Applied Physics
Hank |
A new study sought to analyze the chewing nature of four types of gum bases and along the way determine bubbling capacity also. Gums are generally oils, resins, and elastomers generally held in pleasant form by the gum base.
So gum base is important to manufacturers. Chewing gum is a $25 billion per year business, 1,740,000,000,000 sticks. If humans chew each stick for 10 minutes, that is over 33,000,000 years we spend at it - annually.
Companies want to optimize it for their customers. If it is a bubble gum, people want it to be chewed fast enough they can put on a show, but…
Light is the most famous thing that is two distinct entities at once - a wave and a particle - but glass is nearly as mysterious. And not well understood.
We think of glass as being transparent and rigid, is a complex and intriguing material but that is only when cooled and its dynamics slow down significantly. This process, known as “glass transition”, is due to "dynamical heterogeneities," where the dynamics become increasingly correlated and intermittent as the liquid cools down and approaches the glass transition temperature.
In a new study, researchers propose a new theoretical framework…
Last week it was claimed that a material that would be superconducting at normal pressure has been found. This substance known as LK-99 was alleged to be superconducting at normal atmospheric pressure and "room temperatures. This would mean being able to say, make a superconducting power grid that could transport electricity without loss, or cheap superconducting magnets for maglev vehicles or particle accelerators etc. Since writing this story more than one team has reproduced the diamagnetic looking effect in which samples of LK-99, both big and small, all lean to one side…
Superionic materials, needed for solid-state electrolytes that could replace the liquid organic electrolytes in current electric car batteries and make them safe for mass usage, face challenges in going from conception to production.
Lithium ions are very mobile at ambient temperatures in solid-state ionic conductors, and that means atoms do not simply vibrate around their equilibrium positions. Disorder is bad in production systems.
A new paper applied a fully dynamical approach to recover the elastic tensors and elastic moduli of superionic materials, based on the Parrinello-…
Quantum magnetism exploration is getting a boost from atoms about 3 billion times colder than interstellar space.
Space is cold, of course, but is warmed by the afterglow from the Big Bang. A Kyoto team instead used lasers to cool its fermions, atoms of ytterbium, within about one-billionth of a degree of absolute zero, the unattainable temperature where all motion stops, far colder than interstellar space.
Fermions include things like electrons and are one of two types of particles that all matter is made of, and atoms are subject to the laws of quantum dynamics just like electrons and…
People who buy electric cars don't understand a lot about energy generation. They may believe that solar panels and wind are providing the energy, but even after $3 trillion in subsidies, those have not changed the percentage of energy generated by mainstream sources, like natural gas.
Their second introduction to reality is charging. If you are sleeping, and can sleep well knowing your electric car charging is equivalent load to an entire extra house on the grid, long charging times are fine, but it makes long trips a source of anxiety for most.
When the 1980s-era lithium-ion batteries that…
A recently published paper in Nature Physics, “Time-reversal-based quantum metrology with many-body entangled states”, finds that a new technique to measure atomic vibrations can improve the accuracy of atomic clocks and quantum sensors. This would help scientists find dark matter, gravitational waves or unexpected phenomena. This is a dramatic finding that will push back the possibilities of science.
The Problem
The paper was written by a group of MIT physicists, Vladan Vuletić being the corresponding author of the paper. The other authors are Simone Colombo, Edwin Pedrozo-Peñafiel…
The Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research recently published a study regarding the relationship between spectral emissivity and the temperatures of three different crystal-bearing basalts. It’s common for scientists to use thermocouples to measure high temperatures in such cases due to their sensitivity over a wide range.
A thermocouple is a sensor that measures temperatures, consisting of two dissimilar metal wires connected at one end and joined to the thermocouple thermometer at the other end. Let’s look at a few key concepts of this exciting research.
Defining Spectral…
A half-mile-long stretch of tunnel in California is now colder than most of the universe. It contains a new superconducting particle accelerator, part of an upgrade project to the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free-electron laser, one of the last milestones before LCLS-II will produce X-ray pulses that are 10,000 times brighter, on average, than those of LCLS and that arrive up to a million times per second – a world record for today’s most powerful X-ray light sources.
Crews have successfully cooled the accelerator to minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit – or 2 kelvins – a…
There are three dimensions in the known universe. Fiction authors like to call time a dimension but it really isn't, it is just a way to look at the other three. Even if you don't remember what you ate for lunch yesterday the universe knows you were 2 millions miles away from where you are right now when you at it. Since everything in the universe was also shifting in chaotic ways there is no way to return and have a different lunch.
While there aren't 4D materials, there are effectively 2D ones - a single layer of atoms like graphene used in applications from flexible touch panels to…