If simply breathing can spread the SARS-CoV-2 virus to others nearby, what about blowing into a tuba? Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania used fluid mechanics to study the movement of aerosols generated by professional musicians. The latest research from the labs of Penn scientists Paulo Arratia and Douglas Jerolmack was an answer to “a call for help,” says Arratia. It was 2020, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, like so many cultural institutions, had suspended performances due to the COVID-19 pandemic….
The clear and periodic pattern of fast radio bursts may originate from a distant neutron star. Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have detected a strange and persistent radio signal from a far-off galaxy that appears to be flashing with surprising regularity. The signal is classified as a fast radio burst, or FRB — an intensely strong burst of radio waves of unknown astrophysical origin, that typically lasts for a few milliseconds at most. However, this new signal persists for up…
… help to compress light for nanophotonic applications. KAIST researchers and their collaborators at home and abroad have successfully demonstrated a new platform for guiding the compressed light waves in very thin van der Waals crystals. Their method to guide the mid-infrared light with minimal loss will provide a breakthrough for the practical applications of ultra-thin dielectric crystals in next-generation optoelectronic devices based on strong light-matter interactions at the nanoscale. Phonon-polaritons are collective oscillations of ions in polar dielectrics coupled…
New COMAP radio survey will peer beneath the “tip of the iceberg” of galaxies to unveil a hidden era of star formation. Sometime around 400 million years after the birth of our universe, the first stars began to form. The universe’s so-called dark ages came to an end and a new light-filled era began. More and more galaxies began to take shape and served as factories for churning out new stars, a process that reached a peak about 4 billion…
Neutron stars have the strongest magnetic fields in the universe, and the only way to measure their surface magnetic field directly is to observe the cyclotron absorption lines in their X-ray energy spectra. The Insight-HXMT team has recently discovered a cyclotron absorption line with an energy of 146 keV in the neutron star X-ray binary Swift J0243.6+6124, corresponding to a surface magnetic field of more than 1.6 billion Tesla. After direct measurement of the strongest magnetic field in the universe…
Theoreticians at the MPSD have demonstrated how the coupling between intense lasers, the motion of electrons, and their spin influences the emission of light on the ultrafast timescale. Their work has been published in npj computational materials. Electrons, present in all kind of matter, are charged particles and therefore they react to the application of light. When an intense light field hits a solid, these particles experience a force, called the Lorentz force, that drives them and induces some exquisite…
With their newly developed “nanoTIPTOE” technique, physicists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, in cooperation with Stanford University, have managed for the first time to record a helical light field on shortest time and length scales. It has been known since the end of the 19th century that light is an electromagnetic wave, whereby its frequency determines its color. With around one quadrillion oscillations per second, light oscillates so quickly that…
In 2019 tidal disruption, much of star’s mass ended up in symmetrical cloud that hid black hole. In 2019, astronomers observed the nearest example to date of a star that was shredded, or “spaghettified,” after approaching too close to a massive black hole. That tidal disruption of a sun-like star by a black hole 1 million times more massive than itself took place 215 million light years from Earth. Luckily, this was the first such event bright enough that astronomers…
… in organic-inorganic hybrid lead halide perovskite with terahertz probes. Organic-inorganic hybrid metal halide perovskites (MHPs) have attracted tremendous attention for optoelectronic applications. For example, cost-effective solar cells, solid-state lighting, memristors, and ultrafast spin switches in spintronics have recently been designed using MHPs. Despite the promise of the material, many questions remain regarding the nature and mobility of charge carriers in MHPs, which require further understanding. Researchers from the University of shanghai for science and technology, in collaboration with Qingdao…
Researchers at the NOMAD Laboratory at the Fritz Haber Institute have been engaged in describing how surfaces change in contact with reactive gas phases under different temperature and pressure conditions. Researchers at the NOMAD Laboratory at the Fritz Haber Institute have been engaged in describing how surfaces change in contact with reactive gas phases under different temperature and pressure conditions. For this purpose, they have developed the so-called replica exchange grand canonical method (REGC). The results were published in the…
The first ever exoplanets were discovered 30 years ago around a rapidly rotating star, called a pulsar. Now, astronomers have revealed that these planets may be incredibly rare. The new work will be presented tomorrow (Tuesday 12 July) at the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2022) by Iuliana Nițu, a PhD student at the University of Manchester. The processes that cause planets to form, and survive, around pulsars are currently unknown. A survey of 800 pulsars followed by the Jodrell Bank…
… using archive at NSF’s NOIRLab. Amateur astronomer delves into archival data at the Community Science and Data Center to discover 34 ultracool dwarfs accompanying low-mass stars or white dwarfs. How often do stars live alone? For brown dwarfs — objects that straddle the boundary between the most massive planets and the smallest stars — astronomers need to uncover more examples of their companions to find out. Ace citizen scientist Frank Kiwy has done just that by using the Astro…
A potential step forward in understanding complex quantum turbulence. A research group of Professor Makoto Tsubota and Specially Appointed Assistant Professor Satoshi Yui, both from the Graduate School of Science and the Nambu Yoichiro Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Osaka Metropolitan University, in cooperation with their colleagues from Florida State University and Keio University, conducted a systematic numerical study of vortex diffusion in quantum turbulence in superfluid helium-4 (He II) at extremely low temperatures, near absolute zero (−273°C), and…
Analysis offers new means to predict ‘cosmological signatures’ for models of dark matter. A team of physicists has developed a method for predicting the composition of dark matter—invisible matter detected only by its gravitational pull on ordinary matter and whose discovery has been long sought by scientists. Its work, which appears in the journal Physical Review Letters, centers on predicting “cosmological signatures” for models of dark matter with a mass between that of the electron and the proton. Previous methods…
Switching something on and off again usually takes it back into its original state. A new magnetic material, however, has to be switched four times, while the spin of atoms moves once in a circle. If you switch a bit in the memory of a computer and then switch it back again, you have restored the original state. There are only two states that can be called “0 and 1”. However, an amazing effect has now been discovered at TU…
Novel method suppresses background noise in STED microscopy selectively and effectively, with potential for integration into other dual-beam point-scanning techniques. Nanoscopy describes the ability to see beyond the generally accepted optical limit of 200–300 nm. Stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, developed by Stefan W. Hell and Jan Wichmann in 1994, and experimentally demonstrated by Hell and Thomas Klar in 1999, is a superresolution technique for nanoscopy. STED microscopy has made considerable progress and is widely used in practical research. But…
Feedback
