Physics News

Programmable Liquid Matter: Researchers Find Way to Morph Liquid Metal into Physical Shapes

Tokuda et al apply electrical charges to morph liquid metal into 2D shapes. How the electric field creates deformation: (a) a liquid metal blob far from the electrodes and in absence of field is subject to no force; (b) deformation occurs when the blob is in contact with one of the electrodes and an electric voltage is applied across it; (c) deformation in this work as a 2D process. Image credit: INTERACT Lab, University of Sussex.
Oct 18, 2017 by News Staff

University of Sussex researcher Yutaka Tokuda and co-authors have applied electrical charges to manipulate liquid metal into 2D shapes such as letters and a heart. The findings, reported at the 2017 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces in Brighton, the United Kingdom, represent an ‘extremely promising’ new class of materials that can be programmed to seamlessly change shape. Tokuda et al apply electrical charges to morph...

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Artist’s illustration of two merging neutron stars. Image credit: NSF / LIGO / Sonoma State University / A. Simonnet.

Scientists Detect Gravitational Waves from Colliding Neutron Stars

Oct 17, 2017 by News Staff

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration, Virgo Collaboration, and their partners have directly detected gravitational waves — ripples in space and time...

Periodic table of the elements.

Periodic Table’s Heaviest Elements Alter Theory of Quantum Mechanics

Oct 4, 2017 by News Staff

An international team of chemists led by Florida State University researchers has found that the theory of quantum mechanics does not adequately explain...

Physicists Catch Fourth Gravitational Wave: GW170814

Sep 28, 2017 by News Staff

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration report the first joint detection of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space and...

Musician on stage playing an electric guitar. Image credit: Herb1979.

Revolutionary New Electric Guitar String Invented

Sep 24, 2017 by News Staff

An invention by University of St Andrews researcher Jonathan Kemp allows electric guitar strings to be balanced in sensitivity and feel in a way that has...

Researchers from the University of Michigan have uncovered that the cause of turbulence in non-equilibrium atmospheric pressure plasma is due to heat-induced sound waves from the instrument’s electrodes. Image credit: Texas A&M University.

Heat-Induced Sound Waves Drive Turbulence in Plasma Therapy, Study Says

Sep 12, 2017 by Zvi Cramer

Non-equilibrium atmospheric pressure plasma jets are a promising mode of treating a variety of afflictions. However, unpredictable turbulence in the plasma...

Schematic view of a large-scale quantum processor based upon phosphorus (31P) donors in silicon, operated and coupled through the use of an induced electric dipole. Idle qubits have electrons at the interface, leaving the 31P nucleus in the ultra-coherent ionized state. Electrons are partially shifted toward the donor for quantum operations. The sketch shows a possible architecture where a cluster of qubits is locally coupled via the electric dipole, and a subgroup thereof is further coupled to another cluster through interaction with a shared microwave cavity (aqua). Image credit: Guilherme Tosi, University of New South Wales.

Researchers Invent New Architecture for Quantum Computing

Sep 7, 2017 by News Staff

A new architecture, based on so-called ‘flip-flop’ qubits, allows for a silicon quantum processor that can be scaled up without the precise placement...

Zeolitic ice (left) and aeroice (right) are illustrated: their structure can be regarded as combinations of a couple of polyhedral building blocks. In molecular scale, each polygonal face of the polyhedra is made of water molecules (left bottom); yellow lines are hydrogen bonds. Image credit: Masakazu Matsumoto / CC BY 2.0.

Scientists Predict Existence of Ultralow-Density Ices: ‘Aeroices’

Sep 6, 2017 by News Staff

A research team at Okayama University in Japan has theoretically predicted a new class of ice phases, called aeroices, likely the most stable solid phases...

The TinyLev system is composed of the driver board and the single-axis levitator with 72 transducers (arranged as two surfaces, each containing 36 transducers); expanded polystyrene (EPS) particles are trapped at its nodes. Image credit: Marzo et al, doi: 10.1063/1.4989995.

Researchers Develop Home Acoustic Levitator

Aug 16, 2017 by Enrico de Lazaro

A research team at the University of Bristol, UK, has developed a relatively cheap and small acoustic levitator that is capable of holding samples of interest...

A candidate event of light-by-light scattering, a very rare process in which two photons interact and change direction, measured in the ATLAS detector. Image credit: CERN.

CERN Physicists Find Direct Evidence of High Energy Light-By-Light Scattering

Aug 15, 2017 by News Staff

Physicists from the ATLAS experiment, one of the four major experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, have found the first direct...

The artist’s rendering shows how potential ‘wells’ are created for photons in the microresonator through heating with an external laser beam (green). Image credit: David Dung, University of Bonn.

