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Category: particle physics – Page 39

NASA Is Watching a Huge Anomaly Growing in Earth’s Magnetic Field

For years, NASA has monitored a strange anomaly in Earth’s magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies above the planet, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa.

This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for years, and perhaps none more so than NASA researchers.

The space agency’s satellites and spacecraft are particularly vulnerable to the weakened magnetic field strength within the anomaly, and the resulting exposure to charged particles from the Sun.

First direct images reveal atomic thermal vibrations in quantum materials

Researchers investigating atomic-scale phenomena impacting next-generation electronic and quantum devices have captured the first microscopy images of atomic thermal vibrations, revealing a new type of motion that could reshape the design of quantum technologies and ultrathin electronics.

Yichao Zhang, an assistant professor in the University of Maryland Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has developed an electron microscopy technique to directly image “moiré phasons”—a physical phenomenon that impacts superconductivity and heat conduction in for next-generation electronic and .

A paper about the research, which documents images of the thermal vibration of for the first time, has been published in the journal Science.

Seeing the unseen: Laser acceleration technology shows microscopic particle behavior

Researchers from Trinity College Dublin’s School of Engineering have built a powerful new machine that lets us watch precisely what happens when tiny particles—far smaller than a grain of sand—hit a surface at extremely high speeds. It’s the only machine like it in Europe, and it took over two years to design and build.

New method simplifies analysis of complex quantum systems with strong interactions

A research team led by TU Darmstadt has transformed a difficult problem in quantum physics into a much simpler version through innovative reformulation—without losing any important information. The scientists have thus developed a new method for better understanding and predicting difficult quantum mechanical systems. The study is published in Physical Review Letters.

This problem has long preoccupied : How can systems consisting of many atoms, between which strong attractive forces act, be described mathematically? Already for about 10 particles, such systems are at the limits of current numerical methods.

It becomes particularly complicated when the atoms are exposed to an external force. However, this is the case in many experiments with cold atoms due to the way in which motion is restricted to one dimension, for example. Such systems of strongly interacting particles in one dimension were proposed in the 1960s and have since served as a reference problem in theoretical physics. So far, they have only been solved in a few special cases.

The Universe’s Most Elusive Particles Might Be Talking to Themselves

Neutrinos are among the most puzzling particles in the universe. Nearly massless and incredibly elusive, they rarely interact with anything, yet they play a deadly role in the life cycle of stars far larger than our sun. These subatomic particles exist in three known types—electron, muon, and tau—and despite decades of study, many of their behaviors remain poorly understood.

Because neutrinos interact so weakly, it is nearly impossible to make them collide under laboratory conditions. As a result, scientists still do not know whether they follow the interaction rules laid out by the standard model of particle physics or if they engage in theorized “secret” interactions exclusive to neutrinos.

In a new study, researchers with the Network for Neutrinos, Nuclear Astrophysics, and Symmetries (N3AS), including members from UC San Diego, have used theoretical models to demonstrate that massive stars in the final stages of their lives may naturally provide the perfect setting for studying these interactions.

Metasurfaces could be the next quantum information processors

In the race toward practical quantum computers and networks, photons—fundamental particles of light—hold intriguing possibilities as fast carriers of information at room temperature.

Photons are typically controlled and coaxed into quantum states via waveguides on extended microchips, or through bulky devices built from lenses, mirrors, and beam splitters. The photons become entangled—enabling them to encode and process quantum information in parallel—through complex networks of these . But such systems are notoriously difficult to scale up due to the large numbers and imperfections of parts required to do any meaningful computation or networking.

Could all those optical components be collapsed into a single, flat, ultra-thin array of subwavelength elements that control light in the exact same way, but with far fewer fabricated parts?

Scientists just solved the mystery of the missing ocean plastic—now we’re all in trouble

Millions of tons of plastic in the ocean aren't floating in plain sight—they're invisible. Scientists have now confirmed that the most abundant form of plastic in the Atlantic is in the form of nanoplastics, smaller than a micrometer. These particles are everywhere: in rain, rivers, and even the air. They may already be infiltrating entire ecosystems, including the human brain, and researchers say prevention—not cleanup—is our only hope.

Demonstration of first antimatter quantum bit paves way for improved comparisons of matter and antimatter

In a breakthrough for antimatter research, the BASE collaboration at CERN has kept an antiproton—the antimatter counterpart of a proton—oscillating smoothly between two different quantum states for almost a minute while trapped. The achievement, reported in a paper published today in the journal Nature, marks the first demonstration of an antimatter quantum bit, or qubit, and paves the way for substantially improved comparisons between the behavior of matter and antimatter.

Researchers visualize crystal phase changes particle by particle in new simulations

The secret to how steel hardens and shape-memory alloys snap into place lies in rapid, atomic-scale shifts that scientists have struggled to observe in materials. Now, Cornell researchers are revealing how these transformations unfold, particle by particle, through advanced modeling techniques.

Using custom-built computer simulations, Julia Dshemuchadse, assistant professor of and engineering at Cornell Engineering, and Hillary Pan, Ph.D., have visualized solid-solid phase transitions in unprecedented detail, capturing the motion of every particle in a theoretical material as its crystal structure morphs into another.

Their findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal not only classical transformation mechanisms, but also entirely new ones, reshaping how scientists understand this fundamental process in materials science.

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