Tightening a string, e.g. when tuning a guitar, makes it vibrate faster. But when strings are nano-sized, increased tension also reduces, or ‘dilutes’, the loss of the string’s vibrational modes. This effect, known as ‘dissipation dilution’, has been exploited to develop mechanical devices for quantum technologies, where engineered, tensioned nanostrings with a thickness of just a few tens of atomic layers oscillate more than ten billion times after being plucked just once. The equivalent on a guitar would be a…
Using adaptive mesh refinement, supercomputer simulation narrows axion mass range. Physicists searching — unsuccessfully — for today’s most favored candidate for dark matter, the axion, have been looking in the wrong place, according to a new supercomputer simulation of how axions were produced shortly after the Big Bang 13.6 billion years ago. Using new calculational techniques and one of the world’s largest computers, Benjamin Safdi, assistant professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley; Malte Buschmann, a postdoctoral research…
Graphene multiplexed sensor works quicker, faster, and cheaper than previous opioid wastewater monitoring methods. The unique properties of the atom-thick sheet of carbon, known as graphene, enabled a new penny-sized, multiplexed bio-sensor that’s the first to detect opioid byproducts in wastewater, a team of researchers from Boston College, Boston University, and Giner Labs report in the latest online edition of the journal ACS Nano. The novel device is the first to use graphene-based field effect transistors to detect four different…
An international team of astronomers including those from the University of Freiburg and Leibniz Institute for Solar Physics (KIS), Germany, found that the axis of rotation of a black hole in a binary system is tilted more than 40 degrees relative to the axis of the stellar orbit. The finding challenges current theoretical models of black hole formation. The study has been published in “Science”. Astronomers made the first reliable measurement of a large difference between the axis of rotation…
Würzburg researchers have highlighted and quantified a three-fold coupling between exciton, photon, and phonon in a microcavity with embedded two-dimensional materials. Atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials can provide highly interesting excitonic properties, which render them an attractive platform to explore polaritonic physics. In the literature, a variety of inorganic exciton-polariton systems have been studied experimentally and described theoretically using the broadly accepted model of two coupled oscillators, where only the coupling between excitons and cavity photons is considered. Now, Donghai…
Scientists from the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Vanderbilt University, City University of New York, University of Nebraska, and University of Iowa have just published new results on asymmetric light-matter waves in the reknowned magazine „Nature“. They have uncovered that low-symmetry crystals can support a new type of wave enabled by optical ‘shear forces’. The results offer new possibilities for compact optical technologies to enable new ways to guide light or to store information optically. We typically…
Space travel can be agonizingly slow: For example, the New Horizons probe took almost 10 years to reach Pluto. Traveling to Proxima Centauri b, the closest habitable planet to Earth, would require thousands of years with even the biggest rockets. Now, researchers calculate in ACS’ Nano Letters that low-power lasers on Earth could launch and maneuver small probes equipped with silicon or boron nitride sails, propelling them to much faster speeds than rocket engines. Instead of catching wind, like the sails on…
An international team of scientists at the European XFEL has taken a snapshot of a cyclic molecule using a novel imaging method. Researchers from the European XFEL, DESY, Universität Hamburg and the Goethe University Frankfurt and other partners used the world’s largest X-ray laser to explode the molecule iodopyridine in order to construct an image of the intact molecule from the resulting fragments. (Nature Physics, DOI 10.1038/s41567-022-01507-0). Exploding a photo subject in order to take its picture? An international research…
New findings enable first direct, real-time images of radiation-sensitive soft nanomaterials in organic solvents. With highly specialized instruments, we can see materials on the nanoscale – but we can’t see what many of them do. That limits researchers’ ability to develop new therapeutics and new technologies that take advantage of their unusual properties. Now, a new method developed by researchers at Northwestern University is using Monte Carlo simulations to extend the capabilities of transmission electron microscopy and answer fundamental questions…
Scientists studied antimatter in the proton with higher precision than ever before, revealing insights into the particle’s puzzling dynamics. The Science The proton is a positively charged particle that exists at the center of every atom. It is a confined complex system of strongly interacting fundamental particles, quarks, and the nuclear force carriers, gluons. Its properties like charge are dominated by an excess of three quarks — two “up” quarks and one “down” quark, called valence quarks. However, take a closer look,…
In a first for imaging, new microscope captures details, 3D motion of molecules in liquid. Understanding the nitty gritty of how molecules interact with each other in the real, messy, dynamic environment of a living body is a challenge that must be overcome in order to understand a host of diseases, such as Alzheimer’s. Until now, researchers could capture the motion of a single molecule, and they could capture its rotation — how it tumbles as it bumps into surrounding…
Eddies in an exotic liquid known as a superfluid merge to form large vortices, analogous to how cyclones form in the turbulent atmosphere. The new research, by a team from The University of Queensland, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems (EQUS) and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (FLEET) will be important for emerging technological applications of superfluidity, such as precision sensing. Lead author and theorist Dr Matt Reeves said the team’s results…
The MATISSE instrument at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer has observed a cloud of cosmic dust at the centre of the galaxy NGC 1068 (also known as Messier 77 or M77) hiding a supermassive black hole. The findings of an international team of astronomers including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, have confirmed predictions made around 30 years ago and are giving astronomers new insight into the mechanisms of “active galactic…
University of Wisconsin–Madison physicists have made one of the highest performance atomic clocks ever, they announced Feb. 16 in the journal Nature. Their instrument, known as an optical lattice atomic clock, can measure differences in time to a precision equivalent to losing just one second every 300 billion years and is the first example of a “multiplexed” optical clock, where six separate clocks can exist in the same environment. Its design allows the team to test ways to search for…
Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a new algorithm that allows them to model the dynamics of physical systems from observations. In the future it could be applied to the onset of turbulence and tipping points in climate. Modelling dynamically evolving physical systems is at the core of science and technology. Engineers need to know how the wings of a new airplane model will vibrate under particular flight conditions, and climate scientists are trying to predict how global temperatures and…
Rice lab’s RAMBO reveals unexpected influence on compound’s crystal lattice. Phonons are collective atomic vibrations, or quasiparticles, that act as the main heat carriers in a crystal lattice. Under certain circumstances, their properties can be modified by electric fields or light. But until now, nobody noticed they can respond to magnetic fields as well. That may be because it takes a powerful magnet. Rice University scientists led by physicist Junichiro Kono and postdoctoral researcher Andrey Baydin triggered the unexpected effect in a totally nonmagnetic semiconducting crystal of…
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