in the journal, Acta Astronautica. While people have managed to put men…
Tailor-made laser light fields can be used to slow down the movement of several particles and thus cool them down to extremely low temperatures – as shown by a team from TU Wien. Using lasers to slow down atoms is a technique that has been used for a long time already: If one wants to achieve low-temperature world records in the range of absolute temperature zero, one resorts to laser cooling, in which energy is extracted from the atoms with…
Astronomers from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) and the Vatican Observatory (VO) teamed up to spectroscopically survey more than 1000 bright stars that potentially host exoplanets. The team presents precise values of 54 spectroscopic parameters per star in the first of a series of papers in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and releases all its data to the scientific community. This unprecedented large number of parameters will be essential to interpret the stellar light and find connections between…
Entangled photon pairs to help fighting cancer. The recently launched QEED project aims to significantly reduce measurement time in clinical cancer diagnostics by developing a spectrally resolved imaging technique based on entangled photon pairs. FBH scientists will develop the required diode lasers and quantum light modules. The in-house Prototype Engineering Lab will then assemble these modules together with the project partners’ components into the ready-to-use QEED system. Funding is provided by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)….
Higher order statistical analysis of protons emitted from wide range of gold-gold collision energies shows clear absence of a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) at the lowest energy. Physicists report new evidence that production of an exotic state of matter in collisions of gold nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—an atom-smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory—can be “turned off” by lowering the collision energy. The “off” signal shows up as a sign change—from negative to positive—in data…
The Sun emitted a strong solar flare, peaking at 3:16 p.m. ET on Feb. 17, 2023. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the Sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of energy. Flares and solar eruptions can impact radio communications, electric power grids, navigation signals, and pose risks to spacecraft and astronauts. This flare is classified as an X2.2 flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its…
Astronomers from the University of Texas and the University of Arizona have discovered a rapidly growing black hole in one of the most extreme galaxies known in the very early Universe. The discovery of the galaxy and the black hole at its centre provides new clues on the formation of the very first supermassive black holes. The new work is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Using observations taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory…
Using electron microscopy to create ultrafast movies of nano-processes. A slow-motion movie on sports television channels shows processes in hundredths of a second. By contrast, processes on the nanoscale take place in the so-called femtosecond range: For example, an electron needs only billionths of a second to orbit a hydrogen atom. Physicists around the world are using special instruments to capture such ultrafast nano-processes in films. Researchers at Kiel University (CAU) have developed a new method for such films that…
Molybdenum disulfide MoS2 is a groundbreaking material for electronics applications. As a two-dimensional layer similar to graphene, it is an excellent semiconductor, and can even become intrinsically superconducting under the right conditions. It’s not particularly surprising that science fiction authors have already been speculating about „molycircs“, fictional computer circuits built from MoS2, for years – and that physicists and engineers are directing huge research efforts at this material. At University of Regensburg, we have many years of expertise with diverse…
A research group led by Stefanie Komossa (MPIfR Bonn, Germany) presents new results on the galaxy OJ 287, based on the most dense and longest radio-to-high-energy observations to date with telescopes like the Effelsberg telescope and the Swift Observatory. The results favor a pair of black holes in the center of the galaxy with a smaller mass of 100 million solar masses for the primary black hole. Several outstanding mysteries, including the apparent absence of the latest big outburst of…
By illuminating a sample surface with short laser beam pulses, it is possible to film sequences of various chemical and physical reactions. A research team that included researchers from the University of Gothenburg has now developed the world’s fastest single-shot laser camera, which is at least a thousand times faster than today’s most modern equipment for combustion diagnostics. The discovery has enormous significance for studying the lightning-fast combustion of hydrocarbons. What happens to a material that is burned in different…
Power plasma with gigajoule energy turnover generated for eight minutes. After successful recommissioning in autumn 2022, the Greifswald nuclear fusion experiment has surpassed an important target. In 2023, an energy turnover of 1 gigajoule was targeted. Now the researchers have even achieved 1.3 gigajoules and a new record for discharge time on Wendelstein 7-X: the hot plasma could be maintained for eight minutes. During the three-year completion work that ended last summer, Wendelstein 7-X was primarily equipped with water cooling…
A special carbon molecule can function as multiple high-speed switches at once. For the first time, an international team of researchers, including those from the University of Tokyo’s Institute for Solid State Physics, has demonstrated a switch, analogous to a transistor, made from a single molecule called fullerene. By using a carefully tuned laser pulse, the researchers are able to use fullerene to switch the path of an incoming electron in a predictable way. This switching process can be three…
A solar radio burst with a signal pattern, akin to that of a heartbeat, has been pinpointed in the Sun’s atmosphere, according to a new study. In findings published in the journal Nature Communications, an international team of researchers has reported uncovering the source location of a radio signal coming from within a C-class solar flare more than 5,000 kilometers above the Sun’s surface. Researchers say the study’s findings could help scientists better understand the physical processes behind the energy release of solar…
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