Lifeboat Foundation

Materials with enhanced thermal conductivity are critical for the development of advanced devices to support applications in communications, clean energy and aerospace. But in order to engineer materials with this property, scientists need to understand how phonons, or quantum units of the vibration of atoms, behave in a particular substance.

“Phonons are quite important for studying new materials because they govern several material properties such as thermal conductivity and carrier properties,” said Fuyang Tay, a graduate student in applied physics working with the Rice Advanced Magnet with Broadband Optics (RAMBO), a tabletop spectrometer in Junichiro Kono’s laboratory at Rice University. “For example, it is widely accepted that superconductivity arises from electron–phonon interactions.

Recently, there has been growing interest in the magnetic moment carried by phonon modes that show circular motion, also known as chiral phonons. But the mechanisms that can lead to a large phonon magnetic moment are not well understood.

Virtual reality, or VR, is not just for fun-filled video games and other visual entertainment. This technology, involving a computer-generated environment with objects that seem real, has found many scientific and educational applications as well.

Sean Preins, a doctoral student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, has created a VR application called VIRTUE, for “Virtual Interactive Reality Toolkit for Understanding the EIC,” that is a game changer in how particle and nuclear physics data can be seen.

Made publicly available on Christmas Day, VIRTUE can be used to visualize experiments and simulated data from the upcoming Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC, a planned major new nuclear physics research facility at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, New York. EIC will explore mysteries of the “strong force” that binds the atomic nucleus together. Electrons and ions, sped up to almost the speed of light, will collide with one another in the EIC.

When two lead ions collide at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), they produce an extremely hot and dense state of matter in which quarks and gluons are not confined inside composite particles called hadrons. This fireball of particles—known as quark–gluon plasma and believed to have filled the universe in the first few millionths of a second after the Big Bang—expands and cools down rapidly. The quarks and gluons then transform back into hadrons, which fly out of the collision zone towards particle detectors.

In collisions where the two lead ions do not collide head on, the overlap region between the ions has an elliptic shape that leaves an imprint on the flow of hadrons. Measurements of such elliptic flow provide a powerful way to study quark–gluon plasma. In a recent paper posted to the arXiv preprint server, the ALICE collaboration reported a new measurement of the elliptic flow of hadrons containing heavy quarks, which are particularly powerful probes of the plasma.

Unlike the gluons and light quarks that make up the bulk of the quark–gluon plasma created in heavy-ion collisions, heavy charm and beauty quarks are produced in the initial stages of the collisions, before the plasma forms. They therefore interact with the plasma throughout its entire evolution, from its expansion and cooling to its transformation into hadrons.

Liquid crystal is a state of matter that exhibits properties of both liquid and solid. It can flow like a liquid, while its constituent molecules are aligned as in a solid. Liquid crystal is widely used nowadays, for example, as a core element of LCD devices.

The magnetic analog of this kind of material is dubbed the “spin-nematic phase,” where spin moments play the role of the molecules. However, it has not yet been directly observed despite its prediction a half-century ago. The main challenge stems from the fact that most conventional experimental techniques are insensitive to spin quadrupoles, which are the defining features of this spin-nematic phase.

But now, for the first time in the world, a team of researchers led by Professor Kim Bumjoon at the IBS Center for Artificial Low-Dimensional Electronic Systems in South Korea has succeeded at directly observing spin quadrupoles. This work was made possible through remarkable achievements over the last decades in synchrotron facility development.

After internal chaos earlier this month, OpenAI replaced the women on its board with men. As it plans to add more seats, Timnit Gebru, Sasha Luccioni, and other AI luminaries tell WIRED why they wouldn’t join.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Space Command, the Defense Department’s combatant command responsible for space operations, has achieved full operational capability, its commander Gen. James Dickinson announced Dec. 15.

In short, this means that U.S. Space Command is now fully up and running. It has the staff, infrastructure and plans it needs to handle its mission of conducting space operations and protecting American and allied assets and interests in space.

U.S. Space Command, established in 2019 in Colorado Springs, is tasked to monitor space activity and threats, support other military units with space capabilities like communications and surveillance, respond to crises involving space, deter aggression and defeat enemies if needed.

From ChatGPT to Gemini, this year was dominated by large language models and other AIs becoming everyday tools used by millions of people.

By Alex Wilkins

The company announces its latest huge chip — but will now focus on developing smaller chips with a fresh approach to ‘error correction’

The second-largest quantum computing chip won’t be fitted into IBM’s next-generation System Two quantum computer. Instead, it will use three smaller 133-qubit chips with a much lower error rate.

Addiction, Cannabis, Mental Health — December 17, 2023.