Gaining a better understanding of the limiting factors for the existence of stable, superheavy elements is a decade-old quest of chemistry and physics. Superheavy elements, as are called the chemical elements with atomic numbers greater than 103, do not occur in nature and are produced artificially with particle accelerators. They vanish within seconds.
Scientists have developed a white paint that cools below the temperature of its ambient surroundings even under direct sunlight. Their research, published October 21 in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, demonstrates a radiative cooling technology that could be used in commercial paints, that could be less expensive to manufacture, and that passively reflects 95.5% of sunlight that reaches its surface back into outer space. In contrast, commercial "heat rejecting paints" currently on the market only reflect 80%-90% of solar irradiation and cannot achieve below-ambient temperatures.
Converting heat into electricity is a property thought to be reserved only for stiff materials like crystals. However, researchers—inspired by the infrared (IR) vision of snakes—developed a mathematical model for converting soft, organic structures into so-called "pyroelectric" materials. The study, appearing October 21 in the journal Matter, proves that soft and flexible matter can be transformed into a pyroelectric material and potentially solves a long-held mystery surrounding the mechanism of IR vision in snakes.
Tenacity comes naturally to a guy who hails from the "mule capital of the world." That trait has stood Columbia, Tennessee, native Elliot Perryman in good stead as an intern at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Last fall, he began working with staff scientist Peter Zwart in the Center for Advanced Mathematics for Energy Research Applications (CAMERA) through the Berkeley Lab Undergraduate Research program.
Our eyes are sensitive to only three spectral color bands (red, green, blue), and people can no longer distinguish colors if it becomes very dark. Spectroscopists can identify many more colors by the frequencies of the light waves and can distinguish atoms and molecules by their spectral fingerprints. In a proof-of-principle experiment, Nathalie Picqué and Theodor Hänsch from the Max-Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) and the Ludwig-Maximilian University (LMU) have now recorded broad spectra with close to 100,000 colors in almost complete darkness. The experiment employs two mode-locked femtosecond lasers and a single photon counting detector. The results have just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In modern optics, a variety of nanoscale materials and their localisation have been examined, as they lead to novel optical effects. Viewing a direction sensitive information display utilizing the optical Janus effect has attracted great attention owing to its dynamic operation scheme which allows for discriminative information delivery. However, the integration of nano-materials within multiple layers limit their application in dynamic and real-time color tuning.
A team of researchers at Osaka University, in collaboration with the University of Bordeaux and the Bergonié Institute in France, has succeeded in terahertz imaging of early-stage breast cancer less than 0.5 mm without staining, which is difficult to identify even by pathological diagnosis. Their work provides a breakthrough towards rapid and precise on-site diagnosis of various types of cancer and accelerates the development of innovative terahertz diagnostic devices.
As the COVID-19 virus continues to spread around the globe, studying aerosol and droplet transport within different environments can help establish effective, physics-informed measures for virus mitigation. One of the most important environments to gain a rapid understanding about COVID-19's spread is inside the school classroom.
As the coronavirus has affected more than 30 million people globally, researchers have increasingly focused on the extent to which airborne respiratory droplets carrying the virus travel and contaminate the air after an infected person coughs.
From light bulbs to cell phones, all electronic devices in everyday life rely on the flow of electrons to function. Just as scientists use meters to describe the length of an object or seconds to measure the passage of time, they use amperes, or amps, to quantify electric current—the rate at which electric charge moves through a circuit.
Microscopy techniques that incorporate mid-infrared (IR) illumination holds tremendous promise across a range of biomedical and industrial applications due to its unique biochemical specificity. However, the method is primarily limited by the detection range, where existing mid-infrared (mid-IR) detection techniques often combine inferior methods that are also costly. In a new report now published on Science Advances, Inna Kviatkovsky and a research team in physics, experimental and clinical research, and molecular medicine in Germany, found that nonlinear interferometry with entangled light provided a powerful tool for mid-IR microscopy. The experimental setup only required near-IR detection with a silicon-based camera. They developed a proof-of-principle experiment to show wide-field imaging across a broad wavelength range covering 3.4 to 4.3 micrometers (µm). The technique is suited to acquire microscopic images of biological tissue samples at the mid-IR. This work forms an original approach with potential relevance for quantum imaging in life sciences.
A Madonna and Child painting with a history almost as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa's smile has been identified as an authentic Raphael canvas by Czech company InsightART, which used a robotic X-ray scanner to investigate the artwork.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is one of the coldest places on Earth. The 1.9 K (-271.3 °C) operating temperature of its main magnets is even lower than the 2.7 K (-270.5 °C) of outer space. To get the LHC to this temperature, 120 tons of liquid helium flow around a closed circuit in the veins of the accelerator.
The Polish-Israeli team from the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw and the Weizmann Institute of Science has made another significant achievement in fluorescent microscopy. In the pages of the Optica journal the team presented a new method of microscopy which, in theory, has no resolution limit. In practice, the team managed to demonstrate a fourfold improvement over the diffraction limit.
The chips of the future will include photonics and electronics; they will have bandwidth, speed and processing and computing abilities that are currently unthinkable; they will make it possible to integrate many other components, and their capabilities will increase exponentially compared to electronic chips. In all, they will be essential in many fields; they will bring us a little closer, for example, to quantum computing or to the autonomous car.
Optical fiber data transmission can be significantly improved by producing the fibers, made of silica glass, under high pressure, researchers from Japan and the US report in the journal npj Computational Materials.
A recent study from the University of Melbourne proposes a new theory for the origin of dark matter, helping experimentalists in Australia and abroad in the search for the mysterious new matter.
This highly compact beam forming network has been designed for multi-beam satellite payload antennas. Generating a total of 64 signal beams outputted from a single antenna, this novel design could cover the entire Earth with multiple spot beams from geostationary orbit.
In a world first, researchers from the University of Ottawa in collaboration with Israeli scientists have been able to create optical framed knots in the laboratory that could potentially be applied in modern technologies. Their work opens the door to new methods of distributing secret cryptographic keys—used to encrypt and decrypt data, ensure secure communication and protect private information. The group recently published their findings in Nature Communications.
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