New research indicates that nitrogen, one of the most-common elements in the Universe and the dominant gas in the atmosphere of Earth, becomes a metallic fluid when subjected to the extreme pressure and temperature conditions found deep inside the Earth and other planets. Nitrogen is most-commonly bonded with itself in …

A multinational team of researchers led by University of Cambridge scientist Dr. Alessandro Rossi and University of Adelaide’s Dr. Giuseppe Tettamanzi has developed a ground-breaking single-electron ‘pump.’ Their work was published on June 19, 2018 in the journal Nano Letters. Rossi et al operate a hybrid electron pump in silicon …

At more than 60 billion revolutions per minute, a nanomechanical rotor developed by Purdue University researcher Tongcang Li and co-authors is more than 100,000 times faster than a high-speed dental drill. Ahn et al levitated a nanoparticle in vacuum and driven it to rotate at high speed, which they hope …

A study conducted by an international consortium called the CLAS Collaboration, made up of 182 members from 42 institutions in 9 countries, has confirmed that increasing the number of neutrons as compared to protons in the atom’s nucleus also increases the average momentum of its protons. The result, reported in …

A new uncertainty relation, linking quantum mechanics and the precision with which temperature can be measured, has been discovered by University of Exeter theoretical physicists Janet Anders and Harry Miller. How hot is Schrödinger’s coffee? Image credit: Myriams Fotos / Wynn Pointaux / Sci-News.com. “If you measure the temperature of …

Physicists from the ALPHA Collaboration at CERN have detected the Lyman-alpha transition — when the hydrogen electron transitions between the lowest-energy (1S) level and the higher-energy (2P) level, emitting or absorbing ultraviolet light of 121.6 nm wavelength — in the antihydrogen atom, the antimatter counterpart of hydrogen. Artist’s impression of …

Physicists from the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have observed the Higgs boson decaying into a pair of bottom quarks (H→ bb–). This elusive interaction is predicted to make up almost 60% of the Higgs boson decays. The finding is consistent with the hypothesis that the …

A team of scientists at Yale University has experimentally demonstrated one of the key steps in building the architecture for quantum computers — the ‘teleportation’ of a quantum gate between two logical qubits, on demand. A chip designed to operate as a 128-qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum optimization processor. Image credit: …

Physicists from the Institute for Solid State Physics at the University of Tokyo, Japan, have recorded the largest magnetic field ever generated indoors — a whopping 1,200 T (tesla). Nakamura et al record highest magnetic field ever achieved indoors. Image credit: Windell Oskay / CC BY 2.0. “Magnetic fields are …

An international team of researchers from McGill University, California Institute of Technology and Indiana University has calculated the strength of nuclear pasta — extremely dense material deep inside the crust of neutron stars. The results, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, show that nuclear pasta may be the strongest …