Physics

When learning the basics of atomic structure in school, we all pictured electrons as perfectly round. That’s just easier than pondering the ramifications of dark matter on the Standard Model. Scientists have long wondered just how round electrons are, an answer that could affect how we understand subatomic particles. The …

Physicists from the Advanced Cold Molecule Electron Electric Dipole Moment (ACME) Collaboration have examined the shape of an electron’s charge with unprecedented precision to confirm that it is extremely round. The result, reported in the journal Nature, supports the strength of the Standard Model of particle physics and seems to …

Physicists from the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) Collaboration at CERN have gained new insights into the properties of the quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter thought to have existed just after the Big Bang. The findings are published in the journal Physics Letters B. An event from the …

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 …