https://phys.org/physics-news/physics en-us Phys.org provides the latest news on physics, materials, nanotech, science and technology. In a recent report, Xiaolei Peng and a team of scientists in materials science and engineering at the University of Texas, U.S., and the Tsinghua University, China, developed opto-thermoelectric microswimmers bioinspired by the motion behaviors of Escherichia coli (E. coli). They engineered the microswimmers using dielectric gold Janus particles driven by a self-sustained electric field arising from the optothermal response of the particles. When they illuminated the constructs with a laser beam, the Janus particles showed an optically generated temperature gradient along the particle surfaces, forming an opto-thermoelectrical field to propel themselves along. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-opto-thermoelectric-microswimmers.html General Physics Optics & Photonics Fri, 04 Sep 2020 13:10:01 EDT news518442238 Materials scientists at Duke University have uncovered an atomic mechanism that makes certain thermoelectric materials incredibly efficient near high-temperature phase transitions. The information will help fill critical knowledge gaps in the computational modeling of such materials, potentially allowing researchers to discover new and better options for technologies that rely on transforming heat into electricity. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-floppy-atomic-dynamics-electricity.html General Physics Fri, 04 Sep 2020 12:43:06 EDT news518442181 In atomic nuclei, protons and neutrons share energy and momentum in tight quarters. But exactly how they share the energy that keeps them bound within the nucleus—and even where they are within the nucleus—remain key puzzles for nuclear physicists. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-skin-deep-growth-neutron-stars.html General Physics Fri, 04 Sep 2020 07:47:18 EDT news518424436 Venus flytraps do it, trap-jaw ants do it, and now materials scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst can do it, too—they discovered a way of efficiently converting elastic energy in a spring to kinetic energy for high-acceleration, extreme velocity movements as nature does it. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-imitate-natural-spring-loaded-snapping-movement.html General Physics Thu, 03 Sep 2020 16:51:58 EDT news518370713 Adding noise to enhance a weak signal is a sensing phenomenon common in the animal world but unusual in manmade sensors. Now Penn State researchers have added a small amount of background noise to enhance very weak signals in a light source too dim to sense. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-sensor-noise.html General Physics Optics & Photonics Thu, 03 Sep 2020 16:46:23 EDT news518370380 "One more centimeter," said the chief technician, while operating the hydraulic jack system on 14 August. The 5-m-diameter, 5-m-long cylindrical detector gently slid into the parking position, 56 meters below the ground in the ALICE cavern at LHC Point 2, where it will stand for some time. This operation culminates the many-years-long upgrade of ALICE's Time Projection Chamber (TPC), the large tracking device of the LHC's heavy-ion specialist. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-alice-tpc.html General Physics Thu, 03 Sep 2020 10:28:34 EDT news518347712 The Large Hadron Collider plays with Albert Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2, to transform matter into energy and then back into different forms of matter. But on rare occasions, it can skip the first step and collide pure energy—in the form of electromagnetic waves. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-lhc.html General Physics Thu, 03 Sep 2020 10:27:11 EDT news518347627 A team of researchers from Institut Langevin and Sorbonne Université has shown that it is possible to float boats on both the top and underside of a suspended fluid. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes experiments they conducted with levitating fluids and what they learned from them. Vladislav Sorokin and Iliya Blekhman with the Russian Academy of Science have published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue outlining the work by the team in France. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-boat-underside-liquid.html General Physics Soft Matter Thu, 03 Sep 2020 09:05:23 EDT news518342708 Cosmologists have zoomed in on the smallest clumps of dark matter in a virtual universe—which could help us to find the real thing in space. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-dark.html General Physics Wed, 02 Sep 2020 11:00:03 EDT news518239329 For a wide variety of high-powered scientific instruments, from free-electron lasers to wakefield accelerators to electron microscopes, generating a bright electron beam that has specific properties represents one of the most significant challenges. These instruments can be used for investigating the atomic level properties of matter or for accelerating particles to high energies. