If you’re a massless particle, you must always move at light speed. If you have mass, you must go slower. So why aren’t any neutrinos slow?
The novel method could form a crucial part of NASA’s plans to establish a permanent human presence on the moon.
You may not know that lunar dust poses a real problem to NASA as it aims to establish a permanent crew presence on the moon with its upcoming Artemis missions.
Continue reading “New liquid nitrogen spray could help NASA solve its lunar dust problem” »
The supernova is so old that it is believed to have been described in a passage of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”
A group of scientists has shed new light on a star that exploded in a supernova more than 450 years ago, blasting particles out into space at close to the speed of light.
Now, astronomers have used NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry to study the incredibly long-lasting aftereffects of the supernova called Tycho.
Continue reading “NASA sheds light on a massive supernova dating back to Middle Ages” »
Tunneling reactions in chemistry are difficult to predict. The quantum mechanically exact description of chemical reactions with more than three particles is difficult, with more than four particles it is almost impossible. Theorists simulate these reactions with classical physics and must neglect quantum effects. But where is the limit of this classical description of chemical reactions, which can only provide approximations?
Roland Wester from the Department of Ion Physics and Applied Physics at the University of Innsbruck has long wanted to explore this frontier. “It requires an experiment that allows very precise measurements and can still be described quantum-mechanically,” says the experimental physicist. “The idea came to me 15 years ago in a conversation with a colleague at a conference in the U.S.,” Wester recalls. He wanted to trace the quantum mechanical tunnel effect in a very simple reaction.
Since the tunnel effect makes the reaction very unlikely and thus slow, its experimental observation was extraordinarily difficult. After several attempts, however, Wester’s team has now succeeded in doing just that for the first time, as they report in the current issue of the journal Nature.
Skyrmions are extremely small with diameters in the nanoscale, and they behave as particles suited for information storage and logic technologies. In 1961, Tony Skyrme formulated a manifestation of the first topological defect to model a particle and coined it as skyrmions. Such particles with topologically stable configurations can launch a promising route toward establishing high-density magnetic and phononic (a discrete unit of quantum vibrational mechanical energy) information processing routes.
In a new report published in Science Advances, Liyun Cao and a team of researchers at the University of Lorraine CNRS, France, experimentally developed phononic skyrmions as new topological structures by using the three-dimensional (3D) hybrid spin of elastic waves. The researchers observed the frequency-independent spin configurations and their progression toward the formation of ultra-broadband phononic skyrmions that could be produced on any solid structure.
The results of new experiments indicate that surface-adsorbed water molecules are responsible for contact electrification in granular matter, a finding that challenges established models of this phenomenon.
When two surfaces come into contact, they can exchange electrical charge. This fundamental phenomenon is linked to some of humankind’s earliest scientific experiments—reports suggest that the ancient Greeks uncovered static electricity after rubbing various materials together. Numerous physical processes are at play when two objects touch. But the mechanism underpinning charge exchange—which is known as contact electrification—has bedeviled scientists for centuries [1]. New experiments by Galien Grosjean and Scott Waitukaitis of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria now bring welcome clarity in this field [2]. By levitating a single particle and measuring its charge after consecutive collisions with a surface, the researchers were able to uncover a connection between contact electrification and water molecules on the particle and the surface.
When large numbers of insulating particles, such as grains of sand or particles of flour, collide or rub past each other, enormous electric potentials can build up. Such potentials can have dramatic consequences, leading to spectacular discharges, such as the lightning flashes seen during a sandstorm or a volcanic-ash eruption. Closer to home, such discharges can ignite flammable dusts or disrupt powder flows [3, 4]. But a mystery surrounds this contact electrification: How can identical particles exchange charge? In other words, Why does one of the particles become a donor of charge and the other an acceptor?
Magnetic fields abound in the universe. Despite the fact that the Universe is electrically neutral, atoms may be ionized into positively and negatively charged nuclei and electrons.
According to Science Alert, magnetic fields are created when charges are accelerated. Collisions between and inside interstellar plasma are one of the most prevalent sources of large-scale magnetic fields. This is one of the primary generators of magnetic fields at the cosmic scale.
The Standard Model of particle physics is our current best-guess on what the blue-prints for matter looks like. Of all of its predictions, none are as precise as the magnetic moment of the electron.
Not only is it precisely predicted, it’s among the most accurately measured of any particle’s properties. And while these two values are close, they don’t overlap entirely, providing tantalizing hints of new physics.
Getting closer to the exact value of the electron magnetic moment – simply put, how strongly an electron behaves like a tiny magnet – might one day unlock a greater understanding of the building blocks of physics and how they interact.
A liquid nitrogen spray developed by Washington State University researchers can remove almost all of the simulated moon dust from a space suit, potentially solving what is a significant challenge for future moon-landing astronauts.
The sprayer removed more than 98% of moon dust simulant in a vacuum environment with minimal damage to spacesuits, performing better than any techniques that have been investigated previously. The researchers report on their work in the journal, Acta Astronautica.
While people have managed to put men on the moon, they haven’t figured out how to keep them clean there. Similar to the clingiest packaging peanuts, moon dust sticks to everything that it touches. Worse than the packing peanuts, the dust is composed of very fine particles that are the consistency of ground fiberglass.
The properties of quark-gluon plasma (QGP), the primordial form of matter in the early universe, is conventionally described using relativistic hydrodynamical models. However, these models predict low particle yields in the low transverse momentum region, which is at odds with experimental data. To address this discrepancy, researchers from Japan now propose a novel framework based on a “core-corona” picture of QGP, which predicts that the corona component may contribute to the observed high particle yields.
Research in fundamental science has revealed the existence of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) – a newly identified state of matter – as the constituent of the early universe. Known to have existed a microsecond after the Big Bang, the QGP, essentially a soup of quarks and gluons, cooled down with time to form hadrons like protons and neutrons – the building blocks of all matter. One way to reproduce the extreme conditions prevailing when QGP existed is through relativistic heavy-ion collisions. In this regard, particle accelerator facilities like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have furthered our understanding of QGP with experimental data pertaining to such collisions.
Meanwhile, theoretical physicists have employed multistage relativistic hydrodynamic models to explain the data, since the QGP behaves very much like a perfect fluid. However, there has been a serious lingering disagreement between these models and data in the region of low transverse momentum, where both the conventional and hybrid models have failed to explain the particle yields observed in the experiments.
