Big plans at CERN! With a £12bn colossal atom-smasher on the drawing board, we’re one step closer to unlocking the cosmic secrets that surround us. Is this a worthy investment?
Explore the Future Circular Collider plans, a £12bn project. Will this supercollider be the key to unlocking the missing 95% of the universe?
It’s possible to start a subscale deployment in just a few years. The climate effects would be tiny, but the geopolitical impact could be significant.
Tokamak fusion plasmas benefit from high pressures but are then susceptible to modes of instability. These magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) modes are macroscopic distortions of the plasma, but certain collective motions of individual particles can provide stabilizing effects opposing them. The presence of a resistive wall slows the mode growth, converting a kink to a resistive wall mode (RWM). A kinetic MHD model includes Maxwell’s equations, ideal MHD constraints, and kinetic effects included through the pressure tensor, calculated with the perturbed drift-kinetic distribution function of the particles. The kinetic stabilizing effects on the RWM arise through resonances between the plasma rotation and particle drift motions: precession, bounce, and transit. A match between particle motions and the mode allows efficient transfer of energy that would otherwise drive the growth of the mode, thus damping the growth. The first approach to calculating RWM stability is to write a set of equations for the complex mode frequency in terms of known quantities and then to solve the system. The “energy principle” approach, which has the advantage of clarity in distinguishing the various stabilizing and destabilizing effects, is to change the force balance equation into an equation in terms of changes of kinetic and potential energies, and then to write a dispersion relation for the mode frequency in terms of those quantities. These methods have been used in various benchmarked codes to calculate kinetic effects on RWM stability. The theory has illuminated the important roles of plasma rotation, energetic particles, and collisions in RWM stability.
The neutron lifetime anomaly has been used to motivate the introduction of new physics with hidden-sector particles coupled to baryon number, and on which neutron stars provide powerful constraints. Although the neutron lifetime anomaly may eventually prove to be of mundane origin, we use it as motivation for a broader review of the ways that baryon number violation, be it real or apparent, and dark sectors can intertwine and how neutron star observables, both present and future, can constrain them.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is crashing through a hailstorm of dust as it hurtles towards the sun at awe-inspiring speed.
The probe’s team members found that high-speed impacts with dust particles are not only more common than expected, they’re making tiny plumes of superhot plasma on the surface of the craft, according to an announcement for a new study.
The probe’s main mission goals are to measure the electric and magnetic fields near the sun and learn more about the solar wind—the stream of particles coming off of the sun, says David Malaspina, a space plasma physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences Department and Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Malaspina led the study, which the team will present at a conference this week.
DUNE, a neutrino research project, seeks to unravel the matter-antimatter imbalance mystery by tracking neutrino transformations.
A unique photograph of the Milky Way galaxy was captured using the IceCube detector, which observes high-energy neutrinos from space.
A team from TU Dortmund University recently succeeded in producing a highly durable time crystal that lived millions of times longer than could be shown in previous experiments. By doing so, they have corroborated an extremely interesting phenomenon that Nobel Prize laureate Frank Wilczek postulated around ten years ago and which had already found its way into science fiction movies.
The results have been published in Nature Physics.
Crystals or, to be more precise, crystals in space, are periodic arrangements of atoms over large length scales. This arrangement gives crystals their fascinating appearance, with smooth facets like in gemstones.
In research that could jumpstart work toward the quantum internet, researchers at MIT and the University of Cambridge have built and tested an exquisitely small device that could allow the quick, efficient flow of quantum information over large distances.
Key to the device is a “microchiplet” made of diamond in which some of the diamond’s carbon atoms are replaced with atoms of tin. The team’s experiments indicate that the device, consisting of waveguides for the light to carry the quantum information, solves a paradox that has stymied the arrival of large, scalable quantum networks.
Quantum information in the form of quantum bits, or qubits, is easily disrupted by environmental noise, like magnetic fields, that destroys the information. So on one hand, it’s desirable to have qubits that don’t interact strongly with the environment. On the other hand, however, those qubits need to strongly interact with the light, or photons, key to carrying the information over distances.
A team of Rice University researchers mapped out how flecks of 2D materials move in liquid ⎯ knowledge that could help scientists assemble macroscopic-scale materials with the same useful properties as their 2D counterparts.
“Two-dimensional nanomaterials are extremely thin—only several atoms thick—sheet-shaped materials,” said Utana Umezaki, a Rice graduate student who is a lead author on a study published in ACS Nano. “They behave very differently from materials we’re used to in daily life and can have really useful properties: They can withstand a lot of force, resist high temperatures and so on. To take advantage of these unique properties, we have to find ways to turn them into larger-scale materials like films and fibers.”
In order to maintain their special properties in bulk form, sheets of 2D materials have to be properly aligned ⎯ a process that often occurs in solution phase. Rice researchers focused on graphene, which is made up of carbon atoms, and hexagonal boron nitride, a material with a similar structure to graphene but composed of boron and nitrogen atoms.