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-scientists-important-property.html General Physics Wed, 02 Sep 2020 07:47:41 EDT news518251658 With the addition of just a small number of autonomous vehicles (AVs) on the road, traffic flow can become faster, greener, and safer in the near future, a new study suggests. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-small-self-organizing-autonomous-vehicles-significantly.html General Physics Tue, 01 Sep 2020 12:03:01 EDT news518180574 Glass windows typically offer some amount of soundproofing, sometimes unintentionally. In general, ventilation is required to achieve large sound transmission. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-windows-optimal-transmission.html General Physics Tue, 01 Sep 2020 11:00:06 EDT news518162160 If the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines aren't enough to convince you that face shields alone shouldn't be used to stop the spread of COVID-19, then maybe a new visualization study will. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-shields-masks-valves-ineffective-covid-.html General Physics Soft Matter Tue, 01 Sep 2020 11:00:05 EDT news518162555 Spectroscopy is an important tool of observation in many areas of science and industry. Infrared spectroscopy is especially important in the world of chemistry, where it is used to analyze and identify molecules. The current state-of-the-art method can make approximately 1 million observations per second. UTokyo researchers have greatly surpassed this figure with a new method about 100 times faster. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-giant-molecular.html General Physics Optics & Photonics Tue, 01 Sep 2020 09:59:25 EDT news518173162 It is very hard to take a photo of a hummingbird flapping its wings 50 times per second. The exposure time has to be much shorter than the characteristic time scale of the wing beat, otherwise you will only see a colorful blur. A similar problem is encountered in solid-state physics, where the aim is to determine the magnetic properties of a material. The magnetic moment at a certain location can change very quickly. Therefore, researchers require measuring methods that are fast enough to resolve these fluctuations. With this basic idea in mind, scientists at TU Wien (Vienna), in collaboration with research groups from Würzburg (Germany), has now succeeded in solving a puzzle of solid-state physics. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-material-properties-results.html General Physics Tue, 01 Sep 2020 07:24:12 EDT news518163803 In his Christian Doppler Laboratory, Dieter Süss and his partners from the field of practice investigate the possible applications of magnetic sensors in the automotive and medical sector. Süss's technology achieved its first successes in ABS systems of vehicles and in magnetic resonance imaging. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-applications-magnetic-sensors-automotive-medical.html General Physics Tue, 01 Sep 2020 07:22:10 EDT news518163725 The inside of future nuclear fusion energy reactors will be among the harshest environments ever produced on Earth. What's strong enough to protect the inside of a fusion reactor from plasma-produced heat fluxes akin to space shuttles reentering Earth's atmosphere? https://phys.org/news/2020-08-tungsten-isotope-armor-future-fusion.html General Physics Plasma Physics Fri, 28 Aug 2020 14:37:26 EDT news517844241 Brownian motion of particles in fluid is a common collective behavior in biological and physical systems. In a new report on Science Advances, Kai Leong Chong, and a team of researchers in physics, engineering, and aerospace engineering in China, conducted experiments and numerical simulations to show how the movement of vortices resembled inertial Brownian particles. During the experiments, the rotating turbulent convective vortical flow allowed the particles to move ballistically at first and diffusively after a critical time in a direct behavioral transition—without going through a hydrodynamic memory regime. The work implies that convective vortices have inertia-induced memory, so their short-term movement was well-defined in the framework of Brownian motion here for the first time. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-vortices-brownian-particles-turbulent.html General Physics Fri, 28 Aug 2020 09:30:01 EDT news517813052 An international team of scientists from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, and colleagues from the USA and Switzerland have successfully combined various extreme experimental conditions in a completely unique way, revealing exciting insights into the mysterious conducting properties of the crystalline metal CeRhIn5. In the journal Nature Communications, they report on their exploration of previously uncharted regions of the phase diagram of this metal, which is considered a promising model system for understanding unconventional superconductors. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-track-unconventional-superconductivity-unknown-territory.html General Physics Superconductivity Thu, 27 Aug 2020 10:56:31 EDT news517744586 A supernova, the explosion of a white-dwarf or massive star, can create as much light as billions of normal stars. This transient astronomical phenomenon can occur at any point after a star has reached its final evolutionary stages. