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Physicists at EPFL, within a large European collaboration, have revised one of the fundamental laws that has been foundational to plasma and fusion research for over three decades, even governing the design of megaprojects like ITER. The update shows that we can actually safely use more hydrogen fuel in fusion reactors, and therefore obtain more energy than previously thought.

Fusion is one of the most promising sources of future energy. It involves two atomic nuclei combining into one, thereby releasing enormous amounts of energy. In fact, we experience fusion every day: the sun’s warmth comes from hydrogen nuclei fusing into heavier helium atoms.

There is currently an international fusion research megaproject called ITER, which aims to replicate the fusion processes of the sun to create energy on the Earth. Its aim is the creation of high temperature plasma that provides the right environment for fusion to occur, producing energy.

Simulating complex scientific models on the computer or processing large volumes of data such as editing video material takes considerable computing power and time. Researchers from the Chair of Laser Physics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and a team from the University of Rochester in New York have demonstrated how the speed of fundamental computing operations could be increased in the future to up to a million times faster using laser pulses. Their findings were published on May 11, 2022, in the journal Nature.

The computing speed of today’s computer and smartphone processors is given by field-effect transistors. In the competition to produce faster devices, the size of these transistors is constantly decreased to fit as many together as possible onto chips. Modern computers already operate at the breathtaking speed of several gigahertz, which translates to several billion computing operations per second. The latest transistors measure only 5 nanometers (0.000005 millimeters) in size, the equivalent of not much more than a few atoms. There are limits to how far chip manufacturers can go and at a certain point, it won’t be possible to make transistors any smaller.

Physicists are working hard to control electronics with light waves. The oscillation of a light wave takes approximately one femtosecond, which is one-millionth of one billionth of a second. Controlling electrical signals with light could make the computers of the future over a million times faster, which is the aim of petahertz signal processing or light wave electronics.

As a physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN

Established in 1954 and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, CERN is a European research organization that operates the Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Its full name is the European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire) and the CERN acronym comes from the French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.

Inara TabirAdmin.

As a trans woman this is a dream I yearn for.

J Bear BellOk. I can’t see it ever being a popular choice amongst traditionally gendered men, but for a trans woman this could be a huge and amazing gift.

Continue reading “Space Has Invisible Walls Created by Mysterious ‘Symmetrons,’ Scientists Propose” »

Roger Jones, a physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, explains how the standard model of particle physics may be broken.

“Scientists suspect that a ”fifth force” may be at work in space. This force, which they believe is mediated by a hypothetical particle called a symmetron is responsible for creating invisible walls in space.

The walls aren’t necessarily like the walls of a room. Instead, they are more like barriers. And, they could help explain an intriguing part of space that has left astronomers scratching their heads for quite a while.

BGR.

Continue reading “Mysterious invisible walls may have been discovered in outer space” »

Physicists from Paderborn University have developed a novel concept for generating individual photons—tiny particles of light that make up electromagnetic radiation—with tailored properties, the controlled manipulation of which is of fundamental importance for photonic quantum technologies. The findings have now been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Professor Artur Zrenner, head of the “nanostructure optoelectronics” research group, explains how tailored desired states have so far posed a challenge: “Corresponding sources are usually based on light emissions from individual semiconductor quantum emitters, which generate the photons. Here, the properties of the emitted photons are defined by the fixed properties of the quantum emitter, and can therefore not be controlled with full flexibility.”

To get around the problem, the scientists have developed an all-optical, non-linear method to tailor and control single photon emissions. Based on this concept, they demonstrate laser-guided energy tuning and polarization control of photons (i.e., the light frequency and direction of oscillation of electromagnetic waves).

Alpha particles are also known as alpha radiation.

Alpha particles, also known as alpha radiation, are the star players in the game of alpha decay — here’s everything you need to know.

A team of Cornell University engineers developed a new microscopy technique that’s powerful enough to spot an individual atom in three dimensions — and create an image so clear that the only blurriness comes from the movement of that atom itself.

The technique, which according to the study published Thursday in the journal Science relies on an electron microscope coupled with sophisticated 3D reconstruction algorithms, doesn’t just set a new record in atom resolution. The researchers even say this might be as good as microscopy gets.

“This doesn’t just set a new record,” lead author and Cornell engineer David Muller said in a press release. “It’s reached a regime which is effectively going to be an ultimate limit for resolution. We basically can now figure out where the atoms are in a very easy way. This opens up a whole lot of new measurement possibilities of things we’ve wanted to do for a very long time.”