Researchers propose a new way to improve the beam quality in laser wakefield accelerators, which are small and inexpensive enough to bring high energy physics experiments to a wide variety of universities and labs
Printing has come a long way since the days of Johannes Gutenberg. Now, researchers have developed a new method that uses plasma to print nanomaterials onto a 3-D object or flexible surface, such as paper or cloth. The technique could make it easier and cheaper to build devices like wearable chemical and biological sensors, flexible memory devices and batteries, and integrated circuits. They describe their work in this week’s Applied Physics Letters.
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) is accepting nominations for the 2016 AIP Science Writing Awards through March 31, 2016. Find out more at http://www.aip.org/aip/awards/science-communication/apply.
Researchers in Japan have grown crystals and measured the growth rate on the ISS by interferometry to better examine the effects of microgravity
A team of researchers at Aix Marseille Université developed a technique that allows them to follow physical processes occurring at surfaces of materials at the atomic level in situ and in real time. This new process allowed the research team to study the kinetics of decomposition of a thin layer of silicon dioxide deposited onto silicon during a thermal treatment, a critical component in micro-electronics. The approach is based on the principles of electron microscopy.
To clarify sharkskin’s ability to reduce hydrodynamic drag (academically contested for the past 30 years), researchers at Stony Brook University and the University of Minnesota recently conducted simulations on the ability of the small, tooth-like denticles that make up sharkskin to modify hydrodynamic flow with an unprecedented level of resolution. Far from easing the glide through the water, they found, the structures can actually increase drag by up to 50 percent.
Researchers from the University of Maryland have proposed a new technique to remotely detect the radioactive materials in dirty bombs or other sources. They describe the method in a paper in the journal Physics of Plasmas, from AIP Publishing.
A team of physicists from the University of California, San Diego and The University of Manchester is creating tailor-made materials for cutting-edge research and perhaps a new generation of optoelectronic devices. The materials make it easier for the researchers to manipulate excitons, which are pairs of an electron and an electron hole bound to each other by an electrostatic force.
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) announced today that it has awarded its 2016 John Torrence Tate Award for International Leadership in Physics to South African theoretical physicist Neil Turok.
Biopsies are a gold standard for definitively diagnosing diseases like cancer. Usually, doctors can only take 2-D snapshots of the tissue, and they're limited in their ability to measure the protein levels that might better explain a diagnosis. But now, researchers have developed a new method to acquire 3-D atlases of tissue that provide much more information, incorporating both data on the tissue structure and its molecular profile. They report their results in Biomicrofluidics.
Our solar system contains one massive object – the sun – and many smaller planets and asteroids. Now researchers from Duke University in Durham, N.C. have proposed a new explanation for the size diversity, which is found throughout the universe and is called hierarchy. The researchers report their finding in the Journal of Applied Physics, from AIP Publishing.
Musical styles and genres differ around the world, but the emotional power of music is universally felt. To understand this evocative force, researchers in many fields investigate music’s underlying structure, examining features such as tone, timbre, and auditory and rhythmic features. Now a team of Japanese scientists has developed a new approach to analyzing musical structure. The new method overcomes many of the limits of previous tools, as discussed in the journal Chaos.
A bit of serendipity while carrying out a routine calibration led a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to discover a new method to measure the pressure of supersonic nozzles. This is a significant breakthrough — with wide-ranging applications that include miniature satellites, lab-on-a-chip devices and laser plasma accelerators. Monitoring fast jet pressure changes within microscopic nozzles is extremely challenging. But in Journal of Applied Physics, researchers report creating a device that greatly simplifies the process.
Love can make you feel different things –- sometimes happy, sometimes fixated, and sometimes down right sick. And it turns out that drugs almost work in the same way. But how close are love and addictive drugs related? To the brain, love and drugs act similarly. Being in love floods the brain with chemicals and hormones that help form a connection and produce feelings of euphoria and fascination – the same effects as many drugs.
Have you ever noticed that when heated a film of oil in a pan doesn’t remain completely flat? Instead, it forms a wavy pattern that resembles the exterior of an orange. These sorts of deformations inspired a group of researchers at the Technical University of Darmstadt, in Germany, to explore whether they could be used to improve and streamline microfabrication processes.
Researchers at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, CNRS, and the University of Lorraine have recently developed a design for a coiled-up acoustic metasurface which can achieve total acoustic absorption in very low-frequency ranges.
Ole Peters and Murray Gell-Mann asked: Might there be a foundational difficulty underlying our current economic theory? Is there some hidden assumption, possibly centuries old, behind not one but many of the current scientific problems in economic theory? Such a foundational problem could have far-reaching practical consequences because economic theory informs economic policy. As they report in Chaos, the story that emerged is a fascinating example of how human understanding evolves, sticks, unsticks, and branches.
A group of smart materials known as "electrostrictive polymers" have been explored for years by researchers at the INSA de Lyon for their potential mechanical energy harvesting abilities.
