Physics News

Physicists Propose New Method for Observing Hypothetical Unruh Effect

The Unruh effect predicts a thermal response for an accelerated detector moving through the vacuum. Gooding et al. propose an interferometric scheme to observe an analogue of the circular Unruh effect using a localized laser coupled to a Bose-Einstein condensate. Image credit: University of Nottingham.
Nov 23, 2020 by News Staff

The Unruh effect was described by Stephen Fulling in 1973, Paul Davies in 1975, and William Unruh in 1976. Sometimes called the Fulling-Davies-Unruh effect, it suggests that if you fly through a quantum vacuum with extreme acceleration, the vacuum no longer looks like a vacuum: rather, it looks like a warm bath full of particles. So far it has not been possible to measure or observe it, but now physicists say that instead of studying the empty space...

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McCulloch et al. created ‘rivers’ of regular diamond and lonsdaleite, named after the crystallographer Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, the first woman elected as a Fellow to the Royal Society. Lonsdaleite has a different crystal structure to regular diamond, and is predicted to be 58% harder. Image credit: McCulloch et al., doi: 10.1002/smll.202004695.

Researchers Create Two Types of Diamond at Room Temperature

Nov 19, 2020 by News Staff

A team of scientists from Australia and the United States has created two types of diamond — regular diamond and a diamond-like phase called lonsdaleite,...

Experimental configuration and principles of optical vortex beam for discharge control and guidance: at first, microparticles are prepared and placed in an enclosed container with vertically aligned electrodes (left); an applied electric field through the container lifts the particles by electrostatic forces; some of the lifted particles cross the hollow core doughnut-shaped CW laser beam and get trapped in it; the vortex laser beam is guides particles in the mid-air: particles from a container are transported into a parallel plate chamber through a hole in one of the electrodes; in addition, particles are heated by the same laser beam thus creating a thermal channel between the electrodes that results in a subthreshold electrical breakdown; the inset shows a photograph of the experimental setup with particles trapped in the beam. Image credit: Shvedov et al., doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-19183-0.

‘Tractor’ Laser Beam Has Potential to Control Path, Direction of Lightning

Nov 17, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of researchers has proposed and demonstrated an efficient approach for triggering, trapping and guiding electrical discharges in...

CMS candidate event for a top quark and antitop quark producing an electron, a muon and jets originating from bottom (b) quarks. Image credit: CERN.

CERN Physicists Find First Evidence for Production of Top Quarks in Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions

Nov 16, 2020 by News Staff

New results from the CMS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider demonstrate for the first time that top quarks are produced in nucleus-nucleus...

Schematic layout of the KEK Isotope Separation System. Image credit: Wako Nuclear Science Centre, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization.

Physicists Produce World’s First Beam of Neutron-Rich, Radioactive Tantalum Ions

Nov 11, 2020 by News Staff

Using a new mass-separator of radioactive isotopes, called the KEK Isotope Separation System (KISS), which is developed and operated by the Wako Nuclear...

Anomalies in nuclear physics experiments may show signs of a new force. Image credit: Jw210913.

Physicists Propose New Theory on Origin of Dark Matter

Oct 21, 2020 by News Staff

In a paper published this month in the journal Physical Review Letters, an international team of physicists described a new mechanism of dark matter production. Baker...

In the experiment by Li et al., atoms of rubidium-87 are first pre-cooled and then transported to the main test area, which is a custom-made vacuum chamber; there they are cooled to temperatures of just a few microkelvins. Image credit: Li et al., doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.150501.

Physicists Demonstrate Controlled Transport of Stored Light

Oct 19, 2020 by News Staff

Controlled manipulation, storage, and retrieval of quantum information are essential for quantum communication and computing. Quantum memories for light,...

This image shows the sample chamber inside of a diamond anvil cell, looking axially through the top diamond. The sample originally exists of carbon and sulfur, shown as a black powder, sitting inside a hydrogen-rich environment. The sample is at 4 GPa and is illuminated by 10 mW of 532 nm of laser light to initiate and take to completion the photochemical reaction to produce a Van der Waals solid. Image credit: Snider et al., doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2801-z.

Scientists Create First Room-Temperature Superconductor

Oct 15, 2020 by News Staff

A team of physicists and materials scientists from the University of Rochester, the University of Nevada Las Vegas and Intel Corporation has created material...

Trachenko et al. show that a combination of two dimensionless fundamental constants results in a new dimensionless constant that provides the upper bound for the speed of sound in condensed phases. Image credit: Gerd Altmann.

Physicists Find Upper Limit for Speed of Sound in Solids and Liquids

Oct 14, 2020 by News Staff

Using two dimensionless fundamental constants, an international team of physicists has calculated the fastest possible speed of sound in condensed phases...

An artist’s impression of a blazar. Image credit: DESY / Science Communication Lab.

New Research Sheds Light on Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions

Oct 2, 2020 by News Staff

A team of physicists from the United States and Italy has developed an accurate model to explain how neutrinos interact with atomic nuclei, complicated...

