In previous posts, we have reviewed the different loopholes of Bell experiments. To make a long story short, entanglement experiments are based on measuring some magnitudes in two quantum systems, calculating a value based on the outcomes of these measurements, and if this value goes beyond a certain threshold we can say that the universe […]
Chemistry • Condensed matter • Materials • Physics • Quantum physics
Graphene is a two-dimensional allotrope of carbon made of hexagons. In February 2015, penta-graphene, only made of pentagons, was theoretically proposed as another two-dimensional allotrope of carbon . Apparently, it is dynamically, thermally, and mechanically stable, exhibiting a large band gap (graphene is gapless). However, an exhaustive experimental search has been inconclusive, resulting in doubts […]
In order to study new solid state magnetic properties appropiate new laboratory models are needed. In particular, there is a necessity for a substrate to investigate new forms of magnetic coupling with nanoscale ferromagnets and the exotic physics at the interface with semiconductor or superconductor materials. Now a team of researchers from DIPC and some […]
The success of Bohr’s model of the atom in accounting for the spectrum of hydrogen left this question: Could experiments show directly that atoms do have only certain, separate energy states? In other words, are there really gaps between the energies that an atom can have? A famous experiment in 1914, by the German physicists […]
Condensed matter • Materials • Nanotechnology • Physics • Quantum physics
Silicon surfaces of crystalline solids are part of conventional electronics, but their exploitation in novel materials combining two-dimensional electron states (2DESs) and magnetism, which play an important role in the development of next-generation electronics, still remains elusive. The appearance of 2DESs at surfaces or interfaces and their interplay with magnetic degrees of freedom may open […]
In previous posts, we have discussed the two main loopholes of Bell experiments, the locality loophole, and the detection loophole. Both were closed a long time ago, but only recently they were closed in the same experiment. Let us summarize the kind of experiments we are dealing with by an example. Alice and Bob will […]
What is chaos? Chaos is a concept related to dynamical systems, that are nothing but systems than can be described by amounts that change in time. There are examples of dynamical systems everywhere: the amount of money in your bank account, your weight, your room’s temperature, … all of them evolve in time, and therefore […]
Amplifying Voltage If we place a large resistor in a circuit containing a transistor we can amplify the incoming voltage, since according to Ohm’s law voltage is equal to current times resistance. So a current crossing a small resistance corresponds to a small voltage. But if the same current is made to cross a much […]
Nanoparticles of certain metals, like gold or silver, have attracted substantial interest in recent years owing to their ability to support localized surface plasmon resonances (collective oscillations of conduction electrons). These plasmonic excitations allow manipulation of light at the nanoscale and have enabled technological advances ranging from improved catalytic and photovoltaic cell efficiencies to sensitive […]
The properties of n-type and p-type semiconductors were well known by the end of World War II, during which considerable research was devoted to electronics and the invention of radar. In 1947 three researchers at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey took the idea of the n-p junction diode a step further. William Shockley, Walter Brattain […]