Quantum Physics News

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Experimental Clue About Magnetic Excitations Important for High-Temperature Superconductivity

Intrinsic inefficiencies plague current systems for the generation and delivery of electricity, with significant energy lost in transit. High-temperature superconductors (HTS)—uniquely capable of transmitting electricity with zero loss when chilled to subzero temperatures—could revolutionize the planet's aging and imperfect energy infrastructure, but the remarkable materials remain fundamentally puzzling to physicists. To unlock the true potential of HTS technology, scientists must navigate a quantum-scale labyrinth and pin down the phenomenon's source.

5 Aug 2013

Hubble Telescope Helps Solve Mystery of Short Gamma Ray Burst Origin

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope recently provided the strongest evidence yet that short-duration gamma ray bursts are produced by the merger of two small, super-dense stellar objects.

5 Aug 2013

New 60,000 Star Online Data Set May Help Reveal Formation of Milky Way Galaxy

Scientists with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), including Penn State astronomers, have released to the public a new online data set featuring 60,000 stars that are helping to reveal how our Milky Way galaxy formed.

3 Aug 2013

Research May Enable Exploiting Quantum Resistance of Graphene for Reference

Pure curiosity led him to embark on graphene research. Then, the hype surrounding the miracle material hit with full force. Now Sergey Kubatkin hardly has time in the lab anymore for what he really wants to spend time with: his own experiments.

3 Aug 2013

Story of Higgs Boson to be Told at Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition

The story behind the discovery of the Higgs Boson, which is thought to explain why fundamental particles have mass, is being told by a team from Brunel University, London, at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition this week.

2 Aug 2013

Gargantuan Galaxies Slow Their Growth Over Time

Our universe is filled with gobs of galaxies, bound together by gravity into larger families called clusters. Lying at the heart of most clusters is a monster galaxy thought to grow in size by merging with neighboring galaxies, a process astronomers call galactic cannibalism.

2 Aug 2013

Surprising Revelations About Quenched Galaxies

Some galaxies hit a point in their lives when their star formation is snuffed out, and they become "quenched". Quenched galaxies in the distant past appear to be much smaller than the quenched galaxies in the Universe today. This has always puzzled astronomers — how can these galaxies grow if they are no longer forming stars? A team of astronomers has now used a huge set of Hubble observations to give a surprisingly simple answer to this long-standing cosmic riddle.

2 Aug 2013

UCLA Researchers to Contribute to Development of the Thirty Meter Telescope

With the signing last week of a "master agreement" for the Thirty Meter Telescope — destined to be the most advanced and powerful optical telescope in the world — the University of California and UCLA moved a step closer to peering deeper into the cosmos than ever before.

2 Aug 2013

Liquid Water Reservoir May Lurk Under the Icy Surface of Saturn's Moon

The intensity of the jets of water ice and organic particles that shoot out from Saturn's moon Enceladus depends on the moon's proximity to the ringed planet, according to data obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

1 Aug 2013

Physicists Predict Deviations in Probability of B Meson Decays

A team of physicists from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the French CNRS have predicted deviations in the probability of one of the B meson decays that have been detected experimentally in the LHC accelerator at CERN. Confirmation of these results would be the first direct evidence of the existence of the 'new physics', a more fundamental theory than the current Standard Model.

1 Aug 2013