Physicists Experiment with ‘Super-Photons’

Aug 15, 2017 by News Staff

A team of physicists at the University of Bonn in Germany has developed a technique to create optical ‘wells’ for a photonic Bose-Einstein condensate. The...

Professor Chang and co-authors broke the record for the shortest light pulse. Image credit: University of Central Florida.

Shortest Laser Pulse Lasts 53 Attoseconds

Aug 8, 2017 by News Staff

An international group of physicists and engineers, led by Professor Zenghu Chang of the University of Central Florida, has produced the shortest-ever...

Artist’s impression of a cloud of trapped antihydrogen atoms. Image credit: Chukman So.

Physicists Observe Hyperfine Spectrum of Antihydrogen

Aug 7, 2017 by News Staff

In a paper published in the August 3, 2017 issue of the journal Nature, physicists with the ALPHA collaboration, a multinational project based at CERN,...

Coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering. Image credit: COHERENT Collaboration.

Physicists Observe Elusive Neutrino-Nucleus Interactions for First Time

Aug 4, 2017 by News Staff

A team of physicists with the COHERENT collaboration is the first to detect and characterize coherent elastic scattering of low-energy neutrinos off atomic...

The ATLAS Experiment presented evidence for a first sighting of the Higgs boson decaying to a pair of bottom quarks, with an observed significance of 3.6 sigma. Image credit: ATLAS Collaboration.

Physicists Find Strong Evidence of Higgs Boson Decay to Quarks

Jul 26, 2017 by Enrico de Lazaro

The ATLAS experiment, one of the four major experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, has reported the first evidence for the decay...

Proton is a subatomic particle found in the nucleus of every atom. This artist’s impression shows a proton and a neutron. Image credit: Joanna Griffin / Jefferson Lab / Penn State.

What’s Mass of Proton? Physicists Make Most Precise Measurement Yet

Jul 21, 2017 by News Staff

An international team of physicists from Germany and Japan has made the most precise measurement yet of the proton’s atomic mass. The result is a factor...

Scheme of a waveguide-integrated plasmonic nanoantenna for mode-selective polarization (de)multiplexing. The device couples light of orthogonal polarizations into different directions and modes of the underlying silicon waveguide. Image credit: Guo et al, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.1700007.

Optical Nanoantenna Promises Ultra-Fast Graphics on Gaming Consoles, PCs

Jul 20, 2017 by News Staff

A group of researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) and elsewhere has designed a nanoantenna — a device which is 100 times thinner...

Peering deep into the core of the Crab Nebula, this Hubble image reveals the beating heart of one of the most historic and intensively studied remnants of a supernova, an exploding star. The neutron star at the very center of the nebula has about the same mass as the Sun but compressed into an incredibly dense sphere that is only a few miles across. Spinning 30 times a second, the neutron star shoots out detectable beams of energy that make it look like it’s pulsating. The Hubble snapshot is centered on the region around the neutron star (the rightmost of the two bright stars near the center of this image) and the expanding, tattered, filamentary debris surrounding it. Hubble’s sharp view captures the intricate details of glowing gas, shown in red, that forms a swirling medley of cavities and filaments. Inside this shell is a ghostly blue glow that is radiation given off by electrons spiraling at nearly the speed of light in the powerful magnetic field around the crushed stellar core. This neutron star is a showcase for extreme physical processes and unimaginable cosmic violence. Bright wisps are moving outward from the neutron star at half the speed of light to form an expanding ring. It is thought that these wisps originate from a shock wave that turns the high-speed wind from the neutron star into extremely energetic particles. Image credit: NASA / ESA / J. Hester, ASU / M. Weisskopf, NASA & MSFC.

Astrophysical Shock Waves Generated in the Lab

Jul 18, 2017 by News Staff

A Princeton-led team of researchers has discovered a revolutionary way to generate high-energy shock waves in the lab. Peering deep into the core of the...

The battery-free phone can sense speech, actuate the earphones, and switch between uplink and downlink communications, all in real time. It is powered by either ambient radio signals or light. Image credit: Mark Stone, University of Washington.

First Battery-Free Cellphone Harvests Power from Ambient Radio Signals, Light

Jul 14, 2017 by News Staff

A team of computer scientists and electrical engineers at the University of Washington has invented a cellphone that requires no batteries and harvests...

Experimental configuration of the X-ray Free Electron Laser probe and optical laser; the shock freezing behavior of water captured in a Debye-Scherrer geometry. Inset: schematic of target package as a cut away side view. Image credit: Gleason et al, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.025701.

Researchers Observe Real-Time Growth of Exotic ‘Ice VII’

Jul 12, 2017 by News Staff

A Stanford-led research team has captured the freezing of water, molecule-by-molecule, into a super-dense, exotic form of ice called ice VII. The results...

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