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-supernovae-enable-discovery-muonic-physics.html General Physics Thu, 27 Aug 2020 09:50:03 EDT news517740446 Turing machines were first proposed by British mathematician Alan Turing in 1936, and are a theoretical mathematical model of what it means for a system to "be a computer." https://phys.org/news/2020-08-thermodynamics-quest-turing-machine.html General Physics Thu, 27 Aug 2020 04:05:30 EDT news517719925 When UC Santa Barbara materials scientist Omar Saleh and graduate student Ian Morgan sought to understand the mechanical behaviors of disordered proteins in the lab, they expected that after being stretched, one particular model protein would snap back instantaneously, like a rubber band. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-uncover-unusual-glassy-behavior-disordered.html General Physics Tue, 25 Aug 2020 16:08:07 EDT news517590483 Information can successfully be transmitted through noisy channels using quantum mechanics, according to new research from The University of Queensland and Griffith University. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-noise-superposition.html General Physics Tue, 25 Aug 2020 12:52:59 EDT news517578770 The ancient Japanese art of paper folding, known as origami, can be used to create mechanical, binary switches. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-mechanical-memory-boards-origami.html General Physics Tue, 25 Aug 2020 11:00:04 EDT news517560552 Months into the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a mask while out in public has become the recommended practice. However, many still question the effectiveness of this. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-effectiveness-masks.html General Physics Soft Matter Tue, 25 Aug 2020 11:00:02 EDT news517560862 "You have to work harder to get the job done faster," explains Gianmaria Falasco, a researcher at the University of Luxembourg as he sums up the results of his latest work with Massimiliano Esposito. This will come as no surprise to anyone with any experience of racing around trying to meet appointments and deadlines, but by defining specific parameters for the relation between work expended in terms of dissipation and the rate at which a system changes state, Falasco and Esposito provide a valuable tool for those developing ways of manipulating non-equilibrium systems, be that the behavior of living cells or an electronic circuit. Additionally, the "dissipation-time uncertainty relation" they developed to define this behavior is tantalizingly suggestive of other uncertainty relations in quantum physics. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-physicists-pin-entropy.html General Physics Tue, 25 Aug 2020 09:40:01 EDT news517564044 An international team of physicists from Bielefeld University, Uppsala University, the University of Strasbourg, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, ETH Zurich, and the Free University Berlin have developed a precise method to measure the ultrafast change of a magnetic state in materials. They do this by observing the emission of terahertz radiation that necessarily accompanies such a magnetization change. Their study, titled "Ultrafast terahertz magnetometry," is being published today in Nature Communications. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-method-track-ultrafast-magnetic-state.html General Physics Tue, 25 Aug 2020 09:36:54 EDT news517567003 Inside the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility's 844-meter-diameter storage ring, electrons traveling at almost the speed of light produce some of the brightest X-ray beams in the world. These X-rays can reveal the position and motions of atoms in all kinds of matter. Seven of the facility's 44 beamlines are dedicated to structural biology research and run under the auspices of an EMBL-ESRF partnership known as the Joint Structural Biology Group (JSBG). https://phys.org/news/2020-08-synchrotron.html General Physics Tue, 25 Aug 2020 09:36:25 EDT news517566982 When algae and bacteria with different swimming gaits gather in large groups, their flocking behavior diminishes, something that may reduce the risk of falling victim to aquatic predators. This finding is presented in an international study led from Lund University in Sweden. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-flocking-behaviour-microorganisms-eaten.html General Physics Mon, 24 Aug 2020 14:33:30 EDT news517498406 Published in Nature Physics, findings from a new study co-led by Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University teams show for the first time how ideas from quantum physics can help develop novel drug interventions for bacterial infections and cancer. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-ideas-quantum-physics-alternative-interventions.html General Physics Quantum Physics Mon, 24 Aug 2020 11:00:03 EDT news517475567