Physics

As many parents know, it's often easier to keep your kids under control by exerting less authority rather than more. A child who fidgets uncontrollably in a confining booster seat, for example, may be perfectly content on a plain old chair. A team of physicists at the Universitat de Barcelona has found that the same is true in controlling the movement of particles suspended in liquids. What's more, they speculate that many microscopic systems, macroscopic ecosystems, and human social systems may respond to a gentle touch for the very same mathematical reasons. In order to test their…

"Random lasers" are not what chooses the songs in your CD player in shuffle mode, they are a class of microlasers which use the principle of random light scattering as an integral part of the their operation. In conventional lasers light is trapped between two highly reflecting mirrors where it is amplified by pumping from outside. When this amplification process is efficient enough, the laser begins to operate. After the initiation of the modern study of random lasers by Nabil M. Lawandy at Brown University, it was demonstrated by Hui Cao (Northwestern and Yale) and coworkers that you don't…

A golden coil smaller in diameter than a human hair and a diamond pin embossed with gold may represent the future of high frequency electronics. Carol L. Kory, who specializes in complex electromagnetic computer simulations, will present two papers describing the design and predicted performance of new backward wave oscillators at the Ninth International Vacuum Electronics Conference (IVEC) in Monterey, California. James A. Dayton, Jr., chief technology officer of Teraphysics and inventor of the devices, will follow with two presentations describing the innovative fabrication technology that…

Throughout the history of Earth there have been numerous mass extinctions and there are just as many theories as to why they occurred. The largest we know of occurred some 250 million years ago, give or take, but the mass extinction of the dinosaurs more recently has long been a favorite topic of scientists and philosophers. Scientists at the Cardiff University Centre for Astrobiology have a new twist on an old idea and built a computer model to try and support it. Their model mapped our solar system’s movement and found that it continually “bounces” up and down through the plane of the…

When a hypothetical, quantum-scale balloon is popped in a vacuum, do the particles inside spread out as predicted by classical mechanics or do something else, since matter at the infinitesimally small quantum scale is both a wave and a particle, and its location cannot be fixed precisely because measurement alters the system? The question is deceptively complex, since quantum particles do not look or act like air molecules in a real balloon. Theoretical physicists at the University of Southern California have an answer Heisenberg would be proud of. Quantum-scale chaos exists … sort of.…

A team of researchers from Case Western Reserve University has found that gravitational radiation—widely expected to provide “smoking gun” proof for a theory of the early universe known as “inflation”— can be produced by another mechanism. According to physics scholars, inflation theory proposes that the universe underwent a period of exponential expansion right after the big bang. A key prediction of inflation theory is the presence of a particular spectrum of “gravitational radiation”-- ripples in the fabric of space-time that are notoriously difficult to detect but believed to exist…

Matter and anti-matter are believed to have been created in equal amounts when the universe came in to existence during the Big Bang, yet in the universe today there is only matter. The quest to understand more about the mysterious neutrino particle which is thought to be responsible for this phenomenon has taken a major step forward. The Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment (MICE) project, an accelerator research experiment for a major component of a future Neutrino Factory, has achieved an important milestone with the successful transport of a beam of muon particles along the MICE muon beam…

Danish nano-physicists have made a discovery that can change the way we store data on our computers. This means that in the future we can store data much faster, and more accurate. Your computer has two equally important elements: computing power and memory. Traditionally, scientists have developed these two elements in parallel. Computermemory is constructed from magnetic components, while the media of computing is electrical signals. The discovery of the scientists at Nano-Science Center and the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, Jonas Hauptmann, Jens Paaske and Poul…

Everyone has heard of superconductors but a superinsulator is a newly-discovered fundamental state of matter created by scientists at Argonne National Laboratory in collaboration with several European institutions that opens new directions of inquiry in condensed matter physics and breaks ground for a new generation of microelectronics. Led by Argonne senior scientist Valerii Vinokur and Russian scientist Tatyana Baturina, the international team fashioned a thin film of titanium nitride with they then chilled to near absolute zero. When they tried to pass a current through the material, the…

In the uncharted wilderness at the fringes of the Periodic Table of the Elements is a long-sought island — the fabled 'Island of Stability' - and it is apparently home of a new genre of superheavy chemical elements sought for more than three decades. The periodic table, a fixture on the walls of science classrooms around the world, lists all the chemical elements. These materials make up everything in the universe, from human beings, medicines, and food to stars and swirling clouds of gas a billion light-years across the universe. The first 92 elements on the table exist naturally. The rest…