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Ozkan-Aydin & Goldman showed through a series of experiments that a swarm of chainable legged robots is capable of locomoting on challenging environments and accomplishing complex tasks that are not achievable by individual robots. Image credit: University of Notre Dame.

Researchers Create Self-Reconfigurable Swarms of Multi-Legged Robots

Oct 19, 2021 by News Staff

A team of U.S. researchers has developed a reconfigurable swarm of identical low-cost four-legged robots — with directionally flexible legs and tail...

Gonzalez et al. report an improved measurement of the free neutron lifetime. Image credit: Tomislav Jakupec.

Physicists Measure Neutron Lifetime with Unprecedented Precision

Oct 14, 2021 by News Staff

Physicists have performed an improved measurement of the free neutron lifetime using the UCNτ apparatus at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center. Their...

Schematic representation of the key steps of the teleportation protocol and its verification: (1) realization of an EPR source: the Stokes scattering of a pair of nanobeams results in an entangled state between the photon polarization state and the phonon population state in the nanobeams; (2) an arbitrary input state is encoded in the polarization basis of a weak coherent state; (3) a BSM of the polarization teleports the input state onto the joint mechanical memory state; (4) a short anti-Stokes pulse maps the teleported state (ψout) back onto the photon polarization for verification. Image credit: Fiaschi et al., doi: 10.1038/s41566-021-00866-z.

Scientists Demonstrate Optomechanical Quantum Teleportation

Oct 14, 2021 by News Staff

Quantum teleportation of an unknown input state from an outside source onto a quantum node is considered one of the key components of long-distance quantum...

Hydrogen atoms diffuse easily between the superionic and the liquid phases. The liquid-fcc superionic interface of a water system with 20,736 atoms at 100 GPa and 3,250 K (on the melting curve) is shown. The oxygen atoms are red and the hydrogen atoms are white. The yellow, green and blue lines show the trajectories of three hydrogen atoms during a 75 ps molecular dynamics simulation run. Image credit: Cheng et al., doi: 10.1038/s41567-021-01334-9.

Physicists Study Superionic Water’s Phase Behaviors

Sep 28, 2021 by News Staff

Using machine learning, a team of physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has studied the phase behaviors of superionic water — a phase...

High-precision mass measurements of neutron-deficient indium isotopes with ISOLTRAP: radioactive atoms were produced by nuclear reactions of 1.4 GeV protons impinging on a thick lanthanum carbide target; short-lived indium atoms diffusing from the target were selectively ionized using a two-step laser excitation scheme, provided by the ISOLDE RILIS, which excited one electron above the indium ionization potential (IP); the extracted ion beam was mass separated and injected into a radiofrequency quadrupole (RFQ) ion trap sitting on a high-voltage (HV) platform, where it was bunched and cooled; the beam was then processed by an MR-ToF MS to separate the indium ions from the isobaric contaminants; when the precision Penning trap was used for the mass measurement, further cooling and purification of the beam was achieved using a helium buffer-gas-filled preparation Penning trap; a position-sensitive microchannel plate (MCP) detector was used to record the time of flight and/or the position of the ion after ejection from the precision Penning trap; in the case of indium-99, for which the production yield was too low, the MR-ToF MS was used to perform the mass measurement. Image credit: Mougeot et al., doi: 10.1038/s41567-021-01326-9.

CERN Physicists Measure Masses of Exotic Indium Nuclei

Sep 27, 2021 by News Staff

The isotope tin-100 is of interest for nuclear structure due to its closed-shell proton and neutron configurations. It is also the heaviest nucleus comprising...

One photodetector array of the XENON1T detector seen through the other. Image credit: XENON Collaboration.

XENON1T Experiment May Have Directly Detected Dark Energy

Sep 16, 2021 by News Staff

Some unexplained results from the XENON1T dark-matter detector — a 1,300-kg vat of super-pure liquid xenon shielded from cosmic rays in a cryostat...

An image of a typical non-equilibrium state comprising active filaments, random filament networks and ordered 2D fluidic lattices, and active and self-propulsive electrohydrodynamically sculpted droplets and active emulsions. Image credit: Raju et al., doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abh1642.

