Physics

Two weeks ago, I read several articles on proposed wireless power transfer, e.g. on CNN News or this older one from Physorg. Since I find the idea to have power transmitted wirelessly for home use really exciting, I tried to dig into the topic, you can read the full text here. A brief summary of what I found: There are currently two ideas on the market that rely on different schemes. A) The one has been proposed by a group of physicists from MIT, Marin Soljacic (assistant professor of physics), Aristeidis Karalis, and John Joannopoulos (professor of physics). They have a paper on the arxiv…

For the past three years a satellite has circled the Earth, collecting data to determine whether two predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity are correct. April 14, at the American Physical Society (APS) meeting in Jacksonville, Fla., Professor Francis Everitt, a Stanford University physicist and principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B (GP-B) Relativity Mission, a collaboration of Stanford, NASA and Lockheed Martin, provided the first public peek at data that will reveal whether Einstein's theory has been confirmed by the most sophisticated orbiting laboratory ever…

Researchers have successfully applied X-ray scattering techniques to determine how dissolved metal ions interact in solution. These findings will help researchers better understand how metal ions, such as those found in nuclear waste and other industrial processes, behave in the environment. Researchers at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Notre Dame have successfully applied X-ray scattering techniques to determine how dissolved metal ions interact in solution. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory The results show that the ion structures are…

Through photosynthesis, green plants and cyanobacteria are able to transfer sunlight energy to molecular reaction centers for conversion into chemical energy with nearly 100-percent efficiency. Speed is the key - the transfer of the solar energy takes place almost instantaneously so little energy is wasted as heat. How photosynthesis achieves this near instantaneous energy transfer is a long-standing mystery that may have finally been solved. Sunlight absorbed by bacteriochlorophyll (green) within the FMO protein (gray) generates a wavelike motion of excitation energy whose quantum…

Scientists of the MiniBooNE [1] experiment at the Department of Energy's Fermilab [2] today (April 11) announced their first findings. The MiniBooNE results resolve questions raised by observations of the LSND [3] experiment in the 1990s that appeared to contradict findings of other neutrino experiments worldwide. MiniBooNE researchers showed conclusively that the LSND results could not be due to simple neutrino oscillation, a phenomenon in which one type of neutrino transforms into another type and back again. The announcement significantly clarifies the overall picture of how neutrinos…

Scientists from the Universities of Liverpool and Glasgow have completed work on the inner heart of an experiment which seeks to find out what has happened to all the antimatter created at the start of the Universe. Matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts in the Big Bang but somehow the antimatter disappeared resulting in the Universe, and everything in it, including ourselves, being made of the remaining matter. The final modules of the VErtex LOcator (VELO), a precision silicon detector, have been delivered to CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva. Once…

The first sector of CERN* 's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to be cooled down has reached a temperature of 1.9 K (-271°C), colder than deep outer space! Although just one-eighth of the LHC ring, this sector is the world's largest superconducting installation. The entire 27-kilometre LHC ring needs to be cooled down to this temperature in order for the superconducting magnets that guide and focus the proton beams to remain in a superconductive state. Such a state allows the current to flow without resistance, creating a dense, powerful magnetic field in relatively small magnets. Guiding the two…

Using a laser-cooling technique that could one day allow scientists to observe quantum behavior in large objects, MIT researchers have cooled a coin-sized object to within one degree of absolute zero. This study marks the coldest temperature ever reached by laser-cooling of an object of that size, and the technique holds promise that it will experimentally confirm, for the first time, that large objects obey the laws of quantum mechanics just as atoms do. MIT researchers have developed a technique to cool this dime-sized mirror (small circle suspended in the center of large metal ring) to…

Livermore researchers have moved one step closer to being able to turn on and off the decay of a nuclear isomer. The protons and neutrons in a nucleus can be arranged in many ways. The arrangement with the lowest energy is called the ground state and all others are called excited states. (This is analogous to the ground and excited states of electrons in an atom except that nuclear excited states are typically thousands of times higher in energy.) Excited nuclear states eventually decay to the ground state via gamma emission or to another nucleus via particle emission. Most excited states…

The last quadripolar magnet was brought down into the tunnel of the world’s largest particle accelerator; the CERN’s1 LHC, or Large Hadron Collidor. This magnet is part of a series of 392 units which will ensure that the beams are kept on track all along their trajectory through the tunnel. Its installation marks the completion of a long and fruitful collaboration between the CERN, the CNRS/IN2P32 and the CEA/DSM3 in the field of superconductivity and advanced cryogenics. This collaboration has lasted over ten years and was part of the special contribution made by France, as the host country…