Physics

An invention by University of St Andrews researcher Jonathan Kemp allows electric guitar strings to be balanced in sensitivity and feel in a way that has never been achieved before for an instrument with standard hardware. Musician on stage playing an electric guitar. Image credit: Herb1979. “While string sets have …

Researchers all over the world are engaged in the search for better forms of energy as the demands of society continue increasing, but improving efficiency is necessary as well. Around 14 percent of total US energy production goes toward cooling homes and businesses, so that’s a good place to start. …

A new architecture, based on so-called ‘flip-flop’ qubits, allows for a silicon quantum processor that can be scaled up without the precise placement of atoms required in other approaches. Importantly, it allows qubits to be placed hundreds of nanometers (nm) apart and still remain coupled. Schematic view of a large-scale …

A research team at Okayama University in Japan has theoretically predicted a new class of ice phases, called aeroices, likely the most stable solid phases of water near the absolute zero temperature under negative pressure. Zeolitic ice (left) and aeroice (right) are illustrated: their structure can be regarded as combinations …

A research team at the University of Bristol, UK, has developed a relatively cheap and small acoustic levitator that is capable of holding samples of interest in mid-air. The TinyLev system is composed of the driver board and the single-axis levitator with 72 transducers (arranged as two surfaces, each containing …

Physicists from the ATLAS experiment, one of the four major experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, have found the first direct evidence of high energy light-by-light scattering, a quantum-mechanical process that is forbidden in the classical theory of electrodynamics. A candidate event of light-by-light scattering, a very …

A team of physicists at the University of Bonn in Germany has developed a technique to create optical ‘wells’ for a photonic Bose-Einstein condensate. The artist’s rendering shows how potential ‘wells’ are created for photons in the microresonator through heating with an external laser beam (green). Image credit: David Dung, …

An international group of physicists and engineers, led by Professor Zenghu Chang of the University of Central Florida, has produced the shortest-ever laser pulse: a 53-attosecond X-ray flash. Professor Chang and co-authors broke the record for the shortest light pulse. Image credit: University of Central Florida. Attosecond pulses were first …

In a paper published in the August 3, 2017 issue of the journal Nature, physicists with the ALPHA collaboration, a multinational project based at CERN, report the first detailed observation of spectral lines from an antihydrogen atom, the antimatter counterpart of the simplest atom, hydrogen. Artist’s impression of a cloud …

A team of physicists with the COHERENT collaboration is the first to detect and characterize coherent elastic scattering of low-energy neutrinos off atomic nuclei. Coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering. Image credit: COHERENT Collaboration. Neutrinos, miniscule subatomic particles that rarely interact with matter, are often described as ‘ghost-like.’ Chargeless and nearly without …