For more than two decades, the standard picture of the Universe has rested on a surprisingly simple idea. Space is expanding, galaxies are moving farther apart, and a mysterious ingredient called dark energy is driving that expansion to accelerate. In the simplest model, dark energy is constant through time, an unchanging property of empty space […]
Dark matter is a mysterious, invisible substance that makes up about 27% of the Universe’s total energy content. We cannot see it directly, only infer its presence through the gravity it exerts. For decades, cosmologists have described dark matter haloes as the invisible scaffolding within which galaxies form and live. Every galaxy, including our own […]
Author: Ry Holland, Research Fellow in Microbial Ecology, Monash University Winter in Antarctica is long and dark. Temperatures remain well below freezing. In many places, the Sun sets in April and does not rise above the horizon again until August. Without sunlight, photosynthetic life such as plants, mosses and algae cannot make energy. But that’s […]
Scientists working on the Dark SRF experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have demonstrated unprecedented sensitivity in an experimental setup used to search for theorized particles called dark photons. Researchers trapped ordinary, massless photons in devices called superconducting radio frequency cavities to look for the transition of those photons into […]
wavelike All the matter that has ever been detected accounts for a mere 4.9% of the Universe. Most of the cosmos is the dark universe: a mix of dark matter (26.8%) and dark energy (68.3%), both of which have so far proved impenetrable puzzles. The existence of dark matter has been inferred from the motion […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics • Theoretical physics
Plasmonic nanostructures confine light to dimensions far smaller than the free-space wavelength, as they mix optical fields with electronic excitations. It was not until the 1990s, with the appearance of accurate and reliable nanofabrication techniques, that plasmonics blossomed. It was found then that local fields around nanostructures could be directly measured by near-field scanning optical […]
I remember very well my physics professor during my first year at university. She stressed the importance of having clear intuitions of what physical terms mean before any mathematics was invoked. ‘Imagine someone drops an 100-gram apple 1 metre above your head’, she would say; ‘the pain you feel is the equivalent of a joule […]
The direct search for dark matter has been a thriving experimental field since a couple of decades, and a new and promising experimental approach has been recently developed and tested: the use of an atomic clock inner mechanics. This whole new idea seems to be relatively cheap since no huge technological development is needed, and […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Quantum physics
When we study for the first time the structure of the atom in high school we encounter for the first time the concept of quantum excitation. We learn that excitation is the process in which a nucleus, electron, atom, ion, or molecule acquires energy that raises it to a quantum state (the excited state) higher […]
Some weeks ago I came across a little poem via Twitter (ah, the modern world!). It was authored by Wendell Berry, an american writer and farmer very involved in ecologic farming activism. Let’s meet the poem: To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark […]