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Category: physics – Page 75

The Sun Is More Active Than Scientists Anticipated. Here’s What It Means For Us

From afar, the Sun looks calm and peaceful in our daytime skies. But up close, it’s an erupting, chaotic display of solar activity the likes of which astrophysicists didn’t expect until the last year or so.

“We didn’t think the Sun was going to be as active this particular cycle, but the observations are completely opposite,” Andrew Gerrard, the department chair and director of the Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research at New Jersey Institute of Technology, told Business Insider.

Solar cycles typically occur every 11 years. Within that time, the Sun oscillates from minimum to maximum solar activity, with maximum activity peaking in the middle of the cycle when the Sun’s magnetic fields flip.

Study uncovers broken mirror symmetry in the Fermi-liquid-like phase of a cuprate

Materials that exhibit superconducting properties at high temperatures, known as high-temperature superconductors, have been the focus of numerous recent studies, as they can be used to develop new technologies that perform well at higher temperatures. Although high-temperature superconductivity has been widely investigated, its underlying physics is not yet fully understood.

Paper types ranked by likelihood of paper cuts

Via testing with a skin stand-in, a trio of physicists at Technical University of Denmark has ranked the types of paper that are the most likely to cause a paper cut. In an article published in Physical Review E, Sif Fink Arnbjerg-Nielsen, Matthew Biviano and Kaare Jensen tested the cutting ability and circumstances involved in paper cuts to compile their rankings.

Gravitational waves may hold the key to understanding the secrets of the Big Bang

Scientists may have found a new way to unlock the vast secrets of the Big Bang—the cosmic event thought to have kicked off the expansion of the universe billions of years ago. The revelation came in 2023, when scientists found nearly imperceptible ripples within the very fabric of space and time as we know it.

The ripples appear to be associated directly with rapidly spinning neutrons that we call pulsar timing arrays. Researchers believe that studying gravitational waves—more specifically, the low-frequency background hum they emit—may allow us to learn more about the Big Bang and the universe’s very beginning.

For a long time, researchers have believed that the low-frequency background hum of gravitational waves in our universe was part of a “phase transition” that occurred just after the Big Bang. However, a new bit of research could further unlock the secrets of the Big Bang and suggests that this might not be the case at all.

Dark Matter Explained | Cosmology 101 Episode 7

Dark matter remains one of the most enigmatic components of our universe. In this episode of Cosmology 101, we explore the evidence for dark matter and its critical role in shaping the cosmos. From galaxy rotations to cosmic web structures, discover how dark matter’s invisible hand influences the universe’s evolution and our understanding of fundamental physics.

Join Katie Mack, Perimeter Institute’s Hawking Chair in Cosmology and Science Communication, on an incredible journey through the cosmos in our new series, Cosmology 101.

Sign up for our newsletter and download exclusive cosmology posters at: https://landing.perimeterinstitute.ca…

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Can Supercooled Phase Transitions Explain the Gravitational Wave Background Observed by Pulsar Timing Arrays?

Several pulsar timing array collaborations recently reported evidence of a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) at nHz frequencies. While the SGWB could originate from the merger of supermassive black holes, it could be a signature of new physics near the 100 MeV scale. Supercooled first-order phase transitions (FOPTs) that end at the 100 MeV scale are intriguing explanations, because they could connect the nHz signal to new physics at the electroweak scale or beyond. Here, however, we provide a clear demonstration that it is not simple to create a nHz signal from a supercooled phase transition, due to two crucial issues that could rule out many proposed supercooled explanations and should be checked. As an example, we use a model based on nonlinearly realized electroweak symmetry that has been cited as evidence for a supercooled explanation.

World’s Fastest Microscope Freezes Time To Capture Moving Electrons

University of Arizona researchers have developed an ‘attomicroscopy’ technique using a novel ultrafast electron microscope that captures moving electrons in unprecedented detail, paving the way for significant scientific breakthroughs in physics and other fields.

Imagine having a camera so advanced that it can capture freeze-frame images of a moving electron—an object so fast it could orbit the Earth multiple times in just a second. Researchers at the University of Arizona have developed the world’s fastest electron microscope capable of this remarkable feat.

They believe their work will lead to groundbreaking advancements in physics, chemistry, bioengineering, materials sciences, and more.

A mechanism that transfers energy from nitrogen to argon enables bidirectional cascaded lasing in atmospheric air

To produce light, lasers typically rely on optical cavities, pairs of mirrors facing each other that amplify light by bouncing it back and forth. Recently, some physicists have been investigating the generation of “laser light” in open air without the use of optical cavities, a phenomenon known as cavity-free lasing in atmospheric air.

Publisher retracts 350 papers at once

IOP Publishing has retracted a total of 350 papers from two different 2021 conference proceedings because an “investigation has uncovered evidence of systematic manipulation of the publication process and considerable citation manipulation.”

The case is just the latest involving the discovery of papers full of gibberish – aka “tortured phrases” – thanks to the work of Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse, Cyril Labbé, of University Grenoble-Alpes and Alexander Magazinov, of Skoltech, in Moscow. The tool detects papers that contain phrases that appear to have been translated from English into another language, and then back into English, likely with the involvement of paper-generating software.

The papers were in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series (232 articles), and IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (118 articles), plus four editorials.

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