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Category: particle physics – Page 5

Diamond-based particle detector captures one-picosecond electron bursts for high-rate beam diagnostics

Physicists at UC Santa Cruz and other institutes across California and New Mexico have developed a detection system that will allow next-generation particle accelerators to better reveal fundamental biological and chemical processes, as well as advance critical areas such as materials science and energy research.

The Advanced Accelerator Diagnostics Collaboration, a group of two University of California campuses and three U.S. national laboratories, came together to solve a growing need for high-rate beam diagnostics. These accelerators will now jump from 120 pulses a second to 1 million pulses a second, straining current beam diagnostic systems. The results are now published in the journal Physical Review Accelerators and Beams.

“It really highlights the power of collaboration between universities and national laboratories,” said Bruce Schumm, the Long Family Professor of Experimental Physics. “If you took away Lawrence Berkeley Lab, if you took away Los Alamos, if you took away UC Davis, any of those, the whole thing would have fallen apart.”

How do flocking birds and schools of fish move? New research offers crystal-clear answer

Flocking birds and schools of fish are a familiar sight. While previous research has uncovered the broad dynamics driving these movements, their underlying intricacies remain a mystery. Now a study by a team of New York University mathematicians offers new insights into these phenomena. It reveals that flocks and schools behave in ways similar to a soft crystalline material, with individual birds and fish serving as “atoms” that are evenly spaced in a lattice-like formation.

The findings, reported in the journal Physical Review Fluids, offer detailed insights into the hydrodynamic and aerodynamic interactions crucial in aerospace and automotive engineering, robotics and energy harvesting.

“Our findings offer a new way to understand how animal collectives coordinate movement and respond to their environment,” says Christiana Mavroyiakoumou, a researcher at NYU’s Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science at the time of the study and now a fellow at Oxford University’s Mathematical Institute. “More specifically, lines of birds or fish behave like an elastic material with regularly spaced individuals held together by flexible, or spring-like, bonds—akin to soft crystalline substances in which atoms are arranged in an orderly, repeating pattern.”

Electrically tunable spin polarization in graphene opens path toward low-power spintronic devices

Researchers at the National Graphene Institute, in collaboration with the National University of Singapore, have shown that the magnetic behavior of electrons in graphene can be precisely controlled using electricity, revealing unusually large spin signals in a carefully engineered graphene system.

The study, published in Nature Communications, demonstrates how placing graphene close to a magnetic material can influence the spin of electrons without permanently altering graphene itself. By combining this magnetic proximity effect with graphene superlattices and operating at very low charge densities, the researchers were able to strongly tune how spins move through the material.

“This work shows that by combining graphene with nearby magnetic materials, we can gain a high level of control over electron spin using electrical signals alone,” said Dr. Daniel Burrow, from the University of Manchester. “In simple terms, we are learning how to pass information through graphene using the spin of electrons rather than their electrical charge.”

Reversible chirality switching in MoS₂ generates spin currents without magnets

A newly developed method allows researchers to dynamically switch chirality—a particular lack of mirror symmetry—to generate spin currents in semiconductors, researchers from Science Tokyo report. Their approach relies on the reversible insertion and removal of small chiral molecules from the interlayer gaps of a layered, nonchiral semiconductor material using electrochemistry.

The findings could pave the way for the development of novel chiral spintronic materials and technologies that do not rely on magnets or magnetic fields.

AI-driven optical tweezers sort hundreds of particles per hour without humans

Just as self-driving cars navigate traffic without a human behind the wheel, laboratory instruments are now being developed that can design, carry out and repeat experiments independently, 24 hours a day.

Researchers at the University of Gothenburg and other institutions have now developed an AI system capable of speeding up the operation of optical tweezers, dubbed SmartTrap. The work has been published in Nature Methods.

New plasma trick could unlock smaller, more powerful computer chips

Under carefully controlled conditions, particles within a plasma can strike the surface of a TMD material and knock atoms loose. The challenge is achieving enough energy to remove sulfur atoms from the top layer without harming the molybdenum layer beneath. Because the difference between success and damage is so small, developing a reliable process has proven difficult.

Using computer simulations, researchers found that treating molybdenum disulfide with oxygen or fluorine before plasma exposure can make the process much more controlled. Their findings were published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.

Quantum sensor overcomes major obstacle in search for dark matter and gravitational waves

A prototype quantum sensor developed by researchers at Imperial has demonstrated for the first time that a key principle behind next-generation quantum detectors can work under realistic conditions.

The study shows how comparing two long-baseline atom interferometers, instruments that use lasers to precisely measure the behavior of atoms, allows experimental noise to be effectively canceled.

This enables signals to be recovered even when individual measurements are overwhelmed and opens the door to searches for gravitational waves from the early universe and signatures of exotic forms of dark matter.

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