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Tin isotopes reveal clues to nuclear stability

Separated by an ocean and more than a decade, innovative experiments with 31 tin isotopes having either a surplus or shortage of neutrons show how neutrons influence nuclear stability and element formation. The experiments, conducted between 2002 and 2012 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and more recently at CERN, provide knowledge that impacts nuclear energy and national security applications.

The earlier, influential ORNL measurements contributed to the American Physical Society naming ORNL’s Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility a historic physics site in 2016. Several resulting publications by ORNL scientists and collaborators examined nuclear energy transitions of isotopes of tin and its neighbors and established the “doubly-magic” nature of tin-132 —stability resulting from full outer shells of both protons and neutrons.

Recent laser spectroscopy measurements at CERN’s ISOLDE facility by a team of scientists, including Alfredo Galindo-Uribarri of ORNL, combined with ORNL’s earlier Holifield results, have helped physicists understand how nuclear properties change across isotopes. The results, which help theoretical physicists improve models, are published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Is this glass square the long, long future of data storage?

Scientists at Microsoft Research in the United States have demonstrated a system called Silica for writing and reading information in ordinary pieces of glass which can store two million books’ worth of data in a thin, palm-sized square.

In a paper published today in Nature, the researchers say their tests suggest the data will be readable for more than 10,000 years.

Could a recently reported high-energy neutrino event be explained by an exploding primordial black hole?

The KM3NeT collaboration is a large research group involved in the operation of a neutrino telescope network in the deep Mediterranean Sea, with the aim of detecting high-energy neutrino events. These are rare and fleeting high-energy interactions between neutrinos, particles with an extremely low mass that are sometimes referred to as “ghost particles.”

Recently, the KM3NeT collaboration reported an extremely high-energy neutrino event, which carried an energy of approximately 220 PeV (peta-electron volts). This is one of the most energetic events recorded to date and its cosmological origin has not yet been identified.

Researchers at Universidade de São Paulo and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid carried out a theoretical study exploring one proposed explanation for this remarkable neutrino event, namely that it originated from the explosion of a primordial black hole near Earth.

Quantum entanglement pushes optical clocks to new precision

By replacing single atoms with an entangled pair of ions, physicists in Germany have demonstrated unprecedented stability in an optical clock. Publishing their results in Physical Review Letters, a team led by Kai Dietze at the German National Metrology Institute, hope their approach could help usher in a new generation of optical clocks—opening up new possibilities in precision experiments and metrology.

To measure the passing of time, every clock works by counting oscillations of some reference frequency—whether it’s the swinging pendulum of a clocktower, or the vibrations of an electrified quartz crystal in a modern digital clock. Timekeeping accuracy is directly tied to how reliable these oscillations are: while a pendulum can accrue noticeable variations in its swing, vibrating quartz is far more reliable, making quartz clocks far more accurate.

Today, optical clocks are the most precise timekeepers ever achieved. In these devices, atoms are first “probed” by an ultra-stable laser tuned close to a specific optical transition. When the laser frequency matches the energy difference between two electronic states, an electron is excited to a higher energy level.

Lab-in-the-loop framework enables rapid evolution of complex multi-mutant proteins

The search space for protein engineering grows exponentially with complexity. A protein of just 100 amino acids has 20100 possible variants—more combinations than atoms in the observable universe. Traditional engineering methods might test hundreds of variants but limit exploration to narrow regions of the sequence space. Recent machine learning approaches enable broader searches through computational screening. However, these approaches still require tens of thousands of measurements, or 5–10 iterative rounds.

With the advent of these foundational protein models, the bottleneck for protein engineering swings back to the lab. For a single protein engineering campaign, researchers can only efficiently build and test hundreds of variants. What is the best way to choose those hundreds to most effectively uncover an evolved protein with substantially increased function? To address this problem, researchers have developed MULTI-evolve, a framework for efficient protein evolution that applies machine learning models trained on datasets of ~200 variants focused specifically on pairs of function-enhancing mutations.

Published in Science, this work represents Arc Institute’s first lab-in-the-loop framework for biological design, where computational prediction and experimental design are tightly integrated from the outset, reflecting a broader investment in AI-guided research.

Obstacle or accelerator? How imperfections affect material strength

Imagine a material cracking—now imagine what happens if there are small inclusions in the material. Do they create an obstacle course for the crack to navigate, slowing it down? Or do they act as weak points, helping the crack spread faster?

Historically, most engineers believed the former, using heterogeneities, or differences, in materials to make materials stronger and more resilient. However, research from Georgia Tech is showing that, in some cases, heterogeneities make materials weaker and can even accelerate cracks.

Led by School of Physics Assistant Professor Itamar Kolvin, the study, “Dual Role for Heterogeneity in Dynamic Fracture,” was published in Physical Review Letters this fall.

What ‘housane’ rings are and why a light-powered route may matter for drugs

When developing new drugs, one thing is particularly important: finding and producing the right molecules that can be used as active ingredients. The key elements of some drugs, such as penicillin, are small, tri- or quadripartite ring molecules. A team led by Prof Frank Glorius from the Institute of Organic Chemistry of the University of Münster (Germany) has now developed a method for efficiently converting readily available basic materials into such small, high-grade ring molecules. The product has a structure reminiscent of a line drawing of a house, hence its name “housane.” The reaction is triggered by a photocatalyst that transfers light energy to the molecules to enable the conversion.

New chip-scale microcomb uses lithium niobate to generate evenly spaced light

Applied physicists in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have discovered a new way to generate ultra-precise, evenly spaced “combs” of laser light on a photonic chip, a breakthrough that could miniaturize optical platforms like spectroscopic sensors or communication systems.

The research was led by Marko Lončar, the Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics at SEAS, and published in Science Advances. The paper’s first author is Yunxiang Song, a graduate student in Quantum Science and Engineering.

Particles don’t always go with the flow (and why that matters)

It is commonly assumed that tiny particles just go with the flow as they make their way through soil, biological tissue, and other complex materials. But a team of Yale researchers led by Professor Amir Pahlavan shows that even gentle chemical gradients, such as a small change in salt concentration, can dramatically reshape how particles move through porous materials. Their results are published in Science Advances.

How small particles known as colloids, like fine clays, microbes, or engineered particles, move through porous materials such as soil, filters, and biological tissue can have significant and wide-ranging effects on everything from environmental cleanups to agriculture.

It’s long been known that chemical gradients—that is, gradual changes in the concentration of salt or other chemicals—can drive colloids to migrate directionally, a phenomenon known as diffusiophoresis. But it was often assumed that this effect would matter only when there was little or no flow, because phoretic speeds are typically orders of magnitude smaller than average flow speeds in porous media. Experiments set up in Pahlavan’s lab demonstrated a very different outcome.

Terahertz spectroscopy finds nitrogen can lengthen GaAs-like LO phonon decay

An Osaka Metropolitan University-led research team investigated the decay time of coherent longitudinal optical (LO) phonons both in a GaAs1−x Nx epilayer and in a GaAs single crystal to clarify the effects of dilute nitridation.

The team observed in terahertz time-domain spectroscopy that the terahertz electromagnetic waves, which are emitted from the coherent GaAs-like LO phonons, have a relatively long decay time in a GaAs1−x Nx epilayer in comparison with the terahertz waves from the coherent GaAs LO phonons in a semi-insulating GaAs single crystal.

This implies that alloy effects (mixed crystal effects) on the phonon Raman band broadening, which have a possibility of leading to the short decay time, hardly govern the decay time even in the present GaAs1−x Nx epilayer sample.

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