High-pressure study solves 60-year-old mystery. For the first time, researchers have recorded live and in atomic detail what happens to the material in an asteroid impact. The team of Falko Langenhorst from the University of Jena and Hanns-Peter Liermann from DESY simulated an asteroid impact with the mineral quartz in the lab and pursued it in slow motion in a diamond anvil cell, while monitoring it with DESY’s X-ray source PETRA III. The observation reveals an intermediate state in quartz…
On a cold winter day, the warmth of the sun is welcome. Yet as humanity emits more greenhouse gases, the Earth’s atmosphere traps more and more of the sun’s energy, which steadily increases the Earth’s temperature. One strategy for reversing this trend is to intercept a fraction of sunlight before it reaches our planet. For decades, scientists have considered using screens or other objects to block just enough of the sun’s radiation — between 1 or 2 percent — to mitigate…
In a recently published article in the leading physics journal “Nature Physics”, a team of researchers with the participation of the University of Augsburg reports about unexpectedly universal correlations between the thermal expansion and the glass-transition temperature of glass-forming materials, providing new insights into the complex nature of the transition from the liquid into the solid glass. Glasses are solid materials, however lacking the crystalline structure with a regular arrangement of the atoms that is typical for conventional solids. The…
Roughly 500 million light-years away, near the constellation Delphinus, two galaxies are colliding. Known as merging galaxy IIZw096, this luminous phenomenon is obscured by cosmic dust, but researchers first identified a bright, energetic source of light 12 years ago. Now, with a more advanced telescope — the James Webb Space Telescope that started its observations in July 2022 — the team has pinpointed the precise location of what they have dubbed the “engine” of the merging galaxy. They published their…
Engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, have finished testing the high-gain antenna for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. When it launches by May 2027, this NASA observatory will help unravel the secrets of dark energy and dark matter, search for and image exoplanets, and explore many topics in infrared astrophysics. Pictured above in a test chamber, the antenna will provide the primary communication link between the Roman spacecraft and the ground. It will downlink the…
Physicists using advanced muon spin spectroscopy at Paul Scherrer Institute PSI make the missing link between their recent breakthrough in a kagome metal and unconventional superconductivity. The team uncovered an unconventional superconductivity that can be tuned with pressure, giving exciting potential for engineering quantum materials. A year ago, a group of physicists led by PSI detected evidence of an unusual collective electron behaviour in a kagome metal, known as time-reversal symmetry-breaking charge order – a discovery that was published in…
A study of the upper atmosphere’s composition has successfully measured an increased presence of 18O, a heavier oxygen issotope with 10 instead of eight neutrons. Helmut Wiesemeyer (MPIfR Bonn) and his colleagues have measured the 18O fraction of the upper mesosphere/lower thermosphere for the first time, using the GREAT instrument aboard SOFIA and found that the upper atmosphere has an 18O fraction close to that of the lower atmosphere. A better understanding to what extent biological effects permeate Earth’s atmosphere…
A new study reports the first experimental creation of a quantum potential with energies given by sequences of prime numbers, paving the way for a new approach to the investigation of mathematical problems related to number theory using quantum physics. Do you want to know whether a very large integer is a prime number or not? Or if it is a ‘lucky number’? A new study by SISSA, carried out in collaboration with the University of Trieste and the University…
A previously unknown phase transition in the early universe. Think of bringing a pot of water to the boil: As the temperature reaches the boiling point, bubbles form in the water, burst and evaporate as the water boils. This continues until there is no more water changing phase from liquid to steam. This is roughly the idea of what happened in the very early universe, right after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. The idea comes from particle physicists…
The ‘mirrors’ exist for only a fragment of time but could help to reduce the size of ultra-high power lasers, which currently occupy buildings the size of aircraft hangars, to university basement sizes. They have potential to be developed into a variety of plasma-based, high damage-threshold optical elements that could lead to small footprint, ultra-high-power, ultra-short pulse laser systems. The new way of producing mirrors, and other optical components, points the way to developing the next generation high power lasers,…
LMU physicists have shown how fluid flows influence the formation of complex patterns. The formation of patterns is a universal phenomenon that underlies fundamental processes in biology. An example are the concentration patterns of proteins, which direct vital cellular processes, including cell division, polarity, and movement. These protein patterns arise from the interplay of chemical reactions and the spatial transport of proteins. Transport can occur either passively (through diffusion) or actively (through flows). Unlike diffusion, transport by flows exhibits a…
Scientists couple terahertz radiation with spin waves. An international research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has developed a new method for the efficient coupling of terahertz waves with much shorter wavelengths, so-called spin waves. As the experts report in the journal Nature Physics (DOI: 10.1038/s41567-022-01908-1), their experiments, in combination with theoretical models, clarify the fundamental mechanisms of this process previously thought impossible. The results are an important step for the development of novel, energy-saving spin-based technologies for data…
A quick electric pulse completely flips the material’s electronic properties, opening a route to ultrafast, brain-inspired, superconducting electronics. With some careful twisting and stacking, MIT physicists have revealed a new and exotic property in “magic-angle” graphene: superconductivity that can be turned on and off with an electric pulse, much like a light switch. The discovery could lead to ultrafast, energy-efficient superconducting transistors for neuromorphic devices — electronics designed to operate in a way similar to the rapid on/off firing of…
Digitalization, automation and efficiency are the buzzwords of the industry of the future. To this end, the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS develops customer-specific sensors, actuators and optical components. These represent the key technologies for IoT and numerous future applications with artificial intelligence. Fraunhofer IPMS is one of the leading research institutes for the development and manufacture of electronic, mechanical and optical components and devices and their integration into intelligent systems. With its innovative micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and micro-opto-electro-mechanical…
Shining light on a water droplet creates effects analogous to what happens in an atom. This can help us understand how atoms work, write researchers from the University of Gothenburg in a new journal article. If you whisper by the wall in the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, you’ll discover that the sound bounces off the dome’s walls all the way around and is audible on the opposite side. Which is why the Cathedral’s dome has been dubbed…
Star’s sudden 2020 slowdown allows for test of ‘anti-glitch’ theory. On Oct. 5, 2020, the rapidly rotating corpse of a long-dead star about 30,000 light years from Earth changed speeds. In a cosmic instant, its spinning slowed. And a few days later, it abruptly started emitting radio waves. Thanks to timely measurements from specialized orbiting telescopes, Rice University astrophysicist Matthew Baring and colleagues were able to test a new theory about a possible cause for the rare slowdown, or “anti-glitch,”…
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