Feature Channels: Particle Physics

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Sometimes, liquid drops don't drop. Instead, they climb. Using computer simulations, researchers have now shown how to induce droplets to climb stairs all by themselves. This stair-climbing behavior could be useful in everything from water treatment and new lab-on-a-chip microfluidic devices, to biochemical processing and medical diagnostic tools. The researchers describe their findings this week in the journal Physics of Fluids.

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The concept of a simple technique to remove thin layers from otherwise thick, rigid semiconductor crystals has been actively explored for years. In a significant advance, a research group from IBM successfully applied their new “controlled spalling” layer transfer technique to gallium nitride (GaN) crystals, a prevalent semiconductor material, and created a pathway for producing many layers from a single substrate. They report their work in this week’s Journal of Applied Physics.

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Spray cooling is one of the most promising methods for cooling high heat flow electronics. Two-phase spray cooling, in particular, has been shown to cool heat fluxes orders of magnitude higher than traditional cooling methods but the complex physics of it demands deeper understanding. To tackle this, researchers investigated the basic physics of droplet impingement using a computational approach called the lattice-Botzmann method; they report their work in this week’s Physics of Fluids.

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Once launched into low-Earth orbit, a small satellite needs propulsion. Electrospray uses spiky, needle-like jets of fluid to push spacecraft.

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Deep inside the remains of an exploded star lies a twisted knot of newly minted molecules and dust. Using ALMA, astronomers mapped the location of these new molecules to create a high-resolution 3-D image of this “dust factory,” providing new insights into the relationship between a young supernova remnant and its galaxy.

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A team of scientists has found evidence for a new type of electron pairing that may broaden the search for new high-temperature superconductors. The findings provide the basis for a unifying description of how radically different copper- and iron-based "parent" materials can develop the ability to carry electrical current with no resistance at strikingly high temperatures.

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Scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have made the first direct measurements, and by far the most precise ones, of how electrons move in sync with atomic vibrations rippling through an exotic material, as if they were dancing to the same beat.

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By applying a new computational analysis to a galaxy magnified by a gravitational lens, astronomers have obtained images 10 times sharper than what Hubble could achieve on its own.

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A state-of-the-art telescope for detecting optical signatures of gravitational waves - built and operated by an international research collaboration, led by the University of Warwick - has been officially launched.

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Researchers at the University of Southampton have cast doubt over established explanations for certain behaviours in pulsars – highly magnetised rotating neutron stars, formed from the remains of supernovae.

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The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and ATLAS Computing Facility (RACF) Mass Storage Service—part of the Scientific Data and Computing Center (SDCC) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory—now records 100 petabytes of data reflecting nearly two decades of physics research.

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Adding the equivalent of a miniature tornado to the interface between electrospray ionization (ESI) and a mass spectrometer (MS) has allowed researchers to improve the sensitivity and detection capability of the widely-used ESI-MS analytical technique.

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A international team of researchers has discovered magnetic vortex-antivortex pairs arising from correlated electron spins in a newly engineered trilayer material. The discovery could advance memory cells and points to the potential development of 3-D magnetic logic circuits. They discuss their work in this week’s Applied Physics Letters.

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Tracking movements of individual particles provides understanding of collective motions, synchronization and self-assembly.

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Using VLBA telescope, astronomers have made the first detection of orbital motion in a pair of supermassive black holes in a galaxy some 750 million light-years from Earth.

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The universe is stretching out ever more rapidly – a phenomena known as cosmic acceleration – and scientists don’t know why. Understanding the “dark energy” that is causing this expansion would help them put together a clearer picture of the universe’s history. Scientists supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science are using massive telescopes to chart how dark energy has influenced the structure of the universe over time.

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Article describes ALCC allotment of 269.9 million supercomputer hours to study the complex edge region of fusion plasmas.

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Astronomers combined the power of a “natural lens” in space with the capability of the Hubble Space Telescope to make a surprising discovery—the first example of a compact yet massive, fast-spinning, disk-shaped galaxy that stopped making stars only a few billion years after the big bang. Researchers say that finding such a galaxy so early in the history of the universe challenges the current understanding of how massive galaxies form and evolve.

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An international team of scientists has for the first time used an X-ray free-electron laser to unravel the structure of an intact virus particle on the atomic level. The method dramatically reduces the amount of virus material required, while also allowing the investigations to be carried out several times faster than before. This opens up entirely new research opportunities.

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The petascale Comet supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) on the UC San Diego campus has emerged as a key resource in what is considered to be the most advanced dark matter research quest to-date, with a group of international researchers recently announcing promising results after only one month of operation with a new detector.