Researchers in Germany studied how a multitude of electronic interactions govern the encounter between a molecule called porphine and copper and silver surfaces – information that could one day be harnessed to make molecular building blocks self-assemble into nanodevices.
Researchers have developed a speedy, controllable way to get two or more ingredients into the same tiny capsule and only have them mix when triggered by a signal like vibrations or heat
Researchers from Research Institute for Nuclear Problems of Belarusian State University in Belarus and Institut Jean Lamour-Université de Lorraine in France have developed a novel, low-cost, ultra-lightweight material that could be used as an effective anti-reflective surface for microwave radiation based on the eyes of moths.
Researchers in France working wondered whether it might be possible to tap into active thermography camera technology -- behind night-vision equipment and the thermal imaging of buildings -- to create a sort of thermal microscope to produce heat maps of single cells to help them understand the thermal behavior of the cells or go a step even further by detecting diseased conditions at the sub-cell scale. They report their work in Applied Physics Letters.
What can mathematical modeling teach us about the micrometeorology of the southern Amazonian "transitional" forest? Quite a lot, it turns out. This particular forest is located between the rain forest of the Amazon Basin and the tropical Brazilian Savanna, so it plays a crucial role in both regional and global biogeochemical cycling. Researchers have delved into how the transitional forest ensures a connection between the rain forest and the savanna, as reported in Chaos.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota and BioNano Genomics have improved a nanochannel-based form of mapping by using dynamic time-series data to measure the probability distribution, or how much genetic material separates two labels, based on whether the strands are stretched or compressed. They detail their work this week in Biomicrofluidics.
Researchers at MINAO, a joint lab between The French Aerospace Lab in Palaiseau and the Laboratoire de Photonique et de Nanostructures in Marcoussis, have recently demonstrated metamaterial resonators that allow emission in the infrared to be tuned through the geometry of the resonator.
When mixed with lightweight polymers, tiny carbon tubes reinforce the material, promising lightweight and strong materials for airplanes, spaceships, cars and even sports equipment. While such carbon nanotube-polymer nanocomposites have attracted enormous interest from the materials research community, a group of scientists now has evidence that a different nanotube -- made from boron nitride -- could offer even more strength per unit of weight. They publish their results in the journal Applied Physics Letters.
A team of engineers from Cornell University, the University of Notre Dame and the semiconductor company IQE has created gallium nitride (GaN) power diodes capable of serving as the building blocks for future GaN power switches — with applications spanning nearly all electronics products and electricity distribution infrastructures. They describe their results in a paper in this week’s Applied Physics Letters.
To isolate the contribution of water to the vibrational fluctuations that occur between DNA, bulk water, and the charged biomolecular interface between the two, researchers in Berlin have performed two-dimensional spectroscopic analyses on double-stranded DNA helices at different hydration levels. They detail their investigations in this week’s Structural Dynamics.
In this week’s Journal of Chemical Physics, Bo Persson, a scientist at the Jülich Research Center, discusses his new theory that describes how slippery ice gets when a hard material like a ski slides across it. The theory agrees well with experimental data and could help design better sliding systems, as well as contribute to a fundamental understanding of ice friction that could help explain the movement of glaciers and other natural processes.
The following articles are freely available online from Physics Today (www.physicstoday.org), the world's most influential and closely followed magazine devoted to physics and the physical science community.
Förster resonant energy transfer (FRET) is a radiationless transmission of energy that occurs on the nanometer scale. The process promotes energy rather than charge transfer, providing an alternative contactless pathway that avoids some of the losses caused by charge recombination at the interface. Researchers in Cyprus and in Greece have conducted an investigation on how various structural and electronic parameters affect FRET, and they present their work in this week’s The Journal of Chemical Physics.
Researchers in New Zealand have developed a new sensor that can detect low levels of E2, one of the primary estrogen hormones, in liquids. The sensor, described in the Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology B, has a simple design, gives real-time readings, could be integrated into an electronic monitoring system and uses very little power – advantages it has over other types of detection methods.
African-American students remain underrepresented in physical science and engineering disciplines, according to a new report from the American Institute of Physics Statistical Research Center. The report shows that while the total number of bachelor's degrees obtained in the past decade by African-Americans has increased each year, this growth is not mirrored by increased representation in the physical sciences and engineering.
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) announced today that Helen R. Quinn, a Professor Emerita of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and a pioneer in science education, is the winner of AIP's 2016 Karl Taylor Compton Medal for Leadership in Physics.
Researchers in Germany have developed a tool to help grapple with enormous data sets and reveal big picture trends, such as climatic tipping points and their effects on species. The researchers created a software package based on the Python programming language that unifies complex network theory and nonlinear time series analysis – two important data analysis concepts. The researchers named the software “pyunicorn,” and they discuss their findings in this week’s CHAOS, from AIP Publishing.
