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Hypersonic impact rapidly transforms diamond into graphite, revealing energy-absorbing mechanism

Rice University researchers have developed a way to stabilize diamond during high-temperature and low-pressure processing, creating a strong bulk composite and discovering that high-speed collisions can rapidly transform diamond into graphite. Their study is published in Materials Today.

Diamond is one of the hardest known materials, with high thermal conductivity, properties that make it valuable for technologies that operate under extreme conditions. The findings could help researchers design tougher materials for aerospace, defense and other demanding environments by showing how diamond changes and absorbs energy under extreme force.

“This was quite an exciting outcome as it is nearly impossible to sinter diamond at lower pressures, and this new process we have developed could lead to the large-scale manufacturing of diamond-based composites,” said Pulickel Ajayan, the lead author of the study and the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor of Engineering.

New measurements explain how silicon and diamond achieve extreme reversible stretching

A research team led by Yang Lu from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering, The University of Hong Kong (HKU), has uncovered the microscopic physical nature of ultralarge elasticity in covalent semiconductors such as silicon and diamond. The discovery provides quantitative guidance for deep elastic strain engineering (DESE), paving the way for the development of next-generation electronic, optoelectronic and quantum devices.

Despite the potential of DESE, the underlying deformation mechanisms of these covalent crystals have long remained elusive. The research team was the first to directly observe the pure lattice evolution of single-crystal silicon and diamond under tension at the atomic scale.

By precisely quantifying the resulting lattice strains, the researchers bridged macroscopic mechanical strain with microscopic lattice strain, establishing a physical foundation for the design of advanced semiconductor devices. The research team also includes PhD student Jiayi Li and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Heyi Wang.

Electronic skin improves temperature and pressure sensing for personalized prosthetics

An electronic skin with a sensing system that can detect pressure and temperature could someday help amputees gain feeling in their prosthetics. The work, led by Washington State University researchers and published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, can sense at a scale 10 times finer than current commercial glove sensors.

“This approach democratizes the production of medical-grade e-skins, making advanced tactile feedback viable for widespread clinical adoption,” said Hongyi Shen, a graduate student in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and first author on the paper. “This work lays a crucial foundation for a full bionic skin with both sensing and haptic stimulation functions on prosthetics.”

Haptic stimulation replicates the sense of touch. Providing even partial sensation for amputees could greatly improve their ability to perform tasks.

When people of different generations create together, brain activity changes

When people of different generations create art together, their brains initially show more synchrony, and the synchrony can predict feelings of loneliness or social connection, according to a study published Aug. 20 in the journal PLOS Biology by Ryssa Moffat from ETH Zurich in Switzerland and colleagues.

Loneliness—a perceived feeling of social isolation—is a growing health risk. Policymakers and health practitioners are working on methods to create meaningful social interactions that bring people together, especially between generations. But while intergenerational interactions can increase well-being in older adults, the physiological changes resulting from them are unknown.

To better understand changes in the brain that might come as intergenerational relationships are formed, the authors of this pre-registered study collected data from 31 intergenerational pairs, recruiting adults older than 70 and pairing them with adults between 18 and 35, and comparing them with 30 same-generation pairs of younger adults.

Illuminating the limits of the international unit of light, the candela

The candela, the international unit of light in use for almost a century, forms the basis of photometry. According to a new study, measurements derived from it systematically misjudge the brightness of colored light sources and depart markedly from human perception.

An international team led by perception researcher Karl Gegenfurtner at Justus Liebig University Giessen (JLU) has found a surprisingly simple rule for how bright colored surfaces actually appear: Perceived brightness can be predicted almost completely by taking only the highest of the three weighted color components: red, green and blue. The rule accounts for more than 95% of the judgments observed and outperforms all established photometric models.

“The candela is the only SI unit that rests not on physics alone but on human perception,” Gegenfurtner says.

Intense light bent out of shape—ultrafast lenses made from gas

Researchers from the MPIK in Heidelberg used an atomic gas as a time-dependent lens to shape and spectrally manipulate intense high-frequency laser pulses. This gas-based optical element could pave the way toward better XUV- and X-ray pulse control for applications such as chemical reaction steering, quantum computing, and advanced spectroscopy methods for fundamental science. The paper is published in the journal Science Advances.

Magnetically levitated quantum bit could address design flaws

Researchers at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, headquartered at Florida State University, have designed a new quantum computing architecture that uses magnetic levitation to smooth over design flaws in the intricate components necessary to run a quantum computer.

Quantum bits, or qubits, can be as small as a few nanometers, and manufacturing them inevitably introduces random flaws on their surfaces. By using superconducting magnets to levitate neon particles, the research addresses a challenge in electron-on-neon qubit devices: the tendency for electrons to become trapped by tiny random bumps on the neon surface, making them function unpredictably.

The study, published in PRX Quantum, could help pave the way for more reproducible and scalable quantum computing technologies.

AI boosts sensitivity to double-Higgs signatures occurring about once per trillion collisions

Is the universe as stable as we think it is? That’s one of the big questions that particle physicists worldwide are preparing to answer with the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC—the world’s most powerful particle accelerator—when its upgrade is completed in about four years. In the meantime, researchers, including a cohort at the University of Michigan, are working to sharpen their analytical tools and techniques to make the most of the LHC’s current and future data.

A team including U-M physicists has now reported record-setting sensitivity in spotting a specific interaction within the LHC’s data that may help answer fundamental questions about our universe. In particular, the analysis uses an advanced AI algorithm to spot signatures researchers are looking for to understand how the Higgs boson, the famous fundamental particle that helps explain how subatomic particles have mass, interacts with itself.

“This analysis is the most sensitive in the world to this specific physics,” said Greg Myers, a research fellow in the U-M Department of Physics.

Quantum Fluctuations Break a Crystal’s Symmetry Rules

Electronic fluctuations can act as a resonant bridge between normally separate crystal vibrations, offering a new route to study and control ferroaxial quantum states.

Symmetry is a basic rule of the natural world. It explains why some objects appear the same after they are rotated, reflected, or changed in other ways. In materials, symmetry helps determine how atoms and electrons are positioned and how they move together. It can also block certain collective atomic motions (vibrations) from interacting, meaning some motions are normally unable to influence one another. But a new study asks whether those limits are always fixed.

A study published in Nature Physics suggests that some of these restrictions can be loosened. Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) in Hamburg found that electronic fluctuations can create a dynamic connection between vibrations that symmetry would usually keep apart. Led by Edoardo Baldini’s group at UT Austin, the work shows how light, vibrations, and electrons can become linked inside a ferroaxial crystal, a special material that may offer new ways to control quantum states with light.

Something Mysterious Just Passed Between Earth and a Distant Star

A mysterious object dubbed Phoebe may be a primordial black hole from the early universe, detected only because it briefly magnified the light of a distant star.

On the night of 18 December 2019, a star in our satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, briefly got brighter. Not dramatically nor explosively, just a smooth, symmetrical rise and fall in brightness lasting about an hour, as though something had passed in front of it and bent its light toward us. Then it returned to normal and was never seen to vary again.

That something has been named Phoebe. And working out what it actually is turns out to be one of the most intriguing puzzles in modern astronomy. The phenomenon at the heart of the story is called gravitational microlensing, and it’s one of the most elegant predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

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