Author: Tom Shand, Honorary Senior Lecturer, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau As the Olympics get going in earnest this week, not everyone’s attention is focused on host city Paris. Surf fans are heading to Tahiti, half a world away in French Polynesia. Why? Well, apart from the French […]
Scientists have used computational algebraic geometry to study predictions for particle physics experiments, such as those at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). These experiments, in combination with new mathematical tools, help to solve unanswered questions in physics in a much faster way and have a profound impact on our understanding of nature. When studying particle […]
Any particle accelerator needs a reliable electron or ion source as a first, humble but essential and critical component. The world’s most powerful particle accelerator today -the Large Hadron Collider- extracts its protons from a single bottle of Hydrogen gas. Ion sources produce beams for a large variety of different scientific experiments, industrial processes and […]
Modern physics suggests time may be an illusion. Einstein’s theory of relativity, for example, suggests the universe is a static, four-dimensional block that contains all of space and time simultaneously – with no special “now”. What’s the future to one observer, is the past to another. That means time doesn’t flow from past to future […]
Ashes have always been a powerful and evocative metaphor representing a vanished and irretrievable past. However, we live in prodigious times, in which nothing can be taken for granted anymore, and the feat of reading the contents of some of the charred papyri of Herculaneum is a good example of this. The credit goes to […]
Numerous physical systems—from classical electromagnetic fields to quantum particle fields—exhibit oscillating wave behavior. Specific settings exist, both in nature and in artificial systems, where these waves form patterns with holes, loops, and other distinct topological characteristics, often referred to as topological wave structures. Now, a team of researchers describes how these structures, which have previously […]
Condensed matter • Nanotechnology • Particle physics • Physics
Superconductors can carry large electrical currents without any resistance. One situation where they don’t carry currents without resistance is when there is too much current. By designing microscopic electronic components made from very thin superconductors, researchers can use this effect to create a switch, like a transistor. Nanowire superconducting switching devices (called nanocryotrons, or nTrons […]
Tantalum is one of the rarest elements and has multiple stable isotopes. The least abundant tantalum isotope, Ta-180 is found naturally in a long-lived excited state, a feature unique to this isotope. In excited states, a nuclei’s protons or neutrons have higher than normal energy levels. Although energetically possible, the radioactive decay of this excited […]
Atomic force microscopy, or AFM, is a widely used technique that can quantitatively map material surfaces in three dimensions, but its accuracy is limited by the size of the microscope’s probe. A new AI technique overcomes this limitation and allows microscopes to resolve material features smaller than the probe’s tip. A new deep learning algorithm […]
A new analysis by the STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a particle collider at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, provides the first direct evidence of the imprint left by what may be the universe’s most powerful magnetic fields on “deconfined” nuclear matter . The evidence comes from […]