Tag Archive for 'Birefringence'

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...

The first artist’s illustration shows a key part of the process that created this new black hole, as the two neutron stars spin around each other while merging. The purple material depicts debris from the merger. Image credit: NASA / CXC / M.Weiss.

Gravitational Waves May Help Find Universe’s Missing Components

Dec 31, 2020 by News Staff

Whenever two compact objects (black holes or neutron stars) collide elsewhere in the Universe, they create gravitational waves that travel across space,...

As the CMB light (left image) travels through the Universe until observed on Earth (right image), the direction in which the electromagnetic wave oscillates (orange line) is rotated by the angle β; the rotation could be caused by dark matter or dark energy interacting with the CMB light, which changes the patterns of polarization (black lines inside the images); the red and blue regions in the images show hot and cold regions of the CMB, respectively. Image credit: Y. Minami / KEK.

Astrophysicists Find Hints of Beyond-Standard-Model Physics in Universe’s Oldest Light

Nov 30, 2020 by News Staff

Using the polarization data from ESA’s Planck satellite, a mission that have studied the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the oldest light in the Universe,...