A device made using a tiny bead floating in a beam of light can measure extremely small pressures and could help find a mysterious kind of neutrino
Category: particle physics – Page 8
A bizarre new state of matter may be hiding inside Uranus and Neptune
Deep inside planets like Uranus and Neptune, scientists may have uncovered a bizarre new state of matter where atoms behave in unexpected ways. Advanced simulations suggest that carbon and hydrogen, under crushing pressures and scorching temperatures, can form a strange hybrid phase—part solid, part fluid—where hydrogen atoms spiral through a rigid carbon framework. This unusual “superionic” structure could reshape how heat and electricity flow inside these distant worlds, potentially helping explain their mysterious magnetic fields.
The deep interiors of ice giant planets such as Uranus and Neptune may contain a previously unknown form of matter. This possibility comes from new computer simulations conducted by Carnegie scientists Cong Liu and Ronald Cohen.
Their study, published in Nature Communications, suggests that carbon hydride could take on an unusual quasi-one-dimensional superionic state under the intense pressures and temperatures found far beneath the surfaces of these distant planets.
The first direct observation of laser-created isolated hopfions
Over the past few decades, some physicists worldwide have been investigating unusual particle-like magnetic structures known as topological solitons. These structures could potentially be leveraged to develop new cutting-edge technologies, such as new magnetic memory devices and computing systems.
A type of topological solitons that has proven to be difficult to realize experimentally is the hopfion. This is a three-dimensional (3D) structure comprised of closed loops of continuously swirling spin textures, which can resemble linked or knotted vortex strings.
Researchers at South China University of Technology, Nankai University, Forschungszentrum Jülich, South China Normal University, University of Luxembourg, and Uppsala University recently reported the first direct observation of isolated hopfions in a magnetic material, which were created using laser pulses.
Quantum Metallurgy Might Be A New Frontier For Superconducting Materials And Artificial Neurons
“The key emphasis here is that disorder is a really important parameter. It’s this tunable thing when we’re playing with quantum phases.”
Modifying the structure of electron crystals is extremely exciting. In superconductors, materials that transport electricity without resistance, the superconducting state can coincide with changes to charge-density waves.
“When we’re doing basic science in these really exotic materials and exotic phases, dramatically new innovations happen,” Hovden told IFLScience. “Technological revolutions like the semiconductor, transistor, and computer happened because we did basic science on atomic structures, on atoms, on matter.”
Testing quantum collapse theory with the XENONnT dark matter detector
Theories of quantum mechanics predict that some particles can exist in superpositions, which essentially means that they can be in more than one state at once. When a particle’s state is measured, however, this superposition appears to “collapse” into a single outcome; a phenomenon often referred to as the “measurement problem.”
In recent years, various theoretical physicists have tried to explain why and how this collapse happens. This led to the introduction of various models, such as the Continuous Spontaneous Localization (CSL) and Diósi–Penrose models.
Both these models predict that spontaneous quantum collapse would also lead to the emission of faint X-ray radiation. The experimental detection of this radiation would thus provide evidence of these theories’ validity.
Researchers combine five metals to build a better nanocrystal
A nanocrystal is an extraordinarily tiny piece of material—composed of anywhere from a few to a few thousand atoms—in which atoms are arranged in a precise, ordered structure. Think of it like taking a piece of gold and shrinking it down to the size of a few hundred atoms. It’s still gold, still crystalline, just almost incomprehensibly small.
Nanocrystals are in the transistors inside computers and smartphones, in smartphone displays and TV screens, in the gold-nanoparticle sensors that power COVID and pregnancy tests, and in the pipes of your car exhaust system, among countless other innovations.
Their small size gives them a dramatically higher ratio of surface area to volume, making them especially useful as catalysts—materials that speed up chemical reactions without being consumed in the process.
Why twisted bilayer graphene stops superconducting near high-dielectric substrates
Superconductors are materials that can conduct electricity with a resistance of zero. In so-called conventional superconductors, this occurs at low temperatures when electrons become bound into pairs, known as Cooper pairs.
In some other materials, however, superconductivity (SC) emerges via other electron pairing mechanisms that are still poorly understood. These materials, called unconventional superconductors, include twisted bilayer graphene (tBLG), a two-dimensional material created by stacking two single sheets of graphene on top of each other, one of which is rotated in relation to the other by a precise small angle.
One factor that plays a role in unconventional SC is the so-called dielectric constant. This is the measure of how well a material reduces the electric forces between charged particles.