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Physicists find ways to increase antihydrogen production 18 hours ago by Lisa Zyga feature Antihydrogen consists of an antiproton and a positron. Credit: public domain (Phys.org)—There are many experiments that physicists would like to perform on antimatter, from studying its properties with spectroscopic measurements to testing how it interacts with gravity. But in order to perform these experiments, scientists first need some antimatter. Of course, they won't be finding any in nature (due to antimatter's tendency to annihilate in a burst of energy when it comes in contact with ordinary matter), and creating it in the lab has proven to...

A new class of magnets that expand their volume when placed in a magnetic field and generate negligible amounts of wasteful heat during energy harvesting, has been discovered by researchers at Temple University and the University of Maryland. The researchers, Harsh Deep Chopra, professor and chair of mechanical engineering at Temple, and Manfred Wuttig, professor of materials science and engineering at Maryland, published their findings, "Non-Joulian Magnetostriction," in the May 21st issue of the journal, Nature. This transformative breakthrough has the potential to not only displace existing technologies but create altogether new applications due to the unusual combination of magnetic...

One of the great physics experiments of our age looks ready to begin its quest.Scientists have held a dedication ceremony to inaugurate the Advanced Ligo facilities in the US. This pair of widely separated laboratories will be hunting for gravitational waves. These ripples in the fabric of space-time are predicted to result from extreme cosmic events, such as the merger of black holes and the explosive demise of giant stars. Confirmation of the waves' existence should open up a new paradigm in astronomy. It is one that would no longer depend on traditional light telescopes to observe and understand phenomena...

Researchers at Japan's Tohoku University are making a bold claim: an entirely new state of matter. The team, led by Kosmas Prassides, says they've created what's called a Jahn-Teller metal by inserting rubidium, a strange alkali metal element, into buckyballs, a pure carbon structure which has a spherical shape from a series of interlocking polygons (think of the Epcot Center, but in microscopic size.) Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Buckyballs, which are somewhat related to other supermaterials like graphene and carbon nanotubes, are already known for their superconductive capabilities. Here, while combining buckyballs and rubidium, the researchers created a...

New understanding of electromagnetism could enable 'antennas on a chip' Apr 08, 2015 Enlarge Anechoic chamber. Credit: University of Cambridge A team of researchers from the University of Cambridge have unravelled one of the mysteries of electromagnetism, which could enable the design of antennas small enough to be integrated into an electronic chip. These ultra-small antennas - the so-called 'last frontier' of semiconductor design - would be a massive leap forward for wireless communications. In new results published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers have proposed that electromagnetic waves are generated not only from the acceleration of electrons,...

HomeScience NASA’s Eagle Works: The Manhattan project of space travel. Karim Immanuel Chemlal A working microwave thruster would radically cut the cost of satellites and space stations and extend their working life, drive a plethora of suddenly affordable deep-space missions, and take astronauts to Mars in days to weeks rather than months. In 2011 the NASA engineering directorate created the Advanced propulsion team unofficially known as the “Eagleworks”. This rock star team of scientists and engineers are headed by Harold ‘Sonny’ White, engineer and applied physicist of NASA’s propulsion team at the Johnson space centre. The goal of the Eagle...

The roots of the propulsion system tested by the NASA team trace back to a British researcher named Roger Shawyer, who claims that his "EmDrive" generates thrust by rocketing microwaves around in a chamber. There is no need for propellant, as solar power can be used to produce the microwaves. Shawyer says that his company, Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd., has successfully tested experimental versions of the thruster. But many scientists have dismissed or downplayed such claims, saying the propulsion system violates the law of conservation of momentum, Wired UK reported. In 2012, however, a team of Chinese researchers built their...

Interactive: What Is Space? Imagine the fabric of space-time peeled back layer by layer. By: Thomas Lin April 30, 2015 In 1915, Albert Einstein’s field equations of gravitation revolutionized our understanding of space, time and gravity. Better known as general relativity, Einstein’s theory defined gravity as curves in the geometry of space-time, overturning Isaac Newton’s classic theory and correctly predicting the existence of black holes and gravity’s ability to bend light. But a century later, the fundamental nature of space-time remains shrouded in mystery: Where does its structure come from? What do space-time and gravity look like in the subatomic...

Hannes Hummel for Quanta MagazineTensor networks could connect space-time froth to quantum information. Next in the series Interactive: What Is Space? Chapter 2: Network Tapestry How Quantum Pairs Stitch Space-Time New tools may reveal how quantum information builds the structure of space. By: Jennifer OuelletteApril 28, 2015 Comments (8) Brian Swingle was a graduate student studying the physics of matter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he decided to take a few classes in string theory to round out his education — “because, why not?” he recalled — although he initially paid little heed to the concepts he...

