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Experiments reveal new details of the process by which contaminants in the ocean could reach the atmosphere through the bursting of bubbles in foam.

The bursting bubbles in ocean foam produce a mist of droplets that can contain enhanced concentrations of ocean pollutant particles. In single-bubble lab experiments, researchers have now shown that the inclusion of a particular particle in an airborne droplet depends on some details of the fluid motion that occurs when the droplet forms [1]. The researchers measured the efficiency with which particles are transferred to droplets and also ran simulations of the fluid motion. Their model predicts that the airborne droplets should contain more large particles, such as microplastics, and fewer smaller particles, such as viruses, than expected based on previous theories.

The droplets produced by bursting air bubbles in ocean foam provide the atmosphere’s main source of ocean-originated particles, including pollutants and bacteria, and environmental scientists want to understand this ocean-to-atmosphere transfer process in detail. Experiments in the 1970s showed that bursting bubbles transport pathogens into the environment and also that the droplets produced contain these particles at high concentrations.

In recent years, organic chemicals containing boron (B) and silicon (Si) have found applications in various fields, including optoelectronics and pharmaceuticals. Moreover, they can also serve as building blocks for complex organic chemicals. As a result, scientists are actively looking for new ways to leverage these versatile chemical tools as well as produce more kinds of organosilicon and organoboron compounds.

One limitation of the synthesis methods currently available for these chemicals is that we cannot introduce multiple B-and Si-containing groups in aromatic nitrogen heterocycles, i.e., carbon rings in which one of the carbon atoms is replaced by a nitrogen atom. If we could produce and freely transform such molecules, it would unlock the synthesis of several compounds relevant in medicinal chemistry.

Fortunately, a research team including Assistant Professor Yuki Nagashima from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), Japan has found a straightforward way around this limitation. As explained in their most recent study published in Nature Communications, the team has developed a method that allows them to modify quinolines, small organic molecules with an aromatic nitrogen heterocycle, with B-, Si-, and carbon-containing groups simultaneously.

What does the inside of a nuclear fusion reactor look like?

“It looks like the future,” Stuart White, head of communications at Tokamak Energy, told Newsweek. “A spaceship. It’s extremely striking, powerful and exciting. You can’t take your eyes off it.”

Nuclear fusion is a technology that creates energy in the same way as the sun: it occurs when two atoms are thrust together with such force that they combine into a single, larger atom and release huge amounts of energy in the process.

Individual atoms trapped by optical ‘tweezers’ are emerging as a promising computational platform.

Over eighty years ago, Rabi oscillations were proposed to describe the strong coupling and population transfer in a two-level quantum system exposed to an oscillatory driving field. As compared to atoms, molecules have an extra degree of vibration, which adds an additional knob to the Rabi oscillations in light-molecule interactions. However, how such a laser-driven Rabi oscillation during the stretching of molecular bonds determines the kinetic energy release (KER) spectrum of dissociative fragments is still an open question.

In a new article published in Light: Science & Applications, a joint team of scientists, led by Professor Feng He from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Professor Jian Wu from East China Normal University has investigated Rabi oscillations in a stretching molecule and discovered the strong-field-induced dissociation dynamics beyond the well-accepted resonant one-photon dissociation scenario. During the dissociation of the simplest molecular ion of H₂⁺, coupled with the laser field, the electron hops between the 1sσ_g and 2pσ_u states, forming the Rabi oscillations.

The ionization-created nuclear wave packet (NWP) may propagate alternatively along the two potential energy curves towards a larger internuclear distance monotonically, termed as the rolling process, or may propagate outwards along the 2pσ_u curve followed by the inward propagation in the 1sσ_g curve and then be relaunched to 2pσ_u state again followed by subsequent dissociation, termed as the looping process. The rolling and looping dissociation pathways lead to different KERs of the ejected dissociative fragments, which have been verified by comparing experimental measurements with quantum simulation results.

Experts assembling sPHENIX, a state-of-the-art particle detector at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, successfully installed a major tracking component on Jan. 19. The Time Projection Chamber, or TPC, is one of the final pieces to move into place before sPHENIX begins tracking particle smash-ups at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) this spring.

The TPC is a gas-filled detector that, combined with the detector’s strong magnetic field, allows nuclear physicists to measure the momentum of charged particles streaming from RHIC collisions. It is one of many detector components that nuclear physicists will use to glean more information about the quark-gluon plasma (QGP)—a primordial soup made up of matter’s fundamental building blocks, quarks and gluons.

“QGP existed at the dawn of the universe some 14 billion years ago, about a millionth of a second after the Big Bang,” said Thomas Hemmick, a physicist at Stony Brook University (SBU) and a collaborator on RHIC research “RHIC’s collisions and sPHENIX’s ability to capture snapshots of particles traversing the QGP will help scientists understand how quarks and gluons cooled and coalesced to form the protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nuclei of all visible matter in the universe today.”

The michael shermer show # 294

What is time? Does the past still exist? How did the universe begin and how will it end? Do particles think? Was the universe made for us? Why doesn’t anyone ever get younger? Has physics ruled out free will? Will we ever have a theory of everything? According to Sabine Hossenfelder, it is not a coincidence that quantum entanglement and vacuum energy have become the go-to explanations of alternative healers, or that people believe their deceased grandmother is still alive because of quantum mechanics. Science and religion have the same roots, and they still tackle some of the same questions: Where do we come from? Where do we go to? How much can we know? The area of science that is closest to answering these questions is physics. Over the last century, physicists have learned a lot about which spiritual ideas are still compatible with the laws of nature. Not always, though, have they stayed on the scientific side of the debate.

Continue reading “Free Will and Determinism from a Physicist’s Perspective (Sabine Hossenfelder)” »

It is “designed to use an inherently safe and extremely robust fuel form.”

The future of deep space exploration is near. Rolls-Royce revealed a new image of a micro-reactor for space that it says is “designed to use an inherently safe and extremely robust fuel form.”

The iconic engineering firm recently tweeted the image alongside a caption. It is designing the nuclear fission system as part of an agreement it penned with the UK Space Agency in 2021.

Continue reading “Rolls-Royce’s new micro-reactor design could send humans to Mars” »

The performance of some quantum technologies could be boosted by exploiting interactions between nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centres and defects on the surface of diamond – according to research done by two independent teams of scientists in the US.

NV centres in diamond have emerged as a promising solid-state platform for quantum sensing and information processing. They are defects in the diamond lattice in which two carbon atoms are replaced with a single nitrogen atom, leaving one lattice site vacant. NV centres are a two-level spin system into which quantum information can be written and read out using laser light and microwaves. An important property of NV centres is that once they have been put into a specific quantum state, they can remain in that state for a relatively long “coherence” time – which makes them technologically useful.