Quantum Physics News

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Spacetime May be a Superfluid

What if spacetime were a kind of fluid? This is the question tackled by theoretical physicists working on quantum gravity by creating models attempting to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics.

25 Apr 2014

New Image Processing Technique Reveals Debris Disks Around Young Stars

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have applied a new image processing technique to obtain near-infrared scattered light photos of five disks observed around young stars in the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes database. These disks are telltale evidence for newly formed planets.

25 Apr 2014

Astrophysicists Discuss Implications of First Hard Evidence of Cosmic Inflation

The world was stunned by the recent announcement that a telescope at the South Pole had detected a cosmic fossil from the earliest moments of creation; During a live Google Hangout, 4 astrophysicists discussed the implications.

23 Apr 2014

Researchers Solve Mysteries of Nearby Planetary System

Mysteries of one of the most fascinating nearby planetary systems now have been solved, report authors of a scientific paper to be published by the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in its early online edition on 22 April 2014.

23 Apr 2014

Multiple Electron Beams May Circulate in Proposed eRHIC Electron Ion-Collider

If you walk by room 201 in Building 911 at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, you might think Stephen Brooks is playing a cool new video game. But Brooks is doing important, innovative work. He’s using his own custom designed software to create a 3-D virtual model of the electron accelerator Brookhaven physicists hope to build inside the tunnel currently housing the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). His mission is to put the virtual pieces together and help test out designs for eRHIC—a proposed machine that would provide unforeseen insight into the inner structure of protons and heavy ions.

23 Apr 2014

PNAS Issue Highlights Quantum Turbulence

The recent discovery of the Higgs boson has confirmed theories about the origin of mass and, with it, offered the potential to explain other scientific mysteries.

22 Apr 2014

'Upside-Down Planet' Helps Confirm ‘Self-Lensing’ Binary Star System

What looked at first like a sort of upside-down planet has instead revealed a new method for studying binary star systems, discovered by a University of Washington student astronomer.

22 Apr 2014

Novel Approaches to Predict Dynamics of Black Holes Swallowing Stars

Somewhere out in the cosmos an ordinary galaxy spins, seemingly at slumber. Then all of a sudden, WHAM! A flash of light explodes from the galaxy's center. A star orbiting too close to the event horizon of the galaxy's central supermassive black hole has been torn apart by the force of gravity, heating up its gas and sending out a beacon to the far reaches of the universe.

21 Apr 2014

NIMS Researchers Synthesize Novel Gold-Based Superconductor

The National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) research team of Masaaki Isobe and Hiroyuki Yoshida, the leader and a postdoctoral fellow, respectively, belonging to the Superconducting Properties Unit and Strongly Correlated Materials Group, Koji Kimoto, the director of the Surface Physics and Structure Unit, Masao Arai, the principal researcher of the Computational Materials Science Unit and Material Properties Theory Group, and Eiji Muromachi, executive vice president, synthesized a novel superconductor, SrAuSi3, which contains gold as a principal constituent element.

21 Apr 2014

European Physical Society Honors SLAC Accelerator Physicist with Frank Sacherer Prize

SLAC postdoctoral researcher Agostino Marinelli has received the Frank Sacherer Prize, an award presented by the European Physical Society to a young accelerator physicist in the early part of his or her career who has made "a recent significant, original contribution to the accelerator field."

21 Apr 2014