Physics

Sep 22nd, 2020 - The Chinese JUNO experiment will aim to answer a mystery about the particles’ mass Neutrinos are the oddballs of the subatomic particle family. They are everywhere, pouring in from the sun, deep space, and Earth and zipping through our bodies by the trillions every second. The particles are so tiny that they seldom interact with anything, making them extremely elusive and hard to study. Moreover, though neutrinos come in different types, or flavors, they can switch from one type to another as they travel near the speed of light. These weird behaviors, scientists believe, might point toward ... [Read More]

Sep 22nd, 2020 - What is Quantum Computing? The 1965 Nobel prize in physics was awarded jointly to Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and Richard Feynman. Their work in ‘quantum electrodynamics’ was an important scientific contribution the world, but, still to this day, their research describes phenomena that are strange and counter-intuitive to the ways in which we understand the world. Those phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, make up the basis of quantum computing. Computers that perform quantum computations using these phenomena are known as ‘quantum computers.’ A traditional ... [Read More]

Sep 22nd, 2020 - Scientists analyze sunquakes to pinpoint flare energy source, perhaps predict flare severity. Solar flares are violent explosions on the sun that fling out high-energy charged particles, sometimes toward Earth, where they disrupt communications and endanger satellites and astronauts. But as scientists discovered in 1996, flares can also create seismic activity — sunquakes — releasing impulsive acoustic waves that penetrate deep into the sun’s interior. While the relationship between solar flares and sunquakes is still a mystery, new findings suggest that these "acoustic transients" — ... [Read More]

Sep 21st, 2020 - Until now, the history of superconducting materials has been a tale of two types: s-wave and d-wave. Now, researchers have discovered a possible third type: g-wave. Until now, the history of superconducting materials has been a tale of two types: s-wave and d-wave. Now, Cornell researchers -- led by Brad Ramshaw, the Dick & Dale Reis Johnson Assistant Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences -- have discovered a possible third type: g-wave. Their paper, "Thermodynamic Evidence for a Two-Component Superconducting Order Parameter in Sr2RuO4," published Sept. 21 in Nature Physics . The lead ... [Read More]

Sep 21st, 2020 - National University of Singapore physicists have discovered new mid-infrared anisotropic collective charge excitations in quasi-metallic phase two-dimensional (2-D) transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). Low-dimensional periodical patterned structures, such as 2-D layered systems or one-dimensional (1D) chained structures in material systems, exhibit intriguing wave phenomena due to the interactions between the many particles in the system (many-body interactions). These low-dimensional periodical structures result in unique material properties that have generated considerable research ... [Read More]

Sep 20th, 2020 - Renormalization, a technique that helps bridge the big and the small, has become perhaps the single most important advance in theoretical physics in 50 years. In the 1940s, trailblazing physicists stumbled upon the next layer of reality. Particles were out, and fields—expansive, undulating entities that fill space like an ocean—were in. One ripple in a field would be an electron, another a photon, and interactions between them seemed to explain all electromagnetic events. There was just one problem: The theory was glued together with hopes and prayers. Only by using a technique dubbed ... [Read More]

Sep 18th, 2020 - Composite fermions are exotic quasi-particles found in interacting 2-D fermion systems at relatively large perpendicular magnetic fields. These quasi-particles, which are composed of an electron and two magnetic flux quanta, have often been used to describe a physical phenomenon known as the fractional quantum Hall effect. Researchers at Princeton University and Pennsylvania State University recently used composite fermions to test a theory introduced by physicist Felix Bloch almost a century ago, suggesting that at very low densities, a paramagnetic Fermi "sea" of electrons should ... [Read More]

Sep 18th, 2020 - Widefield nitrogen-vacancy microscope solves problem of there being no way to tell exactly how strongly magnetic a 2D material was. Australian researchers and their colleagues from Russia and China have shown that it is possible to study the magnetic properties of ultrathin materials directly, via a new microscopy technique that opens the door to the discovery of more two-dimensional (2D) magnetic materials, with all sorts of potential applications. Published in the journal Advanced Materials , the findings are significant because current techniques used to characterise normal ... [Read More]