https://phys.org/ en-us Latest news from School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University Magnetic skyrmions are tiny entities, manifesting in magnetic materials that consist of localized twists in the magnetization direction of the medium. Each skyrmion is highly stable because eliminating it requires untwisting the magnetization direction of the material, just as a knot on a string can only be untied by pulling the rest of the string out of the knot. Magnetic skyrmions are a promising candidate for next-generation magnetic storage devices because of their stability and tiny size—-with widths of 50 nanometers or less, they occupy only a fraction of the area of magnetic bits in current hard disks. For this reason, researchers have been intensively searching out materials that can contain magnetic skyrmions, and studying their electrical and magnetic properties. https://phys.org/news/2019-05-evolution-skyrmions-irfecopt-multilayers-topological.html General Physics Mon, 06 May 2019 09:42:00 EDT news476354513 In the 2018 movie Avengers: Infinity War, a scene featured Dr. Strange looking into 14 million possible futures to search for a single timeline in which the heroes would be victorious. Perhaps he would have had an easier time with help from a quantum computer. A team of researchers from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) and Griffith University in Australia have constructed a prototype quantum device that can generate all possible futures in a simultaneous quantum superposition. https://phys.org/news/2019-04-scientists-machine-quantum-superposition-futures.html Quantum Physics Tue, 09 Apr 2019 04:48:14 EDT news473934900 Nucleophilic substitution is a class of chemical reactions encountered throughout organic chemistry, including those used to manufacture common petrochemical and pharmaceutical products. Its underlying mechanism was discovered 82 years ago by the British chemists Edward Hughes and Christopher Ingold, who showed that an electron-rich chemical species, called a nucleophile, "attacks" and replaces an electron-poor fragment of an organic molecule, called a leaving group. https://phys.org/news/2019-01-upending-fundamental-reaction-chemistrydiscovery-nucleophilic.html Materials Science Fri, 25 Jan 2019 06:53:24 EST news467621594 Electronics have advanced through continuous improvements in microprocessor technology since the 1960s. However, this process of refinement is projected to stall in the near future due to constraints imposed by the laws of physics. Some of these bottlenecks have already taken effect. For instance, the clock speeds of processors are have not exceeded a few gigahertz, or several operations per nanosecond, for the past 20 years, a limitation stemming from the electrical resistance of silicon. This has led to an increasingly urgent global search for superior alternatives to semiconductor electronics. https://phys.org/news/2019-01-ultrafast-spintronics.html General Physics Mon, 21 Jan 2019 11:00:09 EST news467017800 Topological insulators are exotic states of matter that physicists have been intensely studying for the past decade. Their most intriguing feature is that they can be rigorously distinguished from all other materials using a mathematical concept known as "topology." This mathematical property grants topological insulators the ability to transport electric signals without dissipation, via special quantum states called "topological surface states." https://phys.org/news/2019-01-scientists-three-dimensional-topological-medium-electromagnetic.html General Physics Wed, 09 Jan 2019 05:00:01 EST news466075519