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.
Plants and bacteria make use of sunlight with remarkably high efficiency: nine out of ten absorbed light particles are being put to use in an ordinary bacterium. For years, it has been a pressing question of modern research whether or not effects from quantum physics are responsible for this outstanding performance of natural light harvesters.
For Sergio Cantu, a second-year PhD student in physics, the future of computing is one in which information moves at the speed of light, and through a network with unparalleled security.
Five billion years ago, a great disturbance rocked a region near the monster black hole at the center of galaxy 3C 279. On June 14, the pulse of high-energy light produced by this event finally arrived at Earth, setting off detectors aboard NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and other satellites. Astronomers around the world turned instruments toward the galaxy to observe this brief but record-setting flare in greater detail.
When two different sized galaxies smash together, the larger galaxy stops the smaller one making new stars, according to a study of more than 20,000 merging galaxies.
Fast-moving magnetic waves emanating from a distant supermassive black hole undulate like a whip whose handle is being shaken by a giant hand, according to a new study using data from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Long Baseline Array. Scientists used this instrument to explore the galaxy/black hole system known as BL Lacertae (BL Lac) in high resolution.
Astronomers have spotted a super-sized black hole in the early universe that grew much faster than its host galaxy.
It takes two plane flights and a 180-mile car ride to get from Princeton to one of the darkest places in the continental United States, the McDonald Observatory in West Texas. From this isolated spot, Jenny Greene looks out into the universe.
The ghostly shells of galaxy ESO 381-12 are captured here in a new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, set against a backdrop of distant galaxies. The strikingly uneven structure and the clusters of stars that orbit around the galaxy suggest that ESO 381-12 may have been part of a dramatic collision sometime in its relatively recent past.