Physics

The Milagro collaboration, comprised of scientists from 16 institutions across the United States, has discovered two nearby regions with an unexpected excess of cosmic rays.   This is the second finding of a source of galactic cosmic rays relatively near Earth announced in the past week. In the November 20 issue of Nature, ATIC an international experiment led by LSU scientists announced finding an unexpected surplus of cosmic-ray electrons from an unidentified but relatively close source. Cosmic rays are actually charged particles, including protons and electrons that are accelerated to…

What is the latest recipe for anti-matter?  Take a gold sample the size of the head of a push pin, shoot a laser through it, and suddenly more than 100 billion particles of anti-matter appear.  The anti-matter, also known as positrons, shoots out of the target in a cone-shaped plasma "jet." This new ability to create a large number of positrons in a small laboratory opens the door to several fresh avenues of anti-matter research, including an understanding of the physics underlying various astrophysical phenomena such as black holes and gamma ray bursts.  Anti-matter research…

A new approach to calibrating quantum mechanical measurement has been developed with particular applications in optics and super-secure quantum communication.Scientists have used the approach to directly calibrate a detector that can sense the presence of multiple individual photons, it is revealed in research published today in Nature Physics. Being able to sense the presence of individual photons is an important requirement for the development of future long-distance quantum communication devices and networks. One of the potential applications of this new detector is in devices for secret…

A major milestone has been achieved in the completion of the U's next-generation particle accelerator, ALICE, which is set to produce an intense beam of light that will revolutionize the way in which accelerator based light source research facilities will be designed in the future. ALICE is an acronym standing for Accelerators and Lasers In Combined Experiments. Financed by the Science and Technology Facilities Council with seed funding from the North West Development Agency, the project is designed to produce light from both the accelerator and advanced lasers that can be used simultaneously…

Dark matter is believed to account for 85 per cent of the Universe’s mass but has never been detected.   Scientists inferred its existence from gravitational effects of objects in space more than 75 years ago and it has become quite prominent in physics, for something that's never been seen or verified. The international Virgo Consortium  say they can change that and have used a massive computer simulation showing the evolution of a galaxy like the Milky Way to “see” gamma-rays given off by dark matter.  They say their findings, published in Nature, could help NASA’s Fermi…

Scientists have long been on the hunt for evidence of antimatter, matter's arch nemesis and a staple of science fiction in the last century, that might be left over from the very early Universe.  But the latest  results using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Compton Gamma Ray Observatory suggest the search is not going to get any easier. Antimatter would be made up of elementary particles, each of which has the same mass as their corresponding matter counterparts --protons, neutrons and electrons -- but the opposite charges and magnetic properties. When matter and…

Water is the most common and important material in nature but exactly what is water on earth and what properties does it have? It's a more challenging problem than people think.   The changes in properties of water under the action of a magnetic field have been studied for a hundred years but never solved.  In new research reported in the November 2008 issue of Science in China Series G- Physics, Mechanics&Astronomy,  the authors collected and studied the light spectra of water and its features using the spectrum techniques of light for giving an insight into the features…

The dense, hot, radioactive core of the Sun rotates significantly more slowly than the layer next to it, the radiative zone, a Stanford solar physicist has concluded. According to Peter Sturrock, professor emeritus of applied physics, the idea of a slower core has been hinted at before, but his paper published in the Astrophysical Journal provides for the first time a precise rotation rate. - The core spins round once every 28.4 days - The radiative zone rotates once every 26.9 days - The surface rotates faster still-once every 25.2 days. Sturrock deduced from available observational data…

Quantum computing is the Holy Grail of processing.    The analogy is apt because, like that relic of legend, no one is sure exactly what it looks like but we all know it has awesome power.   Another step towards quantum computing was achieved when an international team of scientists were able to successfully store and retrieve information - using the nucleus of an atom. The immediate lure of quantum computing is blinding speed: a quantum computer would be able to perform certain mathematical tasks, such as factoring, many billions of times faster than the most powerful…

Scientists at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz have, for the first time, succeeded in rendering the spatial distribution of individual atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate visible. Bose-Einstein condensates are small, ultracold gas clouds which, due to their low temperatures, can no longer be described in terms of traditional physics but must be described using the laws of quantum mechanics. The first Bose-Einstein condensates were generated in 1995 by Eric A. Cornell, Scientific Blogging featured  columnist Carl E. Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle, who received the Nobel Prize in…