Every electrical device, from a simple lightbulb to the latest microchips, is enabled by the movement of electrical charge, or current. The nascent field of ‘spintronics’ taps into a different electronic attribute, an intrinsic quantum property known as spin, and may yield devices that operate on the basis of spin-transport.
The University of Houston will be recognized Nov. 17 by IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) as the site of the discovery by physicist Paul Chu and colleagues of a material that made high temperature superconductivity practical for real-world applications. The University will receive IEEE's prestigious Milestone Award.
Using a patented experimental device and supercomputer simulations, researchers have managed to explain the formation of jets emitted by young stars. In perfect agreement with astrophysical observations, the model, which involves the interstellar magnetic field, was developed by an international collaboration1 led by French teams at the Laboratoire pour l'Utilisation des Lasers Intenses (LULI, CNRS/École Polytechnique/UPMC/CEA), the Laboratoire d'Etudes du Rayonnement et de la Matière en Astrophysique et atmosphères (LERMA, Observatoire de Paris/CNRS/UPMC/Université de Cergy-Pontoise/ENS Paris) and the Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Intenses (LNCMI, CNRS). Their work is published in the 17 October 2014 issue of the journal Science.
What does a 1980s experimental aircraft have to do with state-of-the art quantum technology? Lots, as shown by new research from the Quantum Control Laboratory at the University of Sydney, and published in Nature Physics today.
The Heising-Simons Foundation has awarded $1.1M to the DESI project with the goal of helping to fabricate the unique optics needed to capture spectra of the young expanding universe.
Computer chips with superconducting circuits — circuits with zero electrical resistance — would be 50 to 100 times as energy-efficient as today's chips, an attractive trait given the increasing power consumption of the massive data centers that power the Internet's most popular sites.
By Larry Hardesty
20 Oct 2014
CQT's quantum mechanics have performed a new feat to get photons – the particles of light – into shape. The technique could prove useful for building devices that shuttle information between photons and atoms and back again. The work is described in a 15 October paper in Physical Review Letters, highlighted by the journal as an Editors' Suggestion.
Cutting-edge paper by Professor George Fraser – who tragically died in March this year – and colleagues at the University of Leicester provides first potential indication of direct detection of Dark Matter – something that has been a mystery in physics for over 30 years
Francis Halzen, the University of Wisconsin-Madison physicist who was the driving force behind the giant neutrino telescope known as IceCube at the South Pole, has been named a winner of the 2014 American Ingenuity Award.
Chapman University has introduced a new academic journal focused on quantum theory. Created and published by physicists within Chapman's Institute for Quantum Studies (IQS), the journal is called Quantum Studies: Mathematics and Foundations. Nearly a year in the works, the inaugural issue, which contains 10 submissions from physicists around the world, was just released.
There’s nothing more out of this world than quasi-stellar objects or more simply — quasars. These are the most powerful and among the most distant objects in the Universe. At their center is a black hole with the mass of a million or more Suns. And these powerhouses are fairly compact — about the size of our Solar System. Understanding how they came to be and how – or if – they evolve into the galaxies that surround us today are some of the big questions driving astronomers.
Using extremely faint light from galaxies 10.8-billion light years away, scientists have created one of the most complete, three-dimensional maps of a slice of the adolescent universe. The map shows a web of hydrogen gas that varies from low to high density at a time when the universe was made of a fraction of the dark matter we see today.
Using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope astronomers have made what may be the most reliable distance measurement yet of an object that existed in the Universe’s formative years. The galaxy is one of the faintest, smallest and most distant galaxies ever seen and measuring its distance with this accuracy was possible due only to the incredibly detailed mapping of how giant galaxy clusters warp the space-time around them.
Static electricity is known to play an important role on Earth's airless, dusty moon, but evidence of static charge building up on other objects in the solar system has been elusive until now.
Heat drives classical phase transitions—think solid, liquid, and gas—but much stranger things can happen when the temperature drops. If phase transitions occur at the coldest temperatures imaginable, where quantum mechanics reigns, subtle fluctuations can dramatically transform a material.