The Gaia satellite has discovered a unique binary system where one star is ‘eating’ the other, but neither star has any hydrogen, the most common element in the Universe. The system could be an important tool for understanding how binary stars might explode at the end of their lives.
An ambitious European mission is being planned to answer fundamental questions about how planetary systems form and evolve. ARIEL will investigate the atmospheres of several hundred planets orbiting distant stars. It is one of three candidate missions selected last month by the European Space Agency (ESA) for its next medium class science mission, due for launch in 2026.
Closed flux surfaces verified / requirements for stellerator operation confirmed
Testing of the magnetic field in the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device was completed sooner than planned. The measurements, which were much anticipated at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald, show: The superconducting magnetic coils, whose technical tests were completed only last week are producing the required magnetic field. The magnetic cage for the fusion plasma, which has a temperature of many million degrees, has a configuration which is in line with the calculations of the physicists. This is an essential milestone in the operational preparations that are currently under way. Later this year, Wendelstein 7-X should produce its first plasma.
Physicists in the College of Arts and Sciences have been awarded a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support their involvement with the construction of an upgrade to the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
An international team led by Princeton University scientists has discovered an elusive massless particle theorized 85 years ago. The particle could give rise to faster and more efficient electronics because of its unusual ability to behave as matter and antimatter inside a crystal, according to new research.
To capitalize on the growing interest in cadmium-free quantum dot (CFQD) technology within the lighting industry, Nanoco Group plc today announced the formation of a new division dedicated to furthering CFQD® Quantum Dot technology in the lighting industry.
The W. M. Keck Foundation has awarded scientists at The University of Texas at Austin two grants totaling $1.5 million to develop a powerful, alternative method for cooling atoms and involve more undergraduate students in using new advanced technologies for research.
Collision physics can be like a game of billiards. Yet in the microscopic world, the outcome of the game is hard to predict. Fire a particle at a group of other particles, and they may scatter, combine or break apart, according to probability distributions governed by quantum mechanics. These processes can tell us about fundamental properties of matter and, if antimatter projectiles are used, also about matter-antimatter interactions.
The fundamental constants that govern the laws of nature are being determined with increasing accuracy, according to a review paper published this week in Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data, from AIP Publishing.
Dark matter may find it tougher to hide in our universe.
An international team of researchers has developed a new map of the distribution of dark matter in the universe using data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES).
By Sarah Schlieder
15 Jul 2015
The meeting will focus on fundamental issues of light-matter interactions from the quantum point of view, the transition between quantum and classical perspectives, and the applications of the insights gained in such a way to the design of molecules and other artificial structures.
Today, the LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has reported the discovery of a class of particles known as pentaquarks. The collaboration has submitted a paper reporting these findings to the journal Physical Review Letters.
When a sound wave hits an obstacle and is scattered, the signal may be lost or degraded. But what if you could guide the signal around that obstacle, as if the interfering barrier didn't even exist? Recently, researchers at Nanjing University in China created a material from polyethylene membranes that does exactly that.
For the first time, the wavelike behaviour of a room-temperature polariton condensate has been demonstrated in the laboratory on a macroscopic length scale. This significant development in the understanding and manipulation of quantum objects is the outcome of a collaboration between Professor Stéphane Kéna-Cohen of Polytechnique Montréal, Professor Stefan Maier and research associate Konstantinos Daskalakis of Imperial College London. Their work has been published in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters.
A team of physicists from the Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik (PDI) and the Freie Universität Berlin (FUB), Germany, the NTT Basic Research Laboratories (NTT-BRL), Japan, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), United States, has used a scanning tunneling microscope to create a minute transistor consisting of a single molecule and a small number of atoms. The observed transistor action is markedly different from the conventionally expected behavior and could be important for future device technologies as well as for fundamental studies of electron transport in molecular nanostructures. The complete findings are published in the August 2015 issue of the journal Nature Physics.