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Cosmology May Help Establish Quantization of Gravity

Among the four fundamental forces of nature, only gravity has not had a basic unit, or quanta, detected. Physicists expect that gravitational force is transmitted by an elementary particle called a graviton, just as the electromagnetic force is carried by the photon.

4 Mar 2014

APS Honors Illinois Wesleyan Physicist with Fellowship in the Society

The American Physical Society (APS) has elected Illinois Wesleyan University’s Gabriel C. Spalding to Fellowship in the Society. This honor is limited to no more than one-half of one percent of the APS membership.

4 Mar 2014

Renowned Theoretical Physicist to Deliver Robert Hofstadter Memorial Lectures

If you aren't a physicist, you might not have encountered the Berry phase, a property of waves in quantum mechanics. But perhaps you've heard of the levitating frog, a demonstration of an amphibian suspended in midair by a powerful magnet that captured the attention of scientists and nonscientists alike in 2000.

4 Mar 2014

Physicists Explore Carbon Ion Facility for Treatment of Cancer

Accelerator physicists are natural-born problem solvers, finding ever more powerful ways to generate and steer particle beams for research into the mysteries of physics, materials, and matter. And from the very beginning, this field born at the dawn of the atomic age has actively sought ways to apply advanced technologies to tackle more practical problems. At the top of the list—even in those early days— was taking aim at cancer, the second leading cause of death in the U.S. today, affecting one in two men and one in three women.

4 Mar 2014

Colored-Noise Langevin Dynamics Improves First-Principles Molecular Dynamics

February issue of the Psi-k network's newsletter contains a scientific highlight reviewing the use of colored-noise Langevin dynamics to improve first-principles molecular dynamics.

4 Mar 2014

Scientists Observe Polarization of a Photon Emitted in Weak Decay of a Bottom Quark

As members of the LHCb collaboration, scientists at EPFL have analyzed data collected at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider that offer a first-time observation of the polarization of the photon emitted in the weak decay of a bottom quark. This finding opens the way to future measurements, which may reveal a reality deeper than the one described by the present theory of elementary particles, the so-called Standard Model.

3 Mar 2014

Researchers Choreograph Molecular Ballet in an X-ray Laser Beam

An international team of researchers has used the world's most powerful X-ray laser to take snapshots of free molecules. The research team headed by Prof. Jochen Küpper of the Hamburg Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) choreographed a kind of molecular ballet in the X-ray beam.

3 Mar 2014