The American Institute of Physics (AIP) has named a journalist and a children's book author as winners of the 2013 AIP Science Communications Awards for their works on the discovery of the Higgs boson and a dog's imaginary trip to the Moon.
After its first run of more than three months, operating a mile underground in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a new experiment named LUX has proven itself the most sensitive dark matter detector in the world.
After more than 40 years of intense research, experimental physicists still seek to explore the rich behaviour of electrons confined to a two-dimensional crystalline structure exposed to large magnetic fields. Now a team of scientists around Prof. Immanuel Bloch (Chair for Experimental Physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and Director at MPQ) in collaboration with the theoretical physicist Dr. Belén Paredes (CSIC/UAM Madrid) developed a new experimental method to simulate these systems using a crystal made of neutral atoms and laser light.
In the spirit of Halloween, scientists are releasing a trio of stellar ghosts caught in infrared light by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. All three spooky structures, called planetary nebulas, are in fact material ejected from dying stars. As death beckoned, the stars' wispy bits and pieces were blown into outer space.
Intensive research is being conducted worldwide on a material that promises a revolution in data processing. For the first time ever, physicists have now produced this from a very simple substance – to the sheer amazement of the scientific world.
Emily Carter, founding director of Princeton University's Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, will describe the essential role of quantum mechanics in the quest for sustainable energy in a free public lecture at UCLA.
Imagine you order a delivery of several glass vases in different colors. Each vase is sent as a separate parcel. What would you think of the courier if the parcels arrive apparently undamaged, yet when you open them, it turns out that all the red vases are intact and all the green ones are smashed to pieces? Physicists from the University of Warsaw and the Gdañsk University of Technology have demonstrated that when quantum information is transmitted, nature can be as whimsical as this crazy delivery man.
A three-year, $10.8 million investment by the Texas A&M University System is set to provide a major boost to multidisciplinary quantum biophotonics research across the Texas A&M University campus.
A common blue pigment used in the £5 note could have an important role to play in the development of a quantum computer, according to a paper published today in the journal Nature.
Theoretical physicist Frank Wilhelm-Mauch and his research team at Saarland University have developed a mathematical model for a type of microscopic test lab that could provide new and deeper insight into the world of quantum particles.
At a cosmologically crisp one degree Kelvin (minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit), the Boomerang Nebula is the coldest known object in the Universe – colder, in fact, than the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, which is the natural background temperature of space.
Cosmochemists at the University of California, San Diego, have solved a long standing mystery in the formation of the solar system: Oxygen, the most abundant element in Earth’s crust, follows a strange, anomalous pattern in the oldest, most pristine rocks, one that must result from a different chemical process than the well-understood reactions that form minerals containing oxygen on Earth.
Dark matter, believed by physicists to outweigh all the normal matter in the universe by more than five to one, is by definition invisible. But certain features associated with dark matter might be detectable, according to some of the many competing theories describing this elusive matter. Now scientists at MIT and elsewhere have developed a tool that could test some of these predictions and thus prove, or disprove, one of the leading theories.
By David L. Chandler
28 Oct 2013
Texas A&M University at Qatar hosted representatives of the European Organization for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research (CERN) and visiting physicists to a workshop this month at Hamad bin Khalifa University (HBKU) Student Center.
Converting heat directly into power could be a major source of renewable energy. A novel approach to study this so called thermoelectricity may help to design new materials that are highly efficient. In an experiment with cold atoms trapped by lasers at ETH Zurich an international group of physicists precisely simulates the behavior of thermoelectric materials.