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Category: materials – Page 12

A Cosmic Catastrophe May Have Turned Neptune’s Ancient Moons Inside Out

Neptune’s tiny moons may be ancient wreckage, preserving material exposed when a catastrophic event shattered much larger icy worlds.

In 1989, Voyager 2 discovered six previously unknown moons around Neptune. Five of them are tiny satellites that travel just beyond the planet’s main rings. Their small size and great distance from Earth have made them especially difficult to study in detail.

Now, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has given scientists a much closer look. A Caltech-led team examined Neptune’s rings along with three of its moons, Larissa, Galatea, and Proteus, and found that their composition appears unlike that of other known bodies in the outer solar system.

4.6-Billion-Year-Old Meteorite Reveals a Surprisingly Strong Primordial Magnetic Field

Ancient meteorite minerals reveal a surprisingly strong magnetic field from the solar system’s first 200,000 years.

About 4.6 billion years ago, before the Sun and planets existed in their familiar forms, the solar system was a vast cloud of gas and dust. Within a few million years, this “solar nebula” collapsed and flattened into a disk, setting the stage for matter to gather into the Sun and the planets that orbit it.

Gravity has long been considered the main force behind this transformation. New evidence from some of the oldest known meteorite material, however, suggests that magnetism was also involved.

HiPR Makes Path Tracing More Responsive by Rendering What Matters

Path tracing can produce remarkably realistic lighting, reflections, and shadows, but that visual quality comes with a fundamental responsiveness problem. When an artist moves an object, changes a material, or adjusts a light, the renderer may effectively restart the entire image—even when only certain areas are meaningfully affected. For creators working in look development, virtual production, level design, or architectural visualization, that delay can interrupt the iterative process.

Hierarchical Progressive Rendering, or HiPR, approaches the problem as one of scheduling. Developed by University of Utah researcher Rafael Padilla alongside Andrew Tate, Dhruv Ram, and Cem Yuksel, the technique identifies where an edit is directly visible and follows its influence through reflections, shadows, indirect illumination, and other light-transport paths. It then updates the most important image regions first while the remaining pixels progressively catch up, ultimately producing the same unbiased path-traced result.

3D magnetic-field control reveals new way to tune spin textures

(Fe0.63 Ni0.3 Pd0.07)3 P, or FNPP, is a magnetic material that exhibits complex magnetic structures even at room temperature. This makes the material of interest for spintronics, a field that could enable data processing with significantly lower energy consumption. One potential application is novel magnetic memory devices.

However, generating and modifying the desired structures in a controlled manner remains a challenge. A new study led by HZB has taken a step forward in this regard. The team demonstrated at the world’s only VEKMAG station at BESSY II that a tiny external B-field in the plane of the magnetic patterns is sufficient to change them. The work is published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The team led by Dr. Florin Radu investigated FNPP samples using soft X-rays and ptychography at BESSY II. The experiments aimed to map the magnetic textures while the sample was exposed to an external magnetic field in specific spatial directions. For this purpose, BESSY II is equipped with a globally unique instrument developed by Radu’s team: the VEKMAG vector magnet can generate a magnetic field of up to 1 T in all three spatial directions.

Tiny 2D cracks creep through materials before triggering sudden fracture, experiments reveal

We have all seen something suddenly break: a phone screen cracks, a plastic object snaps or a piece of glass shatters. To our eyes, the failure seems to happen all at once. But what if the most important part of the break happens long before the final snap?

A new study presents a physical picture of how materials fail. The researchers found that cracks can begin as tiny, two-dimensional patches that grow extraordinarily slowly, at speeds ranging from microns to millimeters per second. Only after these patches grow to span the thickness of the material do they transform into the rapidly moving cracks associated with sudden, explosive fracture.

The research, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, was conducted by Yuval Paz and Jay Fineberg of the Racah Institute of Physics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, together with Meng Wang of the Beijing Institute of Technology and Mokhtar Adda-Bedia of CNRS, ENS de Lyon and Université de Lyon.

How to Watch Back-to-Back Northern Lights from 20 States Tonight

However, a minor G1 geomagnetic storm remains possible, with a chance of a stronger G2 event if lingering solar material finally arrives.

Still, the forecast remains uncertain as several coronal mass ejections could have merged in space into one “cannonball CME” event, though the UK Met Office now says impact is unlikely.

In the meantime, read on for everything you need to know about this stellar event.

New molecular magnet design boosts performance for ultrahigh-density data storage

Researchers at The University of Manchester and the Australian National University have developed a new class of molecular magnets that combines the most successful features of previous designs, resulting in some of the strongest magnetic memory properties reported to date.

The work, published in Nature Communications, centers on single-molecule magnets (SMMs), a class of materials capable of storing magnetic information within individual molecules. These materials are being explored as candidates for future ultrahigh-density data storage technologies, as they offer the potential for information to be stored on a dramatically smaller scale than in conventional magnetic devices.

Controlling the geometry of lanthanide compounds has long been one of the major challenges in molecular magnet design. The researchers have overcome part of that challenge by combining two molecular architectures that had previously delivered strong, but different, magnetic properties.

Slender crystal’s blue-to-yellow glow could make invisible forces visible

Applying pressure to luminescent organic crystals usually brings molecules closer together and weakens their fluorescence. Materials that instead brighten and undergo a large color change are rare, and clear design principles for achieving both responses in simple, rigid aromatic hydrocarbons have been lacking.

Researchers at the University of Osaka and collaborators have now found that crystals of a uniformly slender aromatic hydrocarbon become brighter under pressure while changing their fluorescence from light blue to yellow. Its emission-wavelength sensitivity was the highest reported for a molecular material to date.

The work is published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C.

Reversible electric control unlocks persistent chiral phonon states

Atoms in a material are rarely still. They jiggle back and forth in collective lattice vibrations known as phonons. Their motion can also carry a rotational element: In 2023, scientists at PSI experimentally proved the existence of chiral phonons, which exhibit handedness depending on which way they rotate.

Now, the same team of researchers has shown that an applied electric field can control the handedness of these phonons. The research is published in the journal Nature Materials.

Scientists Observe Quantum Heat Waves at Room Temperature For The First Time

We’ve got another notable first in the field of physics to report: A specific type of quantum behavior in waves of heat has now been observed at room temperature, rather than at the ultra-low cryogenic temperatures that are usually required.

The quantum behavior is phonon focusing, which is where atomic-level, heat-carrying vibrations (the quantum packets known as phonons) travel through a non-metallic material in specific patterns, like rays from a star.

Crucially, this is different from the standard behavior of heat-transporting phonons at room temperature, where the heat spreads out evenly in all directions (a classical rather than quantum way of moving).