Lifeboat Foundation

A cryogenic microscope reveals the atomic-scale processes that disrupt the charge-ordered state in a material as the temperature rises.

Many of the exotic materials being investigated for next-generation technologies exhibit charge order, a state in which the electrons arrange themselves into a periodic pattern, such as stripes of high and low electron density. Researchers have now shown that they can track the evolution of this state as it warms up and melts away by using a cryogenic electron microscope [1]. Their experimental approach offers a new way to explore the interactions between different phases of quantum materials, which could inform the development of future electronic and data storage devices.

In certain materials with strongly interacting electrons, charge order appears—usually below room temperature—as an electron density that varies periodically in a pattern of stripes, a checkerboard, or a more complicated 3D structure. Researchers want to understand this phase because it coexists and interacts with other states and properties of the material, many of which are useful for novel devices and technologies. In high-temperature superconductors, for example, charge order is known to suppress the material’s superconducting behavior. In other materials, strong coupling between charge order and ferromagnetism can trigger colossal magnetoresistance, a property that could be exploited in magnetic storage devices.

A new model reveals that bursts of neural activity known as critical avalanches underlie the brain’s ability to respond consistently to stimuli.

Researchers have discovered a biological mechanism that makes plant roots more welcoming to beneficial soil microbes. This discovery by John Innes Centre researchers paves the way for more environmentally friendly farming practices, potentially allowing farmers to use less fertilizer.

Production of most major crops relies on nitrate and phosphate fertilizers, but excessive fertilizer use harms the environment. If we could use mutually beneficial relationships between plant roots and soil microbes to enhance nutrient uptake, then we could potentially reduce the use of inorganic fertilizers.

Researchers in the group of Dr. Myriam Charpentier discovered a mutation in a gene in the legume Medicago truncatula that reprograms the signaling capacity of the plant so that it enhances partnerships with nitrogen fixing bacteria called rhizobia and arbuscular mycorrhiza fungi (AMF) which supply roots with phosphorus.

Many cells in our body have a single primary cilium, a micrometer-long, hair-like organelle protruding from the cell surface that transmits cellular signals. Cilia are important for regulating cellular processes, but because of their small size and number, it has been difficult for scientists to explore cilia in brain cells with traditional techniques, leaving their organization and function unclear.

In a series of papers appearing in Current Biology, the Journal of Cell Biology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus, the Allen Institute, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and Harvard Medical School used super high-resolution 3D electron microscopy images of mouse brain tissue generated for creating connectomes to get the best look yet at primary cilia.

To develop scalable and reliable quantum computers, engineers and physicists will need to devise effective strategies to mitigate errors in their quantum systems without adding complex additional components. A promising strategy to reduce errors entails the use of so-called dual-type qubits.

These are qubits that can encode quantum information in a system across two different types of quantum states. These qubits could increase the flexibility of quantum computing architectures, while also reducing undesirable crosstalk between qubits and enhancing a system’s operational fidelity.

Researchers at Tsinghua University and other research institutes in China recently realized an entangling gate between dual-type qubits in an experimental setting.

A new analysis of data from the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) reveals fresh evidence that collisions of even very small nuclei with large ones might create tiny specks of a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Scientists believe such a substance of free quarks and gluons, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, permeated the universe a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

RHIC’s energetic smashups of gold ions—the nuclei of gold atoms that have been stripped of their electrons—routinely create a QGP by “melting” these nuclear building blocks so scientists can study the QGP’s properties.

Physicists originally thought that collisions of smaller ions with large ones wouldn’t create a QGP because the small ion wouldn’t deposit enough energy to melt the large ion’s protons and neutrons. But evidence from PHENIX has long suggested that these small collision systems generate particle flow patterns that are consistent with the existence of tiny specks of the primordial soup, the QGP.

These ultra-bright high-energy X-rays can be used to image and study extremely dense matter, like the plasmas created during inertial confinement fusion. The team’s work was recently published in Physical Review E.

LLNL scientist Jeff Colvin compared the source to the machine used to find cavities at a dentist.

By engineering an exceptionally controlled environment using rotationally magic optical tweezers, long-lived entanglement between pairs of molecules using detectable hertz-scale interactions can be achieved.

A team of researchers from GSI/FAIR, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz has succeeded in exploring the limits of the so-called island of stability within the superheavy nuclides more precisely by measuring the superheavy rutherfordium-252 nucleus, which is now the shortest-lived known superheavy nucleus.

Their results are published in Physical Review Letters.