news, journals and articles from all over the world.
PPPL scientists have found that sprinkling a type of powder into fusion plasma could aid in harnessing the ultra-hot gas within a tokamak facility to produce heat to create electricity without producing greenhouse gases or long-term radioactive waste.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) physicist Denise Hinkel was elected vice chair of the American Physical Society (APS) Division of Plasma Physics (DPP) during the annual meeting Oct. 21.
This edition of Science Snapshots highlights the discovery of an investigational cancer drug that targets tumors caused by mutations in the KRAS gene, the development of a new library of artificial proteins that could accelerate the design of new materials, and new insight into the natural toughening mechanism behind adult tooth enamel.
The South Pole Telescope is one of the tools scientists are using to understand the earliest history of our universe. To check out the Department of Energy’s (DOE) investment in this project, DOE Undersecretary for Science Paul Dabbar visited the facility last week.
Researchers report the most complete model to date concerning the transition from metal to insulator in correlated oxides. These oxides have fascinated scientists because of their many attractive electronic and magnetic properties.
Christina Markert is a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Texas in Austin.
Scientists at Berkeley Lab have developed a diamond anvil sensor that could lead to a new generation of smart, designer materials, as well as the synthesis of new chemical compounds, atomically fine-tuned by pressure.
Much about the aerodynamic effects of larger wind farms remains poorly understood. New work in this week’s Journal of Renewable and Sustainably Energy looks to provide more insight in how the structures necessary for wind farms affect air flow. Using a two-scale coupled momentum balance method, researchers theoretically and computationally reconstructed conditions that large wind farms might face in the future, including the dampening effect that comes with spacing turbines close to one another.
Several countries are building futuristic communication systems using higher frequency electromagnetic waves to transfer more data at faster rates, but they have lacked network components to handle these higher bandwidths. Researcher J. Gary Eden proved his new device can rapidly switch functionality to perform the varied tasks needed to support a network with carrier frequencies of over 100 gigahertz. The miniscule-scale architecture concealed within the sugar cube blocks is described in Applied Physics Reviews.
In the 1980s, Saul Perlmutter at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and his collaborators realized that they could use data about supernovae to research the history of the universe. They expected to see that very distant supernovae appear a bit brighter than they would in an expanding universe that wasn’t slowing in its growth.
The data revealed something else entirely.
Stormquakes are a recently discovered phenomenon characterized by seismic activity originating at the ocean floor due to powerful storms. Heavy storms, like hurricanes or nor’easters, can create seismic waves as large as magnitude 3.5 quakes. These tremors caused by the effects of storms on the seafloor are what researchers call stormquakes. Catherine de Groot-Hedlin, who was part of the group that first observed stormquakes, will discuss their properties and meteorological significance at the 178th ASA Meeting.
Given a choice of items to lose on a train, a top-secret document detailing the newly developed hydrogen bomb should be on the bottom of the list. In January 1953, amid the Red Scare and the Korean War, that’s exactly what physicist John Archibald Wheeler lost. In the December 2019 issue of Physics Today, science historian Alex Wellerstein details the creation of the document and Wheeler’s day leading up to its mysterious loss.
Six scientists from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
When making bread, it’s important not to overknead the dough, because this leads to a dense and tight dough due to a reduced water absorption capacity that impairs its ability to rise.
An international team of researchers, including two astrophysicists from the George Washington University, has observed a gamma-ray burst with an afterglow that featured the highest energy photons—a trillion times more energetic than visible light—ever detected in a burst.
A team from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Vanderbilt University made the first experimental observation of a material phase that had been predicted but never seen.
Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, as well as a diverse team of cardiologists and physicists, developed a machine learning algorithm to predict the life expectancy in heart failure patients.
The Kincade Fire has been burning through Sonoma County, displacing people from their homes and leaving destruction in its wake. It is a stark reminder of the increasingly pressing need for a better understanding of how fires begin and spread. This is where Rodman Linn and his research come in. He develops and uses computational models of the coupled interaction between the wildfires and surrounding atmosphere at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In the November 2019 issue of Physics Today, Linn describes a few of the many ways that fluid dynamics controls the behavior of fires.
