The strength of the strong force

Much ado was made about the Higgs boson when this elusive particle was discovered in 2012. Though it was touted as giving ordinary matter mass, interactions with the Higgs field only generate about 1 percent of ordinary mass. ...

Fastest star ever seen is moving at 8% the speed of light

In the center of our galaxy, hundreds of stars closely orbit a supermassive black hole. Most of these stars have large enough orbits that their motion is described by Newtonian gravity and Kepler's laws of motion. But a few ...

Nearly 50-meter laser experiment sets record in university hallway

It's not at every university that laser pulses powerful enough to burn paper and skin are sent blazing down a hallway. But that's what happened in UMD's Energy Research Facility, an unremarkable looking building on the northeast ...

Riding a laser to Mars

Could a laser send a spacecraft to Mars? That's a proposed mission from a group at McGill University, designed to meet a solicitation from NASA. The laser, a 10-meter wide array on Earth, would heat hydrogen plasma in a chamber ...

Physicists develop a perfect light trap

Whether in photosynthesis or in a photovoltaic system: if you want to use light efficiently, you have to absorb it as completely as possible. However, this is difficult if the absorption is to take place in a thin layer of ...

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