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Category: physics – Page 3

Alloy-engineered valleytronics: Microscopic mechanism gives scientists precise control over how excitons behave

Scientists have observed a new microscopic mechanism enabling precise control of the magneto-optical properties of excitons in alloys of two-dimensional semiconductors. This discovery opens up tangible prospects for technological applications in devices exploiting valleytronics. The research findings were published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The team includes researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, in collaboration with teams from the Wrocław University of Science and Technology, Sapienza University of Rome, University of Central Florida, Laboratoire National des Champs Magnétiques Intenses, National University of Singapore, CNR-IFN, as well as research centers in the Czech Republic (University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague) and Japan (National Institute for Materials Science).

Diamond owl swoops in with new method to keep electronics cool

At Rice University, a research lab’s signature keepsake has helped perfect a method for growing patterned diamond surfaces that could help decrease operating temperatures in electronics by 23 degrees Celsius. The paper is published in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

“In the world of electronics, heat is the enemy,” said Xiang Zhang, assistant research professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice and a first author on the study. “A reduction of 23 C is significant—it can extend the lifespan of a device and allow it to run faster without overheating.”

Heat management is one of the major challenges facing today’s high-power technologies, from the gallium nitride transistors used in radar and 5G devices to the processing units powering the data center infrastructure that supports artificial intelligence. Diamond outshines most other materials when it comes to handling heat, but its hardness makes it difficult to work with. Growing diamond in technology-relevant forms is particularly challenging.

Can a chatbot be a co-author? AI helps crack a long-stalled gluon amplitude proof

Like many scientists, theoretical physicist Andrew Strominger was unimpressed with early attempts at probing ChatGPT, receiving clever-sounding answers that didn’t stand up to scrutiny. So he was skeptical when a talented former graduate student paused a promising academic career to take a job with OpenAI. Strominger told him physics needed him more than Silicon Valley.

Still, Strominger, the Gwill E. York Professor of Physics, was intrigued enough by AI that he agreed when the former student, Alex Lupsasca, Ph.D., invited him to visit OpenAI last month to pose a thorny problem to the firm’s powerful in-house version of ChatGPT.

Strominger came away with much more than he expected—and the field of theoretical physics appears to have gained a little something too.

Physicists dream up ‘spacetime quasicrystals’ that could underpin the universe

Spacetime obeys a rule known as Lorentz symmetry means that something is unchanged whether you’re sitting still or moving at close to the speed of light. For example, the laws of physics respect Lorentz symmetry: They don’t change for fast moving observers. Lorentz symmetry doesn’t hold for previously known quasicrystals, or for normal crystals either: An ant sitting still would observe a different structure than would a near light-speed ant. In relativity, observers traveling at high speeds observe an apparent shortening of objects, and that distorts the materials’ structure.

But the new spacetime quasicrystals obey Lorentz symmetry. They would appear the same to an ant sitting still as to one on a speeding rocket. The researchers mathematically formulated their quasicrystals by taking a four-dimensional slice through a grid of points in higher dimensions and projecting those points onto the slice. The slice has a slope that is an irrational number — one that can’t be written as a fraction of two whole numbers, such as pi. The irrational slope means the slice never directly intersects the points on the grid, and that helps produce the structure that never repeats.

Quasicrystals are a mathematical concept that shows up in the structure of real materials, but the concept could appear elsewhere. “The spacetime that we live in could be a quasicrystal,” says Sotiris Mygdalas of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, a coauthor of the study.

How choices made by crowds in a train station are guided by strangers

In crowds, most people are strangers to you, and everyone else for that matter. However, until now, the effect of stranger-to-stranger interactions on the choices people make in crowds has not been properly examined. Ziqi Wang and Federico Toschi from the TU/e Department of Applied Physics and Science Education, along with Alessandro Gabbana at the University of Ferrara in Italy, explored how strangers influence people’s choices in crowds at Eindhoven Centraal railway station. The research is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Using a collection of special overhead sensors, we gathered data on how pedestrians move over a three-year period, from March 2021 to March 2024,” says Toschi. “This amounted to about 30,000,000 pedestrian trajectories and included people getting off trains and those waiting on the platform. We collaborated with ProRail on this project, as we have done in previous studies on how pedestrians move in Eindhoven Centraal station.”

Toschi has been studying pedestrian dynamics for some time and was jointly awarded the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for physics for work on how pedestrians keep a certain distance from each other in crowds.

ALMA and JWST Identification of Faint Dusty Star-forming Galaxies up to z ∼ 8 and Their Connection with Other Galaxy Populations

A recent discovery in astrophysics could overturn our current models of the Universe! A team of astronomers led by UMass Amherst “stacked” observations between the ALMA telescope and the JWST to confirm approximately 70 faint dusty galaxies at the edge of our universe, which were formed almost 13 billion years ago 🌠🔭. This shows that stars were being formed earlier than our current models predict — turning everything we thought we knew upside down. What does this mean for the future of astrophysics? Find out here: https://ow.ly/Nab150Yil7i astronomy.

Zavala, Jorge A., Faisst, Andreas L., Aravena, Manuel, Casey, Caitlin M., Kartaltepe, Jeyhan S., Martinez, Felix, Silverman, John D., Toft, Sune, Treister, Ezequiel, Akins, Hollis B., Algera, Hiddo, Barboza, Karina, Battisti, Andrew J., Brammer, Gabriel, Cai, Zheng, Champagne, Jaclyn, Drakos, Nicole E., Egami, Eiichi, Fan, Xiaohui, Franco, Maximilien, Fudamoto, Yoshinobu, Fujimoto, Seiji, Gillman, Steven, Gozaliasl, Ghassem, Harish, Santosh, Jin, Xiangyu, Kakiichi, Koki, Kakkad, Darshan, Koekemoer, Anton M., Lin, Ruqiu, Liu, Daizhong, Long, Arianna S., Magdis, Georgios E., Manning, Sinclaire, Martin, Crystal L., McKinney, Jed, Meyer, Romain, Rodighiero, Giulia, Salazar, Victoria, Sanders, David B., Shuntov, Marko, Talia, Margherita, Tanaka, Takumi S.

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.

Ultra-stable lasers that rely on crystalline mirrors could advance next-generation clocks and navigation

Lasers, devices that emit intense beams of coherent light in specific directions, are widely used in research settings and are central components of various technologies, including optical clocks (i.e., systems that can keep time relying on light waves as opposed to the vibrations of quartz crystals) and gravitational wave detections.

Over the past decades, physicists have been trying to develop increasingly stable and highly performing lasers that emit more phase-coherent beams of light and could advance the precision of optical interferometry and optical time-keeping devices.

The most dominant approach to stabilize lasers entails the use of pairs of reflective mirrors that face each other, forming a so-called Fabry–Pérot optical cavity. Light bounces back and forth from these mirrors at specific resonant frequencies, forcing a laser to remain at one precise frequency, instead of fluctuating in response to temperature changes or other environmental factors.

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