Researchers Use Electric Field to Create Polygonal and Toroidal Droplets, Liquid Lattices

Sep 15, 2021 by News Staff

When two substances are brought together, they will eventually settle into a steady state called the thermodynamic equilibrium. In new research, a team...

Siraj & Loeb explore the possibility that accretion flares resulting from the tidal disruption of small Oort Cloud bodies by a putative primordial black hole could power an observable optical signal that could be searched for with the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Image credit: Sci-News.com / Zdeněk Bardon / ESO.

Static Black Holes Exert Pressure on Their Environment, Scientists Say

Sep 13, 2021 by News Staff

In 1974, Stephen Hawking made the seminal discovery that black holes emit thermal radiation. Previous to that, black holes were believed to be inert. In...

Black tea brewed in tap water; whereas tea can visibly generate a film where it interfaces with air, its more acidic counterpart, coffee cannot. Image credit: Giacomin & Fischer, doi: 10.1063/5.0059760.

Rheology Research Brews Strong Results for Better Black Tea

Sep 8, 2021 by News Staff

Physicists from the Department of Health Science and Technology in the Institute of Food Nutrition and Health at the ETH Zürich have applied the science...

Yang et al. made the first direct observation of atomic motion in liquid water molecules that have been excited with laser light. Image credit: Greg Stewart / SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Physicists Directly Observe Atomic Motion in Liquid Water Molecules

Aug 25, 2021 by News Staff

An international team of experimental physicists from the United States and Sweden has made the first direct observation of how hydrogen atoms in water...

Two gold ions (red) move in opposite direction at 99.995% of the speed of light (v, for velocity, = approximately c, the speed of light). As the ions pass one another without colliding, two photons (γ) from the electromagnetic cloud surrounding the ions can interact with each other to create a matter-antimatter pair: an electron (e-) and positron (e+). Image credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Physicists Produce Matter and Antimatter from Photon Collisions

Aug 11, 2021 by News Staff

Physicists with the STAR Collaboration at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have produced definitive evidence for...

An artist’s impression of Tcc+, a tetraquark composed of two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark. Image credit: CERN.

CERN Discover New Tetraquark Particle

Aug 2, 2021 by News Staff

The new exotic particle discovered by physicists from the LHCb Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) contains two quarks and two antiquarks....

Display of a candidate WWW→ 3 leptons + neutrinos event; the event is identified by its decay to a muon (red line), two electrons (blue lines) and missing transverse energy (white dashed line). Image credit: CERN.

CERN Physicists Observe Triple W-Boson Production

Jul 27, 2021 by News Staff

Physicists from the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have observed a process called WWW production: the simultaneous creation...

Chen et al. report the observation of room-temperature ferromagnetism in 2D graphitic Zn1-xCoxO (gZCO) monolayer with strong environmental stability; red, blue, and yellow spheres represent cobalt, oxygen, and zinc atoms. respectively. Image credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

World’s Thinnest Magnet Created

Jul 20, 2021 by News Staff

The one-atom thin 2D magnet, created by Dr. Jie Yao from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and his...

The structure of the superlattice material Bi4O4SeCl2. Image credit: University of Liverpool.

Newly-Developed Material Has Extremely Low Thermal Conductivity

Jul 16, 2021 by News Staff

The new superlattice material, Bi4O4SeCl2, developed by a team of scientists from the United Kingdom and France, combines two different arrangements of...

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe approaching the Sun. Image credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.

Parker Solar Probe Reveals New Insights on Electric Field of the Sun

Jul 14, 2021 by News Staff

Using data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, a team of solar physicists calculated the distribution of electrons within the electric field of the Sun;...

Theoretical Physicist Solves How Universe is Reflected near Black Hole

Jul 12, 2021 by News Staff

Black holes are famously compact objects where the paths of light are drastically bent by the curvature of space-time. While light itself cannot escape...

Installation of the CMS beam pipe. Image credit: CERN / CMS Collaboration.

CERN Physicists Observe New Excited Beauty-Strange Baryon

Jul 7, 2021 by News Staff

Using proton-proton collision data collected by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), physicists from the...

CERN Physicists Test ‘Lepton Flavor Universality’

Jul 6, 2021 by News Staff

Physicists from the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have successfully performed measurements of ‘lepton flavor universality,’...