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Category: particle physics

The first direct observation of laser-created isolated hopfions

Over the past few decades, some physicists worldwide have been investigating unusual particle-like magnetic structures known as topological solitons. These structures could potentially be leveraged to develop new cutting-edge technologies, such as new magnetic memory devices and computing systems.

A type of topological solitons that has proven to be difficult to realize experimentally is the hopfion. This is a three-dimensional (3D) structure comprised of closed loops of continuously swirling spin textures, which can resemble linked or knotted vortex strings.

Researchers at South China University of Technology, Nankai University, Forschungszentrum Jülich, South China Normal University, University of Luxembourg, and Uppsala University recently reported the first direct observation of isolated hopfions in a magnetic material, which were created using laser pulses.

Quantum Metallurgy Might Be A New Frontier For Superconducting Materials And Artificial Neurons

“The key emphasis here is that disorder is a really important parameter. It’s this tunable thing when we’re playing with quantum phases.”

Modifying the structure of electron crystals is extremely exciting. In superconductors, materials that transport electricity without resistance, the superconducting state can coincide with changes to charge-density waves.

“When we’re doing basic science in these really exotic materials and exotic phases, dramatically new innovations happen,” Hovden told IFLScience. “Technological revolutions like the semiconductor, transistor, and computer happened because we did basic science on atomic structures, on atoms, on matter.”

Testing quantum collapse theory with the XENONnT dark matter detector

Theories of quantum mechanics predict that some particles can exist in superpositions, which essentially means that they can be in more than one state at once. When a particle’s state is measured, however, this superposition appears to “collapse” into a single outcome; a phenomenon often referred to as the “measurement problem.”

In recent years, various theoretical physicists have tried to explain why and how this collapse happens. This led to the introduction of various models, such as the Continuous Spontaneous Localization (CSL) and Diósi–Penrose models.

Both these models predict that spontaneous quantum collapse would also lead to the emission of faint X-ray radiation. The experimental detection of this radiation would thus provide evidence of these theories’ validity.

Researchers combine five metals to build a better nanocrystal

A nanocrystal is an extraordinarily tiny piece of material—composed of anywhere from a few to a few thousand atoms—in which atoms are arranged in a precise, ordered structure. Think of it like taking a piece of gold and shrinking it down to the size of a few hundred atoms. It’s still gold, still crystalline, just almost incomprehensibly small.

Nanocrystals are in the transistors inside computers and smartphones, in smartphone displays and TV screens, in the gold-nanoparticle sensors that power COVID and pregnancy tests, and in the pipes of your car exhaust system, among countless other innovations.

Their small size gives them a dramatically higher ratio of surface area to volume, making them especially useful as catalysts—materials that speed up chemical reactions without being consumed in the process.

Why twisted bilayer graphene stops superconducting near high-dielectric substrates

Superconductors are materials that can conduct electricity with a resistance of zero. In so-called conventional superconductors, this occurs at low temperatures when electrons become bound into pairs, known as Cooper pairs.

In some other materials, however, superconductivity (SC) emerges via other electron pairing mechanisms that are still poorly understood. These materials, called unconventional superconductors, include twisted bilayer graphene (tBLG), a two-dimensional material created by stacking two single sheets of graphene on top of each other, one of which is rotated in relation to the other by a precise small angle.

One factor that plays a role in unconventional SC is the so-called dielectric constant. This is the measure of how well a material reduces the electric forces between charged particles.

A persistent quantum computing error finally explained

Scientists have discovered the cause of a persistent glitch that continues to disrupt superconducting quantum computers, even when they have built-in defenses. For all their advanced hardware, superconducting quantum computers are vulnerable to errors caused by ionizing radiation from space or the environment. Radiation particles interfere with the chip substrate (the silicon base the processor is built on), which leads to the creation of rogue particles (quasiparticles) that disrupt the qubits, the basic units of quantum computers.

To protect against this, scientists developed a technique called gap engineering. This involves creating an energy barrier in the superconducting material of the qubits, making it harder for these particles to reach sensitive parts of the device.

However, it is not foolproof. Even with this defense, radiation can still cause sudden widespread errors affecting many qubits at once (error bursts). But it was not clear why.

Hourglass nanographenes unlock strong, robust multi-spin entanglement

Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and collaborators have developed a predictive design strategy for creating graphene-like molecules with multiple interacting spins and enhanced resilience to magnetic perturbations, opening new avenues for molecular-scale quantum information technologies and next-generation spintronics.

The research team was led by Professor Lu Jiong from the NUS Department of Chemistry and the NUS Institute for Functional Intelligent Materials, together with Professor Wu Jishan from the NUS Department of Chemistry, and international collaborators, including key contributor Professor Pavel Jelínek from the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.

Magnetic nanographenes, which are molecules composed of fused benzene rings, are of growing interest for quantum technologies because they can host unpaired electrons, or spins, that may be used to store and process information. Unlike conventional magnetic materials based on metal atoms, these carbon-based systems offer chemical versatility and long spin coherence times. However, engineering a single molecule that contains multiple strongly coupled spins in a stable and controlled manner remains a major challenge.

Twisting atom-thin materials reveals new way to save computing energy

A recent study shows a new and potentially more energy-efficient way for information to be transmitted inside electronic systems, including computers and phones—without relying on electric currents or external magnetic fields.

In today’s electronics, information is transmitted by moving electrons through circuits, where ones and zeros are represented by high or low electrical signals. While this approach has enabled modern computing, the movement of electrical charge inevitably generates heat, leading to energy loss and limiting how much devices can be miniaturized and improved.

In the new study, published in Nano Letters, researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and international collaborators demonstrate that simply twisting two layers of certain atom-thin magnetic materials allows magnetic signals to carry information instead of relying on electrical currents to do the work.

NASA Powers Down Voyager 1 Instrument As It Fights To Survive Deep Space

Voyager 1 is losing power, and NASA just shut down a decades-old instrument to keep it going. The sacrifice could help the spacecraft continue exploring interstellar space a little longer.

On April 17, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California transmitted commands to switch off an instrument on Voyager 1 known as the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, or LECP. The spacecraft, which runs on nuclear power, is steadily losing energy, and shutting down this instrument is the most effective way to extend the mission of the first human-made object to reach interstellar space.

A 49-Year-Old Instrument Falls Silent

Small talk shapes big trends: Physics predicts how language patterns spread

A new model to predict how language changes over time has been developed by a statistical physicist at the University of Portsmouth. The model is a step towards understanding the “statistical physics of language,” a scientific theory which borrows ideas from the physics of interacting particles to explain how words, accents, and dialects spread, shift, and disappear across regions and generations, and how they might change in future. The research is published in the journal Physical Review E.

James Burridge, Professor of Probability and Statistical Physics, from the University’s School of Mathematics and Physics, said, Just as meteorologists use mathematical models to forecast tomorrow’s weather, the same kind of thinking can be applied to language.

Where you are affects how you speak and if you map how people use certain words, you see clear geographic patterns—just like a weather map. However, the physics of language is closer to crystals and magnets than the atmosphere.

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