In a new paper published as an “Editors’ Suggestion” in Physical Review Letters, a team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has demonstrated that lead – a metal so soft that it is difficult to machine at ambient conditions – responds similarly to other much stronger metals when rapidly compressed at high pressure.
The Acoustical Society of America will hold its 178th meeting, Dec. 2-6, at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. This major scientific conference brings together interdisciplinary groups of researchers spanning many fields, including physics, medicine, music, psychology, architecture and engineering, to discuss their latest research. Reporters are invited to attend the meeting for free and participate in a series of press conferences featuring a selection of newsworthy research.
This research, titled the “Proton Radius Experiment” and performed by a national scientific team including three MSU physicists, publishes today in Nature, the international journal of science.
In recognition of outstanding achievements in both academia and public service, Kim Budil, leader of the weapon program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), will be honored by her alma mater Nov. 22 with the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Medal from UC Davis’ College of Engineering.
Argonne nuclear scientists and engineers are collaborating with private partners in cutting-edge initiatives that will have meaningful impact.
Electrocatalysts accelerate energy conversion, which is an integral component to many industrially important technologies, such as fuel cells. While many models show promising results to improving this approach, technologies to demonstrate a decrease in degradation to optimize performance are lacking. At the AVS 66th International Symposium and Exhibition, Serhiy Cherevko, a physicist at the Institute of Energy and Climate Research, will talk about the challenges facing current electrocatalysis techniques and possible analytical tools to optimize this approach for widespread commercialization.
Nature has inspired innovative research throughout human history, and three scientists recently studied white beetles to understand the physics of light scattering. At the AVS 66th International Symposium and Exhibition, researchers will talk about their study of these scales to better understand thin “super-white” coatings that can reject solar spectrum and radiate through transparent windows. By studying light scattering at such a small scale, they were able to calculate light scattering in the biological structures faster and more accurately.
Google recently announced that its quantum computer made a huge breakthrough and can perform a calculation that would normally take thousands of years in mere minutes. What exactly is quantum computing? What does it require? Johns Hopkins University’s Yufan Li,…
Game theory has historically studied cooperation and hierarchy, and has sought to explain why individuals cooperate, even though they might be better off not to do so. In this week’s Chaos, researchers use a specialized graph to map a social network of cooperators and their neighbors; they discovered cooperators can attract more neighbors to follow their behaviors and are more likely to become leaders, indicating different learning patterns exist between cooperators and defectors.
Researchers have completed the first-ever, in-depth investigation into how an asteroid would respond to a nuclear deflection attempt, finding that a nuclear device would be able to deflect an asteroid too massive for other approaches. The paper was published by Acta Astronautica on Oct. 15.
The American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society announce Svetlana Jitomirskaya, from the University of California, Irvine, as the recipient of the 2020 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics. The award is given annually to recognize significant contributions to the field. Jitomirskaya is the second woman to receive this award.
The Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility is fostering innovation and growth in nuclear and accelerator physics by expanding its prestigious fellowship program for early career physicists. The lab is doubling the number of Nathan Isgur fellowships and is establishing a new fellowship in honor of Jefferson Lab’s first director, Hermann A. Grunder.
The American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics 72nd Annual Meeting will take place on Nov. 23-26, 2019, in Seattle, Washington. Journalists are invited to attend the meeting for free. Live press webcasts, featuring a selection of newsworthy research, will take place during the meeting. Fluid dynamics is an interdisciplinary field that investigates visible and invisible phenomena from a wide range of disciplines including engineering, physics, biology, oceanography, atmospheric science and geology.
Mohan Edirisinghe leads a team at University College London studying the fabrication of polymeric nanofibers and microfibers — very thin fibers made up of polymers. The fibers can be woven into textilelike structures but depending on the use, different fiber thicknesses may be necessary. To study the effects of various parameters on fiber fabrication, the researchers compared the characteristics of fibers created in different ways. The group describes the work in Applied Physics Reviews.
