Shoot a rifle, and the recoil might knock you backward. Merge two black holes in a binary system, and the loss of momentum gives a similar recoil—a "kick"—to the merged black hole.
General Physics
Mar 31, 2020
5
639
Most modern electronic devices rely on tiny, finely-tuned electrical currents to process and store information. These currents dictate how fast our computers run, how regularly our pacemakers tick and how securely our money ...
General Physics
Feb 3, 2020
1
2683
Astronomers have performed a comprehensive study of stellar populations in the young globular cluster NGC 1866. The new study confirms that the cluster hosts multiple stellar populations, which could have implications for ...
Everything radiates. Whether it's a car door, a pair of shoes or the cover of a book, anything hotter than absolute zero (i.e., pretty much everything) is constantly shedding radiation in the form of photons, the quantum ...
General Physics
Aug 5, 2019
4
865
More than 100 years ago, Albert Einstein and Wander Johannes de Haas discovered that when they used a magnetic field to flip the magnetic state of an iron bar dangling from a thread, the bar began to rotate.
General Physics
Jan 15, 2019
9
1959
The idea that light has momentum is not new, but the exact nature of how light interacts with matter has remained a mystery for close to 150 years. New research from UBC's Okanagan campus, recently published in Nature Communications, ...
Optics & Photonics
Aug 21, 2018
32
449
A 2017 theory proposed by Rice University physicists to explain the contradictory behavior of an iron-based high-temperature superconductor is helping solve a puzzle in a different type of unconventional superconductor, the ...
Superconductivity
May 8, 2018
0
147
One of the biggest challenges in developing integrated photonic circuits—which use light rather than electrons to transport information—is to control the momentum of light. Colors of light travel at different speeds ...
Optics & Photonics
Feb 1, 2018
1
216
For the first time, physicists have developed a technique that can peer deep beneath the surface of a material to identify the energies and momenta of electrons there.
General Physics
Nov 16, 2017
0
922
There's nothing new thing under the sun—except maybe light itself.
Optics & Photonics
Nov 2, 2017
3
788
