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Category: particle physics – Page 457

The result is a science park and university campus that offers degrees at all levels. It hosts more than 300 labs and advanced research equipment, such as the SOLEIL synchrotron. About 100 companies and 6 of France’s public research organizations, including the national research agency CNRS, have a presence there. That combination — of the university with national facilities — is powerful, says Price. The park accounts for an estimated 15% of France’s public and private research. About 30,000 people work or study at Saclay, and this is projected to rise to 80,000 by 2030.

The lab has no overall scientific project, and has added an extra layer of management, says Fayard, although he concedes that the coronavirus pandemic has complicated the lab’s first months. “I fear the lab will have to work hard not to fall between two stools — it is too big to be efficient, but not big enough to invest alone in major local infrastructures.”

But Oliver Brüning, a particle physicist at CERN, Europe’s particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, who spent time working at LAL, says he thinks the new lab has greater weight and influence than did LAL alone.

Saclay’s second-largest lab, the Institute for Integrative Biology of the Cell (I2BC), covers five biology disciples, including structural, cell and genome biology. More than 700 people, employed by national research agencies and universities, work there. Director Frédéric Boccard says it is too soon to judge whether the Paris-Saclay model is a success for research. “But it is extremely promising.” Boccard adds that having a critical mass of technological equipment means that the lab has attracted collaborators from all over France and many other countries, including Germany, the United States and Russia.

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The United Kingdom’s revamped fusion reactor, known as the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST) Upgrade, powered up for the first time yesterday after a 7-year build. The £55 million device will be a testbed for technologies critical to all future fusion reactors, and may provide a stepping stone to a new design of energy-producing facility.

Tokamaks are the frontrunners in the decadeslong effort to generate energy by fusing light elements together. These doughnut-shaped vessels contain a superhot ionized gas—or plasma—of hydrogen isotopes that is constrained with powerful magnets and heated by microwaves and particle beams. (ITER, a gigantic tokamak under construction in France, is a major focus of global efforts to realize fusion power.)

MAST is a variation on the standard tokamak; it is shaped more like a cored apple than a doughnut. Researchers believe that shape can confer greater stability in the roiling plasma than a doughnut-shaped tokamak, but it is less well understood than the traditional design. MAST first tested the concept on a large scale starting in 1999 and has now been upgraded with extra heating power, new technology for extracting heat from the plasma, and other improvements. A parallel effort at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, called the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX), was similarly upgraded. Soon after restarting in 2016, however, NSTX suffered a magnet failure and is now being rebuilt.

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Circa 2015.

LEDs have come a long ways. From the early 70s when a bulky LED watch cost thousands of dollars to LG’s announcement last month that it had created an OLED TV as thin as a magazine, these glowing little bits of magic have become wonderfully cheap and impossibly small. But guess what: they’re about to get much smaller.

A team scientists from the University of Washington just built the world’s thinnest possible LED for use as a light source in electronics. It’s just three atoms thick. No, not three millimeters. Not three nanometers. Three atoms.

“These are 10,000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair, yet the light they emit can be seen by standard measurement equipment,” said Jason Ross, a UW materials scientist and graduate student who helped with the research. “This is a huge leap of miniaturization of technology, and because it’s a semiconductor, you can do almost everything with it that is possible with existing, three-dimensional silicon technologies.”

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This is the episode for anyone who has wondered about the fundamental structure of the universe and its extremely distant future — a time which is so distant that for all practical purposes, it’s almost synonymous with eternity. Black Holes, Fundamental Physics, and the meaning behind the cosmological catchphrase — Turtles All the Way Down. Please listen.

What happens when all the stars in our cosmos’ galaxies burn out; with little or no hydrogen gas left to fuel star formation; and everything pretty much turns to toast? It will presage an age of black holes where extremely low temperatures and fundamental particle decay will alleviate life as we know it. This universal endgame in an almost infinite far future may actually be a Dark Age where little or nothing can happen. And if it does, only on the longest timescales. Yale University astrophysicist Gregory Laughlin and I discuss these and other issues in this cosmological “turtles all the way down” episode of the podcast.

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Spintronic devices are attractive alternatives to conventional computer chips, providing digital information storage that is highly energy efficient and also relatively easy to manufacture on a large scale. However, these devices, which rely on magnetic memory, are still hindered by their relatively slow speeds, compared to conventional electronic chips.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Electronics, an international team of researchers has reported a new technique for magnetization switching—the process used to “write” information into magnetic memory—that is nearly 100 times faster than state-of-the-art spintronic devices. The advance could lead to the development of ultrafast magnetic memory for computer chips that would retain data even when there is no power.

In the study, the researchers report using extremely short, 6-picosecond to switch the magnetization of a thin film in a magnetic device with great energy efficiency. A picosecond is one-trillionth of a second.

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Circa 2018

The world’s first-ever hiking boots to use graphene have been unveiled by The University of Manchester and British brand inov-8.

Building on the international success of their pioneering use of graphene in trail running and fitness shoes last summer, the brand is now bringing the to a market recently starved of innovation.

Just one atom thick and stronger than steel, graphene has been infused into the rubber of inov-8’s new ROCLITE hiking boots, with the outsoles scientifically proven to be 50% stronger, 50% more elastic and 50% harder wearing.

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Crews working on the largest U.S. experiment designed to directly detect dark matter completed a major milestone last month, and are now turning their sights toward startup after experiencing some delays due to global pandemic precautions.

U.S. Department of Energy officials on Sept. 21 formally signed off on project completion for LUX-ZEPLIN, or LZ: an ultrasensitive experiment that will use 10 metric tons of liquid xenon to hunt for signals of interactions with theorized dark matter particles called WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. DOE’s project completion milestone is called Critical Decision 4, or CD-4.

Dark matter makes up an estimated 85 percent of all matter in the universe. We know it’s there because of its observed gravitational effects on normal matter, but we don’t yet know what it is. LZ is designed to detect the two flashes of light that occur if a WIMP interacts with the nucleus of a xenon atom.

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Patrick Windpassinger and his team demonstrate how light stored in a cloud of ultra-cold atoms can be transported by means of an optical conveyor belt.

A team of physicists led by Professor Patrick Windpassinger at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has successfully transported light stored in a quantum memory over a distance of 1.2 millimeters. They have demonstrated that the controlled transport process and its dynamics has only little impact on the properties of the stored light. The researchers used ultra-cold rubidium-87 atoms as a storage medium for the light as to achieve a high level of storage efficiency and a long lifetime.

“We stored the light by putting it in a suitcase so to speak, only that in our case the suitcase was made of a cloud of cold atoms. We moved this suitcase over a short distance and then took the light out again. This is very interesting not only for physics in general, but also for quantum communication, because light is not very easy to ‘capture’, and if you want to transport it elsewhere in a controlled manner, it usually ends up being lost,” said Professor Patrick Windpassinger, explaining the complicated process.

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