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Blog – Page 14

In squash, the “nick shot” is an emphatic, point-ending play in which a player strikes a ball that ricochets near the bottom of the wall and rolls flat along the floor instead of bouncing, leaving an opponent with no chance to return it.

While the shot is as old as the game itself, a team of researchers has now revealed the physics behind it, showing how perfect placement and just the right roll conspire to kill the ball’s bounce.

The research, led by Brown University Professor of Engineering Roberto Zenit, was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. While the findings could be useful in developing shock-dampening technologies, Zenit says the work grew out of his interest in using science to explain the everyday world.

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For the past six years, Los Alamos National Laboratory has led the world in trying to understand one of the most frustrating barriers that faces variational quantum computing: the barren plateau.

“Imagine a landscape of peaks and valleys,” said Marco Cerezo, the Los Alamos team’s lead scientist. “When optimizing a variational, or parameterized, , one needs to tune a series of knobs that control the solution quality and move you in the landscape. Here, a peak represents a bad solution and a valley represents a good solution. But when researchers develop algorithms, they sometimes find their model has stalled and can neither climb nor descend. It’s stuck in this space we call a barren .”

For these quantum computing methods, barren plateaus can be mathematical dead ends, preventing their implementation in large-scale realistic problems. Scientists have spent a lot of time and resources developing quantum algorithms only to find that they sometimes inexplicably stall. Understanding when and why barren plateaus arise has been a problem that has taken the community years to solve.

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All humans who have ever lived were once each an individual cell, which then divided countless times to produce a body made up of about 10 trillion cells. These cells have busy lives, executing all kinds of dynamic movement: contracting every time we flex a muscle, migrating toward the site of an injury, and rhythmically beating for decades on end.

Cells are an example of active matter. As inanimate matter must burn fuel to move, like airplanes and cars, active matter is similarly animated by its consumption of energy. The basic molecule of cellular energy is (ATP), which catalyzes that enable cellular machinery to work.

Caltech researchers have now developed a bioengineered coordinate system to observe the movement of cellular machinery. The research enables a better understanding of how cells create order out of chaos, such as during or in the organized movements of chromosomes that are a prerequisite to faithful cell division.

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In a new study, researchers carried out the most extensive coordinated comparison of optical clocks to date by operating clocks and the links connecting them simultaneously across six countries. Spanning thousands of kilometers, the experiment represents a significant step toward redefining the second and ultimately establishing a global optical time scale.

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Researchers have determined how to use magnons—collective vibrations of the magnetic spins of atoms—for next-generation information technologies, including quantum technologies with magnetic systems.

From the computer hard drives that store our data to the motors and engines that drive power plants, magnetism is central to many transformative technologies. Magnetic materials are expected to play an even larger role in new technologies on the horizon: the transmission and processing of quantum information and the development of quantum computers.

New research led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory developed an approach to control the collective magnetic properties of atoms in real time and potentially deploy them for next-generation information technologies. This discovery could aid in developing future quantum computers, which can perform tasks that would be impossible using today’s computers, as well as “on chip” technologies—with magnetic systems embedded on semiconductor chips, or “on chip.”

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A research team led by Prof. Shao Dingfu from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has predicted a new class of antiferromagnetic materials with unique cross-chain structures, termed “X-type antiferromagnets.” These materials exhibit sublattice-selective spin transport and unconventional magnetic dynamics, offering new possibilities for next-generation spintronic devices.

Published in Newton, this work challenges conventional views of collective atomic behavior in solids and promises transformative applications in next-generation electronics.

Antiferromagnets (AFMs) are valued for their zero net magnetization and ultrafast dynamics, making them attractive for spintronics. However, their practical application has been hindered by mutual spin cancellation between magnetic sublattices, which limits spin current control. The newly proposed X-type AFMs, with their distinctive “X”-shaped intersecting chain geometry, overcome this limitation.

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In a study that closes a long-standing knowledge gap in fundamental science, researchers Boerge Hemmerling and Stephen Kane at the University of California, Riverside, have successfully measured the electric dipole moment of aluminum monochloride (AlCl), a simple yet scientifically crucial diatomic molecule.

Their results, published in Physical Review A, have implications for , astrophysics, and planetary science. The paper is titled “Measurement of the of AlCl by Stark-level spectroscopy.”

Until now, the dipole moment of AlCl was only estimated, with no experimental confirmation. The study’s precise measurement now replaces the theoretical predictions with solid experimental data.

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A research team led by Prof. Chang Hong from the National Time Service Center (NTSC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has developed a strontium optical lattice clock with both frequency stability and systematic uncertainty surpassing 2×10-18. This achievement places China among the global leaders in the field of optical lattice clock development.

The breakthrough aligns with the roadmap set by the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) in 2022, which proposed redefining the SI unit of time—the second—by 2030. The resolution outlined rigorous performance benchmarks for next-generation optical clocks.

Strontium optical lattice clocks, known for their exceptional precision, have emerged as the most promising candidates for the redefinition, offering systematic uncertainties two orders of magnitude lower than those of the current cesium fountain clocks.

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Sharing disappointing results with a world of researchers working to find what they hope will be the “discovery of the century” isn’t an easy task, but that is what Penn State theoretical physicist Zoltan Fodor and his international research group did five years ago with their extensive calculation of the strength of the magnetic field around the muon —a sub-atomic particle similar to, but heavier than, an electron. At the time, their finding was the first to close the gap between theory and experimental measurements, bringing it in line with the Standard Model, the well-tested physics theory that has guided particle physics for decades.

Earlier on the same day, after almost 20 years, a new experimental result was also published showing a strong discrepancy between the theory and the experiment. This was interpreted by most physicists as a sign of new physics, and many physicists shared some skepticism of Fodor’s results and hoped that with more research, the other groups’ result would ring true.

Why? Twenty-four years ago, in an experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory, physicists detected what seemed to be a discrepancy between measurements of the muon’s “”—the strength of its magnetic field—and of what that measurement should be, raising the tantalizing possibility of undiscovered physical particles or forces. They reported that the muon was more magnetic than was predicted by the Standard Model.

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