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Category: particle physics – Page 379

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is a technique that involves beaming electrons through a specimen to form an image. This enables the generation of significantly higher resolution than traditional optical microscopes. While the latter devices are typically limited to around 1000x magnification due to the resolving power of visible light, TEM can provide zoom capabilities that are orders of magnitude greater – surpassing even a scanning electron microscope (SEM).

In recent years, TEM instruments have begun to reach extraordinary levels of detail. Spatial resolutions are now edging into the realm of individual atoms, measuring less than 0.0000005 millimetres (mm).

However, TEM is prone to lens aberrations and multiple scattering, limiting its use to samples thin enough to let electrons pass through. The process is technically challenging and requires additional tools to perform. In 2018, researchers at Cornell University offered a potential solution. They built a high-powered detector combined with a new algorithm-driven process called ptychography. This achieved a new record for microscopic resolution, tripling the previous state-of-the-art.

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## SCIENCE ADVANCES • MAY 24, 2021 # *by Vienna University of Technology*

In everyday life, phase transitions usually have to do with temperature changes--for example, when an ice cube gets warmer and melts. But there are also different kinds of phase transitions, depending on other parameters such as magnetic field. In order to understand the quantum properties of materials, phase transitions are particularly interesting when they occur directly at the absolute zero point of temperature. These transitions are called "quantum phase transitions" or a "quantum critical points."

Such a quantum critical point has now been discovered by an Austrian-American research team in a novel material, and in an unusually pristine form. The properties of this material are now being further investigated.

It is suspected that the material could be a so-called Weyl-Kondo semimetal, which is considered to have great potential for quantum technology due to special quantum states (so-called topological states). If this proves to be true, a key for the targeted development of topological quantum materials would have been found.

This surprising result is probably related to the fact that the behavior of electrons in this material has some special features. "It is a highly correlated electron system. This means that the electrons interact strongly with each other, and that you cannot explain their behavior by looking at the electrons individually.

Continue reading “New quantum material discovered” | >

Circa 2016 o.o!

The theory used to be that hydrocarbons were created in “shocks,” or violent stellar events that cause a lot of turbulence and, with the shock waves, make atoms into ions, which are more likely to combine.

The data from the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory has since proved that theory wrong. Scientists at Herschel studied the components in the Orion Nebula, mapping the amount, temperature and motions for the carbon-hydrogen molecule (CH), the carbon-hydrogen positive ion (CH+) and their parent molecule: the carbon ion (C+).

They found that in Orion, CH+ is emitting light instead of absorbing it, which means that it is warmer than the background gas. This was surprising to scientists because the CH+ molecule is incredibly reactive and needs a high amount of energy to form, so when it interacts with the background hydrogen in the cloud it gets destroyed.

Continue reading “Scientists find ultraviolet light may create life-essential chemicals” | >

Cosmic rays are high-energy atomic particles continually bombarding Earth’s surface at nearly the speed of light. Our planet’s magnetic field shields the surface from most of the radiation generated by these particles. Still, cosmic rays can cause electronic malfunctions and are the leading concern in planning for space missions.

Researchers know cosmic rays originate from the multitude of stars in the Milky Way, including our sun, and other galaxies. The difficulty is tracing the particles to specific sources, because the turbulence of interstellar gas, plasma, and dust causes them to scatter and rescatter in different directions.

In AIP Advances, University of Notre Dame researchers developed a to better understand these and other cosmic ray transport characteristics, with the goal of developing algorithms to enhance existing detection techniques.

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As the need for urgent climate solutions grows, scientists want to put more research into a technology known as solar geoengineering — the idea of chemically altering the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from Earth.

It is seen as a potential method of cooling the planet and offsetting climate change. But could such a technology curtail a climate catastrophe — or become the cause of it?

Those against solar geoengineering fear unintended consequences, including irreversible changes to weather patterns, and many climate activists are wary of using the Earth’s atmosphere as a testing ground. Last month in Sweden, an experiment led by Harvard University researchers was cancelled following opposition by environmental and indigenous groups. Researchers had planned on testing a high-altitude balloon that could be used to disperse reflective aerosol particles into the atmosphere.

In this episode of The Stream, we’ll learn more about solar geoengineering and the debate surrounding it.

Continue reading “Could blocking the sun save the planet?” | >

Physicists in Germany say they have found definitive evidence for the existence of superfluidity in an extremely cold 2D gas of fermions. Their experiment involved confining a few thousand lithium atoms inside a specially-designed trap, and they say that the finding could help shed light on the role of reduced dimensionality in high-temperature superconductors.

Understanding the mechanisms that allow electrical current to flow without resistance inside cuprate materials at ambient pressure and at temperatures of up to 133 K is one of the biggest outstanding challenges in condensed-matter physics. Although scientists can explain the process behind more conventional, lower-temperature superconductivity, they are still trying to work out how the phenomenon can take place at high temperatures in what are essentially 2D materials (cuprates being made up of layers of copper oxide). Such low-dimensional materials are prone to fluctuations that prevent the long-range coherence thought to be essential for superconductivity.

2D Fermi gases can serve as model systems to try and help clear up this mystery, having strong and tuneable correlations between their constituent fermions that can mimic interactions in superconductors. Macroscopic quantum phenomena such as Bose-Einstein condensation involve large numbers of bosons – particles with integer spin – co-existing in a single quantum state. Fermions, in contrast, have half-integer spin and are subject to the Pauli exclusion principle – which precludes multiple particles sharing quantum states. But fermions can get around this restriction by pairing up and combining their spins.

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From a purely scientific frame of reference, many quantum phenomena like non-local correlations between distant entities and wave-particle duality, the wave function collapse and consistent histories, quantum entanglement and teleportation, the uncertainty principle and overall observer-dependence of reality pin down our conscious mind being intrinsic to reality. And this is the one thing the current physicalist paradigm fails to account for. Critical-mass anomalies will ultimately lead to the full paradigm shift in physics. It’s just a matter of time.

With consciousness as primary, everything remains the same and everything changes. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology are unchanged. What changes is our interpretation as to what they are describing. They are not describing the unfolding of an objective physical world, but transdimensional evolution of one’s conscious mind. There’s nothing “physical” about our physical reality except that we perceive it that way. By playing the “Game of Life” we evolved to survive not to see quantum mechanical reality. At our classical level of experiential reality we perceive ourselves as physical, at the quantum level we are a probabilistic wave function, which is pure information.

No matter how you slice it, reality is contextual, the notion that immediately dismisses ‘observer-independent’ interpretations of quantum mechanics and endorses the Mental Universe hypothesis. But we have to be careful here not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. I’d like to make a very important point at this juncture of our discussion: Mental and physical are two sides of the same coin made of information. Both should be viewed as the same substance.

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