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Category: particle physics

We’ve recently heard about efforts to replace some of the aggregate used in concrete with crumbled used tires. Now, scientists have succeeded in producing good quality concrete in which all of the aggregate has been replaced with tire particles.

In recent years, we’ve heard about efforts to replace some of the aggregate used in concrete with crumbled used tires. Now, however, scientists have succeeded in producing good quality concrete in which all of the aggregate has been replaced with tire particles.

Concrete consists of three parts: water, a cement which binds everything together, and an aggregate such as sand or gravel. That aggregate has to be mined from the ground, and is actually now in short supply in many parts of the world.

Discarded tires can be recycled to a certain extent, but often just end up sitting in landfills or getting burned.

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Physicists love to smash particles together and study the resulting chaos. Therein lies the discovery of new particles and strange physics, generated for tiny fractions of a second and recreating conditions often not seen in our universe for billions of years. But for the magic to happen, two beams of particles must first collide.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have announced the first successful demonstration of a new technique that improves particle beams. Future particle accelerators could potentially use the method to create better, denser particle beams, increasing the number of collisions and giving researchers a better chance to explore rare physics phenomena that help us understand our universe. The team published its findings in a recent edition of Nature.

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An international collaboration of scientists has created and observed an entirely new class of vortices—the whirling masses of fluid or air.

Led by researchers from Amherst College in the U.S. and the University of East Anglia and Lancaster University in the U.K., their new paper details the first laboratory studies of these “exotic” whirlpools in an ultracold gas of atoms at temperatures as low as tens of billionths of a degree above absolute zero.

The discovery, announced this week in the journal Nature Communications, may have exciting future implications for implementations of quantum information and computing.

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A team based at Princeton University has accurately simulated the initial steps of ice formation by applying artificial intelligence (AI) to solving equations that govern the quantum behavior of individual atoms and molecules.

The resulting simulation describes how transition into solid ice with quantum accuracy. This level of accuracy, once thought unreachable due to the amount of computing power it would require, became possible when the researchers incorporated , a form of artificial intelligence, into their methods. The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“In a sense, this is like a dream come true,” said Roberto Car, Princeton’s Ralph W. *31 Dornte Professor in Chemistry, who co-pioneered the approach of simulating molecular behaviors based on the underlying quantum laws more than 35 years ago. “Our hope then was that eventually we would be able to study systems like this one, but it was not possible without further conceptual development, and that development came via a completely different field, that of artificial intelligence and data science.”

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Most of us have felt the shock from static electricity by touching a metallic object after putting on a sweater or walking across a carpet. This occurs as a result of charge build-up whenever two dissimilar materials (such as our body and the fabric) come in contact with each other.

In 2012, scientists from the U.S. and China used this phenomenon, known as “,” to build a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) that converts unused mechanical energy into useful electrical energy. Their device consisted of two triboelectric polymer films with metallic electrodes, which, when brought together and separated, resulted in and the development of an electric voltage sufficient to power small electronic devices.

Viewed as potential sustainable energy harvesters, efforts have been made to enhance the power output of TENGs by injecting charges to the of triboelectric films. However, charge recombination in the electrode and charge repulsion on the surface of the material prevents them from achieving high surface charge densities.

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An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has detected novel quantum effects in high-precision studies of natural double-layer graphene and has interpreted them together with the University of Texas at Dallas using their theoretical work. This research provides new insights into the interaction of the charge carriers and the different phases, and contributes to the understanding of the processes involved. The LMU in Munich and the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, were also involved in the research. The results were published in Nature.

The novel material , a wafer-thin layer of carbon atoms, was first discovered by a British research team in 2004. Among other unusual properties, graphene is known for its extraordinarily . If two individual graphene layers are twisted at a very specific angle to each other, the system even becomes superconducting (i.e. conducts electricity without any resistance) and exhibits other exciting such as magnetism. However, the production of such twisted graphene double-layers has so far required increased technical effort.

This novel study used the naturally occurring form of double-layer graphene, where no complex fabrication is required. In a first step, the sample is isolated from a piece of graphite in the laboratory using a simple adhesive tape. To observe quantum mechanical effects, the Göttingen team then applied a high perpendicular to the sample: the electronic structure of the system changes and a strong accumulation of charge carriers with similar energy occurs.

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A sheet of magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene can host novel topological phases of matter, a study has revealed.

Magic-angle twisted , first discovered in 2018, is made from two sheets of graphene (a form of carbon consisting of a single layer of atoms in a honeycomb-like lattice pattern), layered atop one another, with one sheet twisted at precisely 1.05 degrees with respect to the other. The resulting bilayer has unusual electronic properties: for example, it can be made into an insulator or a superconductor depending on how many electrons are added.

The discovery launched a new field of research into magic-angle twisted graphene, known as “twistronics.” At Caltech, Stevan Nadj-Perge, assistant professor of applied physics and , has been among the researchers leading the charge: in 2019, he and his colleagues directly imaged the electronic properties of magic-angle twisted graphene at atomic-length scales; and in 2020, they demonstrated that superconductivity in twisted can exist away from the magic angle when coupled to a two-dimensional semiconductor.

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Electrons inhabit a strange and topsy-turvy world. These infinitesimally small particles have never ceased to amaze and mystify despite the more than a century that scientists have studied them. Now, in an even more amazing twist, physicists have discovered that, under certain conditions, interacting electrons can create what are called ‘topological quantum states.’ This finding, which was recently published in the journal Nature, has implications for many technological fields of study, especially information technology.

Topological states of matter are particularly intriguing classes of quantum phenomena. Their study combines quantum physics with topology, which is the branch of theoretical mathematics that studies geometric properties that can be deformed but not intrinsically changed. Topological quantum states first came to the public’s attention in 2016 when three scientists—Princeton’s Duncan Haldane, who is Princeton’s Thomas D. Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics and Sherman Fairchild University Professor of Physics, together with David Thouless and Michael Kosterlitz—were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work in uncovering the role of topology in electronic materials.

“The last decade has seen quite a lot of excitement about new topological quantum states of electrons,” said Ali Yazdani, the Class of 1909 Professor of Physics at Princeton and the senior author of the study. “Most of what we have uncovered in the last decade has been focused on how electrons get these topological properties, without thinking about them interacting with one another.”

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