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Category: particle physics – Page 540

Joined nano-triangles pave the way to magnetic carbon materials

Graphene, a two-dimensional honeycomb structure made of carbon atoms with a thickness of only one atom, has numerous outstanding properties. These include enormous mechanical resistance and extraordinary electronic and optical properties. Last year a team led by the Empa researcher Roman Fasel was able to show that it can even be magnetic: they succeeded in synthesizing a molecule in the shape of a bowtie, which has special magnetic properties.

Now, researchers report another breakthrough. Theoretical work from 2007 predicted that graphene could exhibit if it were cut into tiny triangles. Over the last three years, several teams, including the Empa team, have succeeded in producing the so-called triangulenes, consisting of only a few dozen , by chemical synthesis under ultra-high vacuum.

Graphene and 2-D materials could move electronics beyond ‘Moore’s law’

A team of researchers based in Manchester, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland and the U.S. has published a new review on a field of computer device development known as spintronics, which could see graphene used as building block for next-generation electronics.

Recent theoretical and experimental advances and phenomena in studies of electronic spin transport in and related two-dimensional (2-D) materials have emerged as a fascinating area of research and development.

Spintronics is the combination of electronics and magnetism, at the nanoscale and could lead to next generation high-speed electronics. Spintronic devices are a viable alternative for nanoelectronics beyond Moore’s law, offering higher energy efficiency and lower dissipation as compared to conventional electronics, which relies on charge currents. In principle we could have phones and tablets operating with spin-based transistors and memories.

Artificial Atoms Create Stable Qubits for Quantum Computing

Quantum engineers from UNSW Sydney have created artificial atoms in silicon chips that offer improved stability for quantum computing, according to a news release.

In a paper published today in Nature Communications, UNSW researchers describe how they created artificial atoms in a silicon ‘quantum dot’, a tiny space in a quantum circuit where electrons are used as qubits (or quantum bits), the basic units of quantum information.

Scientia Professor Andrew Dzurak explains that unlike a real atom, an artificial atom has no nucleus, but it still has shells of electrons whizzing around the centre of the device, rather than around the atom’s nucleus.

ARC reactor design uses superconducting magnets to draw fusion power closer

Circa 2015

Fusion power can seem a bit like the last bus at night; it’s always coming, but never arrives. MIT is working to change that with a new compact tokamak fusion reactor design based on the latest commercially available magnetic superconductor technology. The ARC (affordable, robust, compact) reactor design promises smaller, cheaper reactors that could make fusion power practical within 10 years.

A commercially viable fusion reactor has been the Holy Grail of engineering since the 1950s, with the potential to turn almost all other major electricity sources into an historical footnote overnight. If perfected, it would essentially be an inexhaustible source of power, impacting on almost every aspect of life, from the environment to global politics. The trick is making it practical.

Put simply, fusion involves placing hydrogen atoms under very high heat and pressure until they fuse into helium atoms, which releases tremendous amounts of energy. The Sun does this as a matter of course, but reproducing those conditions on Earth outside of a hydrogen bomb has proven difficult.

Room Temperature Superconductor Breakthrough at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

An international team of researchers has discovered the hydrogen atoms in a metal hydride material are much more tightly spaced than had been predicted for decades — a feature that could possibly facilitate superconductivity at or near room temperature and pressure.

Such a superconducting material, carrying electricity without any energy loss due to resistance, would revolutionize energy efficiency in a broad range of consumer and industrial applications.

The scientists conducted neutron scattering experiments at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory on samples of zirconium vanadium hydride at atmospheric pressure and at temperatures from −450 degrees Fahrenheit (5 K) to as high as −10 degrees Fahrenheit (250 K) — much higher than the temperatures where superconductivity is expected to occur in these conditions.

Scientists Use Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision to Study Lithium-Ion Batteries

New machine learning methods bring insights into how lithium ion batteries degrade, and show it’s more complicated than many thought.

Lithium-ion batteries lose their juice over time, causing scientists and engineers to work hard to understand that process in detail. Now, scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have combined sophisticated machine learning algorithms with X-ray tomography data to produce a detailed picture of how one battery component, the cathode, degrades with use.

The new study, published this month in Nature Communications, focused on how to better visualize what’s going on in cathodes made of nickel-manganese-cobalt, or NMC. In these cathodes, NMC particles are held together by a conductive carbon matrix, and researchers have speculated that one cause of performance decline could be particles breaking away from that matrix. The team’s goal was to combine cutting-edge capabilities at SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) to develop a comprehensive picture of how NMC particles break apart and break away from the matrix and how that might contribute to performance losses.

What Do the Quark Oddities at the Large Hadron Collider Mean?

In their latest analysis, first presented at a seminar in March, the LHCb physicists found that several measurements involving the decay of B mesons conflict slightly with the predictions of the standard model of particle physics—the reigning set of equations describing the subatomic world. Taken alone, each oddity looks like a statistical fluctuation, and they may all evaporate with additional data, as has happened before. But their collective drift suggests that the aberrations may be breadcrumbs leading beyond the standard model to a more complete theory.

“For the first time in certainly my working life, there are a confluence of different decays that are showing anomalies that match up,” said Mitesh Patel, a particle physicist at Imperial College London who is part of LHCb.

The B meson is so named because it contains a bottom quark, one of six fundamental quark particles that account for most of the universe’s visible matter. For unknown reasons, the quarks break down into three generations: heavy, medium, and light, each with quarks of opposite electric charge. Heavier quarks decay into their lighter variations, almost always switching their charge, too. For instance, when the negatively charged heavy bottom quark in a B meson drops a generation, it usually becomes a middleweight, positively charged “charm” quark.

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