Visualization of the new gauge developed to test the predictions of modified gravity theories against the measurement of the size of M87*’s shadow. Image credit: D. Psaltis, University of Arizona / EHT Collaboration.

Shadow of Messier 87’s Supermassive Black Hole Puts General Relativity to Test

Oct 2, 2020 by News Staff

The 2017 observations from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) of M87*, a 6.5-billion-solar-mass black hole in the center of the giant elliptical galaxy...

Physicists seek to understand the underlying laws of the Universe. Image credit: Johnson Martin.

Paradox-Free Time Travel is Mathematically Possible: Study

Sep 25, 2020 by News Staff

Time travel with free will is logically possible in our Universe without any paradox, according to new research from the University of Queensland. Physicists...

This image shows the protoplanetary disc surrounding the young star HL Tauri. Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO.

New Research Sheds Light on Evolution of Interstellar Gas Clouds

Sep 15, 2020 by News Staff

HL Tauri, a young star located 450 light-years away in the constellation of Taurus, is glowing at the center of an system of concentric protoplanetary...

Crystal structure and magnetism in rare-earth langasite: (a) the distorted Kagome lattice of the rare-earth ions in R3Ga5SiO14; about 1.5% of the rare-earth sites (orange) are occupied by the holmium ions; the unit cell is shown by thin solid lines; (b) experimental and theoretical magnetization curves of HoxLa3−xGa5SiO14 (x = 0.043) in external magnetic fields parallel to three crystallographic axes and at T = 5 K. Symbols - experiment, solid lines - model accounting for a ground Ho3+ quasidoublet and a Van-Vleck contribution of excited crystal-field states. The inset shows the local magnetic moments of Ho-ions in the saturation regime. Image credit: Weymann et al, doi: 10.1038/s41535-020-00263-9.

New Type of Magnetoelectric Effect Discovered

Sep 15, 2020 by News Staff

Even small changes in the direction of the magnetic field can switch the electrical properties of a paramagnetic rare-earth material — the holmium-doped...

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope took this image of NGC 1052-DF2 on November 16, 2017. Image credit: NASA / ESA / P. van Dokkum, Yale University.

Self-Interacting Dark Matter Helps Explain Formation of Dark-Matter-Deficient Galaxies

Sep 10, 2020 by News Staff

The so-called self-interacting dark matter theory helps explain why NGC 1052-DF2 and NGC 1052-DF4, a pair of ultra-diffuse galaxies located approximately...

An artist’s impression of binary black holes about to collide. Image credit: Mark Myers, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), Australian National University.

Astronomers Witness Birth of Intermediate-Mass Black Hole

Sep 2, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the twin LIGO detectors located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, and the Virgo detector located near Pisa, Italy, have...

Earth’s internal structure: dense solid metallic core, viscous metallic outer core, mantle and silicate based crust. Image credit: NASA.

Earth’s Inner Core is Around 1.15 Billion Years Old, Study Shows

Aug 26, 2020 by News Staff

The inner core of our planet is between 1 and 1.3 billion years old, according to new research led by the University of Texas at Austin and Carnegie Institution...

Experimental set-up. Quartz-glass sample container cylinder is filled partially with superfluid 3He-B, leaving a free surface of the superfluid approximately 3 mm above the centre of the surrounding coil system. The space above the free surface is vacuum due to the vanishing vapor pressure of 3He at sub-millikelvin temperatures. Magnons can be trapped in this configuration in two separate locations, in the bulk (colored blue) and touching the free surface (colored red). Transverse NMR coils are used both for RF pumping of magnons into the BECs, and for recording the induced signal from the coherently precessing magnetization M (light yellow arrow). The amplitude of the recorded signal is proportional to βM, the tipping angle of M, and its frequency corresponds to the precession frequency of the condensate. The condensates are trapped by the combined effect of the distribution of the orbital anisotropy axis of the superfluid (green arrows) via spin-orbit coupling, and a minimum of the external magnetic field created using a pinch coil (magenta wire loop). The external field H is oriented along the z axis of the sample container. Image credit: Autti et al, doi: 10.1038/s41563-020-0780-y.

Physicists Observe Quantum Time Crystals Interacting with Each Other

Aug 18, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of physicists has studied the controlled interaction of two spatially separated time crystals. Experimental set-up. Quartz-glass...

Error-correcting Schrödinger’s cats. Image credit: Michael S. Helfenbein.

Physicists Develop Error-Correcting Schrödinger’s Cat

Aug 14, 2020 by News Staff

Physicists from the Department of Physics and the Department of Applied Physics at Yale University, the Paul Scherrer Institute and Inria Paris have developed...

Stable blue whirl observed in an experiment. Image credit: H. Xiao, University of Science and Technology of China.

Structure of Mysterious Blue Whirl Revealed

Aug 14, 2020 by News Staff

The blue whirl consists of three different flame structures that swirl together into one otherworldly blue ring, according to new research. Stable blue...

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