Hydrogen-containing substances are important for many industries, but scientists have struggled to obtain detailed images to understand the element’s behavior. In Review of Scientific Instruments, researchers demonstrate the quantification of hydrogen for different states of water — i.e., liquid, frozen and supercooled — for applications to eco-friendly fuel cells.
Irvine, Calif., Oct. 14, 2019 – Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have developed a new scanning transmission electron microscopy method that enables visualization of the electric charge density of materials at sub-angstrom resolution. With this technique, the UCI scientists were able to observe electron distribution between atoms and molecules and uncover clues to the origins of ferroelectricity, the capacity of certain crystals to possess spontaneous electric polarization that can be switched by the application of an electric field.
MOSCOW (MIPT) — The discovery by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz was momentous in that they made it very clear how exoplanets may be sought using what is known as the radial velocity method, says Alexander Rodin from the Moscow Institute…
The American Physical Society (APS) has elected two scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory as 2019 APS fellows.
During the past 20 years, the oil industry has begun to transition away from light oils toward heavier oils. But transporting heavy oils cost-effectively is a challenge because heavy oils are viscous — essentially a thick, sticky and semifluid mess. One way to outmaneuver this problem, reported in Physics of Fluids, is a viscoplastic lubrication technique.
WASHINGTON, D.C., October 8, 2019 — The 2019 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded today to James Peebles, Michel Mayor, and Didier Queloz “for contributions to the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos.” “AIP is delighted…
In a certain sense, physics is the study of the universe’s symmetries. Physicists strive to understand how systems and symmetries change under various transformations.New research from Washington University in St. Louis realizes one of the first parity-time (PT) symmetric quantum systems, allowing scientists to observe how that kind of symmetry — and the act of breaking of it — leads to previously unexplored phenomena.
The winners of the 2019 AIP Science Communication Awards are announced for their topical works on robotics inspired by animals, the nature of the universe, climate change, the awe and excitement of space, and the mystery of black holes. The winners are David L. Hu, Marcia Bartusiak, Nathaniel Rich, Raman Prinja, and Rushmore DeNooyer.
While high-energy physics and cosmology seem worlds apart in terms of sheer scale, physicists and cosmologists at Argonne are using similar machine learning methods to address classification problems for both subatomic particles and galaxies.
Matthew D. Schwartz is a professor in the Department of Physics at Harvard University.
Profiled is physicist Gaute Hagen of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who runs advanced models on powerful supercomputers to explore how protons and neutrons interact to “build” an atomic nucleus from scratch.
By using sound waves, scientists have begun to explore fundamental stress behaviors in a crystalline material that could form the basis for quantum information technologies.
LEDs made of indium gallium nitride provide better luminescence efficiency than many of the other materials used to create blue and green LEDs, but a big challenge of working with InGaN is its known dislocation density defects that make it difficult to understand its emission properties.
An international team of researchers has developed a new algorithm for solving equations using a type of quantum computer called a “quantum annealer.” The team systematically examined how this method scales when facing increasingly difficult mathematical equations, with promising results.
Through a collaboration with DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Argonne is supplying the first eight of 116 superconducting cavities that will create a stream of neutrinos for Fermilab’s Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).
When two mesh screens are overlaid, beautiful patterns appear when one screen is offset. These “moiré patterns” have long intrigued artists, scientists and mathematicians and have found applications in printing, fashion and banknotes. Now, a Rutgers-led team has paved the way to solving one of the most enduring mysteries in materials physics by discovering a moiré pattern in graphene, where electrons organize themselves into stripes, like soldiers in formation.
ITHACA, N.Y. – Cornell University researchers have developed an algorithm designed to visualize models of the universe in order to solve some of physics’ greatest mysteries. The algorithm was developed by applying scientific principles used to create models for understanding…
Study finds educator training could improve STEM outcomes COLUMBUS, Ohio—A shortage of high school physics teachers has led to teachers with little-to-no physics training taking over physics classrooms, causing additional stress and job dissatisfaction for those teachers—and a difficult learning…
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