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Category: particle physics – Page 456

“Strange metals” have that name for a reason – these materials exhibit some unusual conductive properties and surprisingly, even have things in common with black holes. Now, a new study has characterized them in more detail, and found that strange metals constitute a new state of matter.

So-called strange metals differ from regular metals because their electrical resistance is directly linked to temperature. Electrons in strange metals are seen to lose their energy as fast as the laws of quantum mechanics allow. But that’s not all – their conductivity is also linked to two fundamental constants of physics: Planck’s constant, which defines how much energy a photon can carry, and Boltzmann’s constant, which relates the kinetic energy of particles in a gas with the temperature of that gas.

While these properties have been well observed over the years, scientists have had a hard time accurately modeling strange metals. So in a new study, researchers from the Flatiron Institute and Cornell University set out to solve the model, right down to absolute zero – lower than the lowest possible temperature for materials.

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Atoms of antimatter have been trapped and stored for the first time by the ALPHA collaboration, an international team of scientists working at CERN in Switzerland. Berkeley Lab researchers made key contributions to the effort, including the design of the trap’s crucial component—an octupole magnet—and computer simulations needed to identify real antihydrogen annihilation events against a noisy background.

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There’s a factory in Europe that makes antimatter! It’s the rarest, most expensive, and potentially the most dangerous material on earth. Scientists don’t know why this material is so rare. Anti-atoms took 72 years after we discovered antimatter to make. Why?

Thanks to CERN, elise wursten, loïc bommersbach and sarah charley

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Creator/host: dianna cowern editor: levi butner research & writing: sophia chen & dianna & imogen ashford

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Physicists at the University of Alberta have developed technology that can translate data from microwaves to optical light—an advance that has promising applications in the next generation of super-fast quantum computers and secure fiber-optic telecommunications.

“Many quantum computer technologies work in the microwave regime, while many quantum communications channels, such as fiber and satellite, work with optical ,” explained Lindsay LeBlanc, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Ultracold Gasses for Quantum Simulation. “We hope that this platform can be used in the future to transduce quantum signals between these two regimes.”

The new technology works by introducing a between microwave radiation and atomic gas. The microwaves are then modulated with an , encoding information into the microwave. This modulation is passed through the gas atoms, which are then probed with to encode the signal into the light.

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Scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have found a way to use diamonds and graphene to create a new material combination that demonstrates so-called superlubricity.

Led by nanoscientist Ani Sumant of Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) and Argonne Distinguished Fellow Ali Erdemir of Argonne’s Energy Systems Division, the Argonne team combined diamond nanoparticles, small patches of graphene, and a diamond-like carbon material to create superlubricity, a highly-desirable property in which friction drops to near zero.

According to Erdemir, as the graphene patches and diamond particles rub up against a large diamond-like carbon surface, the graphene rolls itself around the diamond particle, creating something that looks like a ball bearing on the nanoscopic level.

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Circa 2017

Data storage technology continues to shrink in size and grow in capacity, but scientists have just taken things to the next level — they’ve built a nanoscale hard drive using a single atom.

By magnetising an atom, cooling it with liquid helium, and storing it in an extreme vacuum, the team managed to store a single bit of data (either a 1 or a 0) in this incredibly miniscule space.

Not enough room for your holiday photos then, but according to the team from IBM Research in California, this proof-of-concept approach could eventually lead to drives the size of a credit card that could hold the entire iTunes or Spotify libraries, at about 30 million songs each.

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Researchers from the UK’s Durham University and Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute claim they’ve come up with the world’s first manufactured non-cuttable material, just 15 percent the density of steel, which they say could make for indestructible bike locks and lightweight armor.

The material, named Proteus, uses ceramic spheres in a cellular aluminum structure to foil angle grinders, drills and the like by creating destructive vibrations that blunt any cutting tools used against it. The researchers took inspiration from the tough, cellular skin of grapefruit and the hard, fracture-resistant aragonite shells of molluscs in their creation of the Proteus design.

An angle grinder or drill bit will cut through the outer layer of a Proteus plate, but once it reaches the embedded ceramic spheres, the fun begins with vibrations that blunt the tool’s sharp edges, and then fine particles of ceramic dust begin filling up gaps in the matrix-like structure of the metal. These cause it to become even harder the faster you grind or drill “due to interatomic forces between the ceramic grains,” and “the force and energy of the disc or the drill is turned back on itself, and it is weakened and destroyed by its own attack.”

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In recent years, several research teams worldwide have been trying to develop a new class of devices known as spintronics or spin transport electronics. These devices can encode, store, process and transmit data using the spin of electrons in certain materials.

The operation of spintronics relies on magneto-transport effects, such as (GMR) and tunneling (TMR), which enable the transport of electrons through a given material in the form of a magnetic field. A device is generally made of two conductive ferromagnetic layers separated by a non-magnetic metal layer (i.e., a spin valve) or an insulator layer (i.e., a ).

Magneto-transport effects, which occur in a device’s spin valves and magnetic tunnel junctions, result in a relatively low resistance when the two magnetic layers are parallel and a relatively high resistance state when they are not. These effects are crucial to the functioning of many contemporary storage devices, including and magnetic random access memories (MRAMs).

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The Fermilab magnet team has done it again. After setting a world record for an accelerator magnet in 2019, they have broken it a year later.

In a June 2020 test, a demonstrator magnet designed and built by the magnet team at the Department of Energy’s Fermilab achieved a 14.5-tesla field strength for an accelerator steering dipole magnet, surpassing their previous record of 14.1 T.

This test is an important step toward addressing the demanding magnet requirements of a future hadron collider under discussion in the particle physics community. If built, such a collider would be four times larger and almost eight times more powerful than the 17-mile-circumference Large Hadron Collider at the European laboratory CERN, which operates at a steering field of 7.8 T. Current future-collider designs estimate the field strength for a steering magnet — the magnet responsible for bending particle beams around a curve — to be up to 16 T.

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Magnetically separating waste particles makes it possible to reclaim a variety of raw materials from waste. Using a magnetic fluid, a waste flow can be separated into multiple segments in a single step. Researchers from Utrecht and Nijmegen have now succeeded in creating a magnetic fluid that remains stable in extremely strong magnetic fields, which makes it possible to separate materials with a high density, such as electronic components. The results have recently been published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.

Magnetic density separation

When you drop a stone and a wooden ball into a basin of , the stone will sink while the ball floats on the surface. This is because the two objects have different densities: the stone is more dense than the water, while the wood is less dense. That principle is also used in magnetic density separation (MDS), except that instead of using water—which has a fixed density—it uses a magnetic fluid with an effective density that can change in relation to its distance from a magnet: it has a higher apparent density at less distance to the magnet. As a result, waste particles of different densities float at different depths in the fluid.

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