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Category: particle physics – Page 50

A team of physicists at Fudan University, working with colleagues from Henan University, both in China, and from Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore and Donostia International Physics Center, in Spain, has developed a way to generate topological structures in surface water using gravity water waves. In their study published in Nature, the group used their technique to generate structures such as wave vortices, skyrmions and Möbius strips.

Prior research has shown that various types of waves can be used to achieve desired goals in a variety of applications; , for example, are used to capture and manipulate individual or groups of molecules to create materials or test molecular properties. Sound waves can be used to control much larger particles, or even objects, such as the membrane in a stereo speaker.

For this new study, the research team found a way to generate topological structures on the surface of water by taking advantage of the noise that develops when waves are laid on top of one another, giving them topological properties that can be used to generate wave fields.

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The appearance of the Interstellar Objects (ISOs) Oumuamua and Comet Borisov in 2017 and 2019, respectively, created a surge of interest.

What were they? Where did they come from? Unfortunately, they didn’t stick around and wouldn’t cooperate with our efforts to study them in detail. Regardless, they showed us something: Milky Way objects are moving around the galaxy.

We don’t know where either ISO came from, but there must be more – far more. How many other objects from our stellar neighbours could be visiting our Solar System?

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High-energy particles rain down on Earth constantly, but scientists have now detected a doozy: a neutrino blasting in from deep space with an energy far greater than anything we’ve seen before.

On 13 February 2023, an undersea detector off the coast of Sicily picked up a record-breaking neutrino event. The particle’s energy was estimated to be a whopping 220 petaelectronvolts (PeV) – for reference, the previous record-holder is a paltry 10 PeV.

Only a handful of astronomical objects are capable of accelerating particles to such extreme energies, such as supernovae or black holes. One possible culprit could be a blazar – a particularly active supermassive black hole that’s firing a jet of radiation almost directly at Earth.

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For the first time, researchers have been able to measure the quantum state of electrons ejected from atoms that have absorbed high-energy light pulses. This is thanks to a new measurement technique developed by researchers at Lund University in Sweden. The results can provide a better understanding of the interaction between light and matter.

When high-energy light with a very short frequency in the extreme ultraviolet or X-ray range interacts with atoms or molecules, it can cause an electron to be “detached” from the atom and ejected in a process called the . By measuring the emitted electron and its kinetic energy, a lot of information can be obtained about the atom being irradiated. This is the basic principle of photoelectron spectroscopy.

The electron that is emitted, known as the photoelectron, is often treated as a classical particle. In reality, the photoelectron is a quantum object that must be described quantum mechanically, as it is so small that at that scale the world is described in terms of quantum mechanics. This means that special rules applied in quantum mechanics have to be used to describe the photoelectron, because it is not just an ordinary small particle but also behaves like a wave.

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Researchers have been working for decades to understand the architecture of the subatomic world. One of the knottier questions has been where the proton gets its intrinsic angular momentum, otherwise referred to as its spin.

Nuclear physicists surmise that the proton’s spin most likely comes from its constituents: quarks bound together by gluons carrying the strong force. But the details of the quark and gluon contributions have remained elusive.

Now, a new investigation from an international collaboration of physicists compiles evidence from observational results and analysis using lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) to present a compelling argument regarding how much of the proton’s spin comes from its gluons.

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Nanoparticle researchers spend most of their time on one thing: counting and measuring nanoparticles. Each step of the way, they have to check their results. They usually do this by analyzing microscopic images of hundreds of nanoparticles packed tightly together. Counting and measuring them takes a long time, but this work is essential for completing the statistical analyses required for conducting the next, suitably optimized nanoparticle synthesis.

Alexander Wittemann is a professor of colloid chemistry at the University of Konstanz. He and his team repeat this process every day. “When I worked on my , we used a large particle counting machine for these measurements. It was like a , and, at the time, I was really happy when I could measure three hundred nanoparticles a day,” Wittemann remembers.

However, reliable statistics require thousands of measurements for each sample. Today, the increased use of computer technology means the process can move much more rapidly. At the same time, the automated methods are very prone to errors, and many measurements still need to be conducted, or at least double-checked, by the researchers themselves.

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