In 1655 the English mathematician John Wallis published a book in which he derived a formula for pi as the product of an infinite series of ratios. Now researchers from the University of Rochester, in a surprise discovery, have found the same formula in quantum mechanical calculations of the energy levels of a hydrogen atom. The researchers report their findings in the Journal of Mathematical Physics.
Microwave absorbers are a kind of material that can effectively absorb incident microwave energy to make objects invisible to radar. Recently, as radar detection devices have improved, scientists are working on high-performance absorbers that can cloak objects in the equivalent ultra-high frequency regime. However, conventional absorbers for the ultra-high regime are usually unsuitable for stealth missions. To solve this problem, researchers have developed an ultra-thin, tunable broadband microwave absorber for ultra-high frequency applications.
On a serendipitous occasion, listening to Rishi Raj, a professor at University of Colorado Boulder, speak about the remarkable effect of moderate electrical fields on lowering the sintering temperature of certain ceramic powders, Himanshu Jain, a professor at Lehigh University, began to wonder if a similar phenomenon was possible in glass — because he knew that the implications could be huge for glass technology. Their collaboration and research are discussed in this week’s Applied Physics Letters.
The American Institute of Physics has named three winners for this year’s AIP Science Writing Awards in the Writing for Children category for fun works on the science behind a famous superhero and the solution to a kids' mystery: Agnieszka Biskup and Tammy Enz will receive the prize for Batman Science: The Real-world Science Behind Batman’s Gear, from Capstone Young Readers, and Dia L. Michels, with a team of writers, will receive the prize for Ghost in the Water, from Science, Naturally.
The American Institute of Physics has named two winners of the 2015 Science Writing Awards for Books for separate works that each treated a complex subject with an engaging style and brought science to broad audiences : Charles Adler, author of Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction, from Princeton University Press; and Stephen Nash, author of Virginia Climate Fever - How Global Warming Will Transform our Cities, Shorelines and Forests, from University of Virginia Press.
Avalanching sand from dune faces can trigger loud, rumbling "booming" or short bursts of "burping" sounds — behaving as a perfectly tuned musical instrument. This sound is persistent and the dunes "sing" in frequencies ranging from 70 to 105 Hertz, with higher harmonics. Researchers discovered that the "booming" and "burping" correspond to the transmission of a class of different waves within the dune and report their findings in the journal Physics of Fluids.
Researchers from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the University of Texas at Austin have applied to acoustic waves the concept of "scattering cancellation," which has long been used to systematically cancel the dominant scattering modes of electromagnetic waves off objects. The work provides fundamental new tools to control acoustic scattering and should improve the ability to make acoustic measurements in the laboratory. It is described in this week’s Journal of Applied Physics.
To prolong the lifespan of Hall thrusters, a team of researchers from the French National Center for Scientific Research have experimentally optimized the operation of a novel, wall-less thruster prototype developed a year ago by the same team. The preliminary performance results were satisfactory, the team said, and pave the way toward developing a high-efficiency wall-less Hall thruster suitable for long-duration, deep space missions. The researchers present their work this week in Applied Physics Letters.
Researchers at the Université du Québec have recently conducted a survey of four Canadian cities to determine the economic feasibility of installing geothermal heating systems in homes in Montreal, Halifax, Vancouver and Toronto. They describe the results of their analysis this month in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy.
New model described in the journal CHAOS represents how the mind processes sequential memory and may help understand psychiatric disorders
By tweaking the shape of the diamond nanostructures into the form of tiny umbrellas, researchers from Tokyo Institute of Technology experimentally showed that the fluorescence intensity of their structures was three to five times greater than that of bulk diamond. They report their results in the journal Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing.
The most sensitive commercial magnetometers require near absolute zero temperatures, but researchers have now built a device with superior performance at a relatively balmy 77 K
Researchers at the Center for Nanomedicine at the Wilmer Eye Institute has been studying mucus in the lungs of cystic fibrosis patients, and their primary goal was to design inhalable therapeutic nanoparticles that cross the cystic fibrosis mucus barrier in the lung. But the work recently led the researchers to the unexpected discovery that mucus appears to change as the disease progresses; the mobility of these nanoparticles could vary widely in mucus from different patients. They will describe their findings this week during the Society of Rheology’s 87th Annual Meeting, being held Oct. 11-15, 2015.
A group of researchers from the University of Akron and Virginia Polytechnic Institute has explored the properties underlying spider glue's humidity-responsive adhesion. They will describe their work and how it might lead to much-sought-after "smart adhesives," with the ability to function even in high-humidity conditions, during The Society of Rheology's 87th Annual Meeting, being held Oct. 11-15, 2015, in Baltimore, Md.
A simple new electron-beam multilayer deposition technique for creating intracavity contacts -- an important component of gallium nitride-based (III-nitride) vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) -- not only yields intriguing optoelectronic properties but also paves the way for others entering this realm of research. The new technique was developed by a team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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