Vishal Sharma shares his insights on how innovations in generative AI will help everyone (and everything) on Earth.
There’s a race underway to build artificial general intelligence, a futuristic vision of machines that are as broadly smart as humans or at least can do many things as well as people can.
A new model describes the population of black hole binaries without assumptions on the shape of their distribution—a capability that could boost the discovery potential of gravitational-wave observations.
Since the first groundbreaking observation of gravitational waves from a black hole merger [1], a worldwide network of observatories–LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA—has discovered nearly a hundred mergers involving black holes and neutron stars (Fig. 1). The nature of this population of compact objects has implications for nearly every aspect of astrophysics and cosmology. However, understanding how gravitational-wave sources fit into our astrophysical theories has proved challenging. Many of the discoveries have confirmed our expectations, but some—such as those of asymmetric black hole binaries or of unexpectedly massive black holes—defy them.
A glass studio becomes a physics lab for biophysicists examining the physiological tissue properties of marine microorganisms.
A radiometry technique directly measures thermal conductivity in molten metals and confirms the relationship with electrical resistivity.
About 4.5 billion years ago, a small planet smashed into the young Earth, flinging molten rock into space. Slowly, the debris coalesced, cooled and solidified, forming our moon. This scenario of how the Earth’s moon came to be is the one largely agreed upon by most scientists. But the details of how exactly that happened are “more of a choose-your-own-adventure novel,” according to researchers in the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory who published a paper in Nature Geoscience.
Researchers at the Quantum Machines Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) are studying levitating materials—substances that can remain suspended in a stable position without any physical contact or mechanical support.
“Our research is inspired by the idea that unconventional superconductivity usually emerges in proximity to magnetism,” Xiang said. “In particular, for copper-based and iron-based high-temperature superconductors, many of the proposed superconducting pairing mechanisms are closely connected to magnetism; moreover, the interplay between magnetism and superconductivity may give birth to more peculiar phases of matter, including the pair-density-wave (PDW) order with a spatially oscillating superconducting order parameter and finite-momentum pairing which has been an intense focus of research recently.”
The EuO/KTO heterostructure examined by Xiang and his colleagues exhibits a strong ferromagnetic proximity effect elicited by the EuO overlayer. This effect makes it an ideal platform to study unconventional superconductivity.
“The first report on the superconductivity at the EuO/KTO interface was published in 2021, focusing on the KTO (111) interface,” Xiang said. “We have since worked on the EuO/KTO (110) interface (considering its improved interface quality), at which we revealed the emergence of two-dimensional superconductivity in a previous paper.”
Operating at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) since 2022, the FASER experiment is designed to search for extremely weakly interacting particles. Such particles are predicted by many theories beyond the Standard Model that are attempting to solve outstanding problems in physics such as the nature of dark matter and the matter-antimatter imbalance in the universe.
Researchers are developing a technique that uses the special synchrotron X-ray light from the Swiss Light Source SLS to non-destructively digitize recordings from high-value historic audio tapes—including treasures from the Montreux Jazz Festival archive, such as a rare recording of the King of the Blues, B.B. King.
Magnetic tapes have almost completely disappeared from our lives and now only enjoy a nostalgic niche existence. However, significant quantities of these analog magnetic media are still stored in the archives of sound studios, radio and TV stations, museums, and private collections worldwide. Digitizing these tapes is an ongoing challenge as well as a race against time, as the tapes degrade and eventually become unplayable.
Sebastian Gliga, physicist at PSI and expert in nanomagnetism, and his team are developing a method to non-destructively digitize degraded audio tapes in the highest quality using X-ray light. To achieve this goal, they have been collaborating with the Swiss National Sound Archives, which has produced custom-made reference recordings and provided audio engineering know-how. Now, a partnership with the Montreux Jazz Digital Project will help to further develop and test the method.
