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For the first time, an experiment was able to demonstrate that it isn’t just identical quantum particles that can become entangled, but particles with opposite electric charges, too. (The π⁺ and the π^–, for what it’s worth, are one another’s antiparticle.) The technique of passing two heavy nuclei very close to one another at nearly the speed of light allows for photons, arising from the electromagnetic field of each nucleus, to interact with the other nucleus, occasionally forming a rho particle that decays into two pions. When both nuclei do this at once, the entanglement can be seen, and the radius of the atomic nucleus can be measured.

It’s also remarkable that measuring the size of the nucleus through this method, which uses the strong force rather than the electromagnetic force, gives a different, larger result than one would get by using the nuclear charge radius. As lead author on the study, James Brandenburg, put it, “Now we can take a picture where we can really distinguish the density of gluons at a given angle and radius. The images are so precise that we can even start to see the difference between where the protons are and where the neutrons are laid out inside these big nuclei.” We now have a promising method to probe the internal structure of these complex, heavy nuclei, with more applications, no doubt, soon to come.

Quantum physics shows that there is no such thing as ‘nothing.’ Even in a vacuum, particles can blink into and out of existence.

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As fusion developers around the world race to commercialize fusion energy, TAE Technologies has pioneered the pursuit of the cleanest and most economical path to providing electricity with hydrogen-boron (also known as p-B¹¹ or p¹¹ B), an abundant, environmentally sound fuel. Today the company is announcing, in collaboration with Japan’s National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), a noteworthy research advancement: the first-ever hydrogen-boron fusion experiments in a magnetically confined fusion plasma.

In a paper published by Nature Communications, scientists explain the outcome of the nuclear fusion reaction of hydrogen-boron in an experiment in NIFS’ Large Helical Device (LHD). This paper describes the experimental work of producing the conditions necessary for hydrogen-boron fusion in the LHD plasma and TAE’s development of a detector to make measurements of the hydrogen-boron reaction products: helium nuclei, known as alpha particles.

The finding reflects years of collaborative international scientific fusion research, and represents a milestone in TAE’s mission to develop commercial fusion power with hydrogen-boron, the cleanest, most cost-competitive, and most sustainable fuel cycle for fusion.

Researchers have captured the signal of neutrinos from a nuclear reactor using a water-filled neutrino detector, a first for such a device.

In a mine in Sudbury, Canada, the SNO+ detector is being readied to search for a so-far-undetected nuclear-decay process. Spotting this rare decay would allow researchers to confirm that the neutrino is its own antiparticle (see Viewpoint: Probing Majorana Neutrinos). But while SNO+ team members prepare for that search, they have made another breakthrough by capturing the interaction with water of antineutrinos from nuclear reactors [1]. The finding offers the possibility of making neutrino detectors from a nontoxic material that is easy to handle and inexpensive to obtain, key factors for use of the technology in auditing the world’s nuclear reactors (see Feature: Neutrino Detectors for National Security).

The SNO+ detector was inherited from the earlier Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) experiment. Today the detector is filled with a liquid that lights up when charged particles pass through it. But in 2018, to calibrate the detector’s components and to characterize its intrinsic radioactive background signal after the experiment’s upgrade, it contained water. The antineutrino signal was observed when, after completing those measurements, the researchers took the opportunity to carry out additional experiments before the liquid was switched out.

Simulations and an experiment aboard the International Space Station show that changes in the system’s repulsive forces are behind the alignment of particles embedded in an electrified plasma.

“If we could see the air we fly in, we wouldn’t,” is a common saying among glider pilots. The invisible turbulent pockets that accompany soaring thermals present hazards to small aircraft, but today’s observational tools struggle to measure such wind features at high spatial resolutions over large distances. Now Yunpeng Zhang of the University of Science and Technology of China and his colleagues demonstrate how adapting a remote-sensing technology called pulsed coherent Doppler lidar (PCDL) enables long-range wind detection with submeter resolution [1].

PCDL senses wind speeds by detecting the frequency shift when a laser pulse scatters off dust particles in the air. By measuring the time taken for this scattered light to return to the detector, the technique allows wide-region profiling of wind speeds. This large-scale sampling comes at the cost of measurement precision, however. Measuring the laser’s travel time requires short-duration pulses, but short pulses transmit little total energy for a given laser power, and this energy is necessarily dispersed over a wide frequency range.

To avoid this trade-off, Zhang and his colleagues imprinted a phase-modulation pattern within each transmitted pulse using an electro-optic modulator. This pattern broke the link between pulse duration and spatial resolution, allowing a more flexible pulse duration. As a result, their setup achieved a spatial resolution of 0.9 m at a distance of 700 m (compared to a 3-m resolution at 300 m for a conventional instrument) and was able to detect the wind from an electric fan on a rooftop 329 m away.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are cylindrical tube-like structures made of carbon atoms that display highly desirable physical properties like high strength, low weight, and excellent thermal and electrical conductivities. This makes them ideal materials for various applications, including reinforcement materials, energy storage and conversion devices, and electronics.

Despite such immense potential, however, there have been challenges in commercializing CNTs, such as their incorporation on plastic substrates for fabricating flexible CNT-based devices. Traditional fabrication methods require carefully controlled environments such as high temperatures and a clean room. Further, they require repeat transfers to produce CNTs with different resistance values.

More direct methods such as laser-induced forward transfer (LIFT) and thermal fusion (TF) have been developed as alternatives. In the LIFT method, a laser is used to directly transfer CNTs onto substrates, while in TF, CNTs are mixed with polymers that are then selectively removed by a laser to form CNT wires with varying resistance values.

Imagine a sheet of material just one layer of atoms thick—less than a millionth of a millimeter. While this may sound fantastical, such a material exists: it is called graphene and it is made from carbon atoms in a honeycomb arrangement. First synthesized in 2004 and then soon hailed as a substance with wondrous characteristics, scientists are still working on understanding it.

Postdoc Areg Ghazaryan and Professor Maksym Serbyn at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) together with colleagues Dr. Tobias Holder and Professor Erez Berg from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have been studying graphene for years and have now published their newest findings on its superconducting properties in a research paper in the journal Physical Review B.

“Multilayered graphene has many promising qualities ranging from widely tunable band structure and special optical properties to new forms of superconductivity—meaning being able to conduct electrical current without resistance,” Ghazaryan explains.