Author: Howard Wiseman, Director, Centre for Quantum Dynamics, Griffith University As Homer tells us, Odysseus made an epic journey, against the odds, from Troy to his home in Ithaca. He visited many lands, but mostly dwelt with the nymph Calypso on her island. We can imagine that his wife, Penelope, would have asked him about […]
DELTA is a 1.5-GeV synchrotron radiation source operated by the TU Dortmund University. This singular university-based facility with emphasis on research and education, offers high degree of flexibility both for user experiments and accelerator physics and technology. Most of the world’s synchrotrons are designed to provide a continuous supply of radiation to users in a […]
Earth’s atmosphere is a vast, swirling engine of weather and climate. Jet streams race across continents, storms spin into hurricanes, and invisible eddies churn the air at every scale. For decades, scientists have struggled to understand exactly how energy and swirling motion flow through these turbulent systems, especially in the layered zones where the air […]
Imagine cooling a liquid so fast it turns into glass: a solid that’s jumbled inside, unlike neat crystal lattices. In 1948, Walter Kauzmann noticed a puzzle. As liquids cool, their entropy (a measure of disorder) drops faster than in crystals. Below a certain temperature, a supercooled liquid would have less entropy than the crystal, implying […]
Traditional chemistry textbooks present a tidy picture: Atoms in molecules occupy fixed positions, connected by rigid rods. A molecule such as formic acid (methanoic acid, HCOOH) is imagined as two-dimensional—flat as a sheet of paper. But quantum physics tells a different story. In reality, nature resists rigidity and forces even the simplest structures into the […]
Author: Florian Neukart, Assistant professor of Physics, Leiden University Time feels like the most basic feature of reality. Seconds tick, days pass and everything from planetary motion to human memory seems to unfold along a single, irreversible direction. We are born and we die, in exactly that order. We plan our lives around time, measure […]
A Radio-Frequency Quadrupole (RFQ) is a resonant cavity with a cylindrical symmetry divided in four lobes resembling a clover-like geometry and four vanes to focus and accelerate charged particles. This structure can accept a continuous flow of low-energy massive particles (such as protons or heavier ions) and accelerate them from the keV to the MeV […]
Author: Marika Taylor, Pro-vice-chancellor, Professor, University of Birmingham In 1980, Stephen Hawking gave his first lecture as Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge. The lecture was called “Is the end in sight for theoretical physics?” Hawking, who later became my PhD supervisor, predicted that a theory of everything – uniting the clashing branches of […]
Author: Knut von Salzen, Senior Research Scientist, Marine Cloud Brightening Research Program, University of Washington Winter is setting in across the Northern Hemisphere, and with it, cold and cloudy winter days. Clouds play a vital role in the environment, providing rain but also reflecting sunlight before it reaches the Earth’s surface. But between 2003 and […]
From the burning of wood to the action of medicines, the properties and behavior of matter are governed by the way chemical elements bond with one another. For many of the 118 known elements, the intricate electronic structures of the atoms that are responsible for chemical bonding are well understood. But for the superheavy elements […]