Some mushrooms are sturdier than others, but it isn’t necessarily because of their chemistry – it’s how the filaments that make them up are arranged.
Category: materials – Page 13
JWST finds unusual black hole in the center of the Infinity Galaxy: ‘How can we make sense of this?’
The researchers behind these findings uncovered the Infinity Galaxy while examining images from the JWST’s 255-hour treasury COSMOS-Web survey. In addition to the suspected direct collapse black hole that sits between the colliding galaxies, the team found that each nucleus of those galaxies also contains a supermassive black hole!
“Everything is unusual about this galaxy. Not only does it look very strange, but it also has this supermassive black hole that’s pulling a lot of material in,” team leader and Yale University researcher Pieter van Dokkum said in a statement. “The biggest surprise of all was that the black hole was not located inside either of the two nuclei but in the middle.
We asked ourselves: How can we make sense of this?
The magic of magnons: Material properties changed non-thermally using light and magnons
“The result was a huge surprise for us. No theory has ever predicted it,” says Davide Bossini.
Not only does the process work—it also has spectacular effects. By driving high-frequency magnon pairs via laser pulses, the physicists succeeded in changing the frequencies and amplitudes of other magnons—and thus the magnetic properties of the material—in a non-thermal way.
“Every solid has its own set of frequencies: electronic transitions, lattice vibrations, magnetic excitations. Every material resonates in its own way,” explains Bossini. It is precisely this set of frequencies that can be influenced through the new process.
Scientists achieve first experimental observation of the transverse Thomson effect
In a new Nature Physics paper, researchers report the first experimental observation of the transverse Thomson effect, a key thermoelectric phenomenon that has eluded scientists since it was predicted over a century ago.
For over a century, thermoelectric effects have formed the foundation of how physicists understand the link between heat and electricity. Our knowledge of how heat and electricity interact within materials is rooted in the Seebeck, Peltier, and Thomson effects, all identified during the 1800s.
The Thomson effect causes volumetric heating or cooling when an electric current and a temperature gradient flow in the same direction through a conductor.
Greatly enhanced nonreciprocal transport in KTaO₃-based interface superconductors linked to parity mixing
Superconductivity is an advantageous property observed in some materials, which entails the ability to conduct electricity without resistance below specific critical temperatures. One particularly fascinating phenomenon observed in some unconventional superconductors is so-called spin-triplet pairing.
In conventional superconductors, electrons form what are known as “Cooper pairs,” pairs of electrons with opposite momentum and spin, a phenomenon referred to as spin-singlet pairing. In some unconventional superconductors, on the other hand, researchers observed a different state known as spin-triplet pairing, which entails the formation of pairs of electrons with parallel spins.
Researchers at Fudan University, RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) and other institutes recently observed a significantly enhanced nonreciprocal transport in a class of superconductors known as KTaO3-based interface superconductors, which they proposed could be explained by the co-existence of spin-singlet and spin-triplet states.