A team of physicists at Harvard University has succeeded in trapping individual polyatomic molecules in optical tweezer arrays for the first time. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes how they achieved their feat and the possible uses for it. A Research Briefing also describes their work in the same journal issue.
In a paper published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, scientists examined the theoretical and observational cases for a ‘cosmic glitch’ in Universe’s gravity.
A new study will improve the detection of gravitational waves —ripples in space and time. Scientists at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities College of Science and Engineering co-led the research with an international team.
The research aims to send alerts to astronomers and astrophysicists within 30 seconds after the detection, helping to improve the understanding of neutron stars and black holes and how heavy elements, including gold and uranium, are produced.
The findings were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), a peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal.
For the first time, lasers have successfully excited the “thorium transition,” a process long pursued by researchers. This breakthrough sets the stage for groundbreaking advancements in high-precision technologies, such as nuclear clocks.
Physicists have eagerly anticipated this breakthrough: scientists globally have spent years searching for a specific state of thorium atomic nuclei that could lead to groundbreaking technological advancements.
It could be used, for example, to build an nuclear clock that could measure time more precisely than the best atomic clocks available today. It could also be used to answer completely new fundamental questions in physics – for example, the question of whether the constants of nature are actually constant or whether they change in space and time.
The work introduces a completely new way to create and study strange metals, whose electrons behave differently than those in a conventional metal like copper. “It is a potential new approach to designing these unusual materials,” says Joseph G. Checkelsky, lead principal investigator of the research and Associate Professor of Physics.
Linda Ye, MIT Ph.D. ‘21, is first author of a paper on the work published earlier this year in Nature Physics. “A new way of making strange metals will help us develop a unifying theory behind their behavior. That has been quite challenging to date, and could lead to a better understanding of other materials, including high-temperature superconductors,” says Ye, now an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology.
The Nature Physics paper is accompanied by a News & Views article titled, “A strange way to get a strange metal.”
Computer simulations by astronomers support the idea that dark matter—matter that no one has yet directly detected but which many physicists think must be there to explain several aspects of the observable universe—exists, according to the researchers, who include those at the University of California, Irvine.
From extreme cold to strong magnets and high pressures, the Synergetic Extreme Condition User Facility (SECUF) provides conditions for researching these potential wonder materials.
This new propulsion system could rewrite the rules of spaceflight—not to mention completely defy conventional physics.
Russellian monism is a theory in the metaphysics of mind, on which a single set of properties underlies both consciousness and the most basic entities posited by physics. The theory is named for Bertrand Russell, whose views about consciousness and its place in nature were informed by a structuralist conception of theoretical physics. On such a structuralist conception, physics describes the world in terms of its spatiotemporal structure and dynamics (changes within that structure) and says nothing about what, if anything, underlies that structure and dynamics. For example, as it is sometimes put, physics describes what mass and charge do, e.g., how they dispose objects to move toward or away from each other, but not what mass and charge are. Thus, Russell writes the following about the events physics describes:
All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent. (Russell 1959: 18)
Russellian monism can be seen as breaking that silence. It posits properties that underlie the structure and dynamics that physics describes. Further, according to Russellian monism, those same properties are relevant to, and may at least partly constitute, consciousness.
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The universe seems to be ruled by equations and numbers. But why just these equations and why just those numbers? Is it just coincidence? In this video I have collected seven of the weirdest coincidences in physics.
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