“Star Trek” introduced the world outside of rocket science circles to the concept of warp drive – the propulsion system that allowed the starship Enterprise to travel faster than the speed of light. Warp speed is the holy grail that would let us explore the universe safely surrounded and protected by a space-distorting warp field. After watching the SpaceX rocket recently just try to land on a platform, you’d think this ability is years if not decades away. Yet the buzz on space websites is that NASA may have accidentally discovered a way to create a warp field. Wait, what?...

Wormholes Untangle a Black Hole Paradox A bold new idea aims to link two famously discordant descriptions of nature. In doing so, it may also reveal how space-time owes its existence to the spooky connections of quantum information. By: K.C. ColeApril 24, 2015 Comments (19) One hundred years after Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity, physicists are still stuck with perhaps the biggest incompatibility problem in the universe. The smoothly warped space-time landscape that Einstein described is like a painting by Salvador Dalí — seamless, unbroken, geometric. But the quantum particles that occupy this space are more like...

A supervoid has been discovered in the universe which is too big to fit into current models Astronomers have discovered a curious empty section of space which is missing around 10,000 galaxies. The ‘supervoid’, which is 1.8 billion light-years across, is the largest known structure ever discovered in the universe but scientists are baffled about what it is and why it is so barren. It sits in a region of space which is much colder than other parts of the universe and although it is not a vacuum, it seems to have around 20 per cent less matter than other...

The research and maps, which span a large area of the sky, are the product of a massive effort of an international team from the US, UK, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, and Brazil. They announced their new results at the American Physical Society (APS) meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. According to cosmologists, dark matter particles stream and clump together over time in particular regions of the cosmos, often in the same places where galaxies form and cluster. Over time, a “cosmic web” develops across the universe. Though dark matter is invisible, it expands with the universe and feels the pull of gravity....

Certain types of supernovae, or exploding stars, are more diverse than previously thought, a University of Arizona-led team of astronomers has discovered. The results, reported in two papers published in the Astrophysical Journal, have implications for big cosmological questions, such as how fast the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang. Most importantly, the findings hint at the possibility that the acceleration of the expansion of the universe might not be quite as fast as textbooks say. The team, led by UA astronomer Peter A. Milne, discovered that type Ia supernovae, which have been considered so uniform that cosmologists...

The "information loss paradox" in black holes—a problem that has plagued physics for nearly 40 years—may not exist. Shred a document, and you can piece it back together. Burn a book, and you could theoretically do the same. But send information into a black hole, and it's lost forever. That's what some physicists have argued for years: That black holes are the ultimate vaults, entities that suck in information and then evaporate without leaving behind any clues as to what they once contained. But new research shows that this perspective may not be correct. "According to our work, information isn't...

An experiment conducted has revealed an unlikely behavior in a class of materials called frustrated magnets, addressing a long-debated question about the nature of these discontented quantum materials. The researchers tested the frustrated magnets -- so-named because they should be magnetic at low temperatures but aren't -- to see if they exhibit a behavior called the Hall Effect. When a magnetic field is applied to an electric current flowing in a conductor such as a copper ribbon, the current deflects to one side of the ribbon. This deflection, first observed in 1879 by E.H. Hall, is used today in sensors...

The surprising discovery of "square ice" which forms at room temperature was made by an international team of researchers last week. The study was published in Nature by a team of scientists from UK and Germany led by Andre Geim of University of Manchester and G. Algara-Siller of University of Ulm. The accompanying review article was done by Alan Soper of Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in UK. "We didn't expect to find square ice ... We found there is something strange in terms of water going through [nanochannels]. It's going too fast. And you can't explain that by just imagining a...

A new out-of-this-world theory links mass extinctions with exotic astrophysics and galactic architecture Every once in a great while, something almost unspeakable happens to Earth. Some terrible force reaches out and tears the tree of life limb from limb. In a geological instant, countless creatures perish and entire lineages simply cease to exist. The most famous of these mass extinctions happened about 66 million years ago, when the dinosaurs died out in the planet-wide environmental disruption that followed a mountain-sized space rock walloping Earth. We can still see the scar from the impact today as a nearly 200-kilometer-wide crater in...

The short circuit delaying the restart of the Large Hadron Collider has been fixed, after a blast of high current melted the metal particle responsible. It is now likely that the LHC will see beams of protons racing around its 27km circumference early next week. The massive machine's second run, after a two-year refit, had faced a delay of up to several weeks after the glitch was discovered ten days ago. But now only much more routine tests remain to be completed. Cern, the European organisation for nuclear research, announced on Tuesday that Run Two of the collider was "back...

The duo suggests that alien-like ships traveling at relativistic speeds can easily intermingle with photons in the cosmic microwave background, which is dubbed CMB. This means that a spacecraft traveling at near light speed would leave a unique signature, and this means it would therefore be fully discoverable. Their research, which was just published in this month's MIT Technology Review, points out that the interaction with photons in the CMB “should create a drag that imposes specific limits on how fast spacecraft can travel.” And, “it should also produce a unique signature of relativistic spaceflight that ought to be visible...