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Researchers at MIT have developed a way of quickly changing the magnetic polarity of a ferrimagnet 180 degrees, using just a small applied voltage. According to the researchers, the discovery could herald a new era of ferrimagnetic logic and data storage systems.

The findings were published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology in a paper co-authored by postdoctoral researcher Mantao Huang, MIT professor of materials science and technology Geoffrey Beach, and professor of nuclear science and technology Bilge Yildiz, as well as 15 other researchers from MIT and other institutions in Minnesota, Germany, Spain, and Korea.

The majority of magnets we come across are of “ferromagnetic” materials. The atoms in these materials are oriented in the same direction with their north-south magnet axes; thus, their combined strength is strong enough to create attraction. As a result, these materials are often used in the modern high-tech environment.

A subatomic particle has been found to switch between matter and antimatter, according to Oxford physicists analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider. It turns out that an unfathomably tiny weight difference between two particles could have saved the universe from annihilation soon after it began.

Antimatter is kind of the “evil twin” of normal matter, but it’s surprisingly similar – in fact, the only real difference is that antimatter has the opposite charge. That means that if ever a matter and antimatter particle come into contact, they will annihilate each other in a burst of energy.

To complicate things, some particles, such as photons, are actually their own antiparticles. Others have even been seen to exist as a weird mixture of both states at the same time, thanks to the quantum quirk of superposition (illustrated most famously through the thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat.) That means that these particles actually oscillate between being matter and antimatter.

Circa 2014

LEDs have come a long ways. From the early 70s when a bulky LED watch cost thousands of dollars to LG’s announcement last month that it had created an OLED TV as thin as a magazine, these glowing little bits of magic have become wonderfully cheap and impossibly small. But guess what: they’re about to get much smaller.

Physicists with the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms have just announced new success with a particular style of quantum computer —a “programmable quantum simulator”. In this architecture, they take supercold rubidium atoms and use optical tweezers (beams of light) to arrange the atoms into shapes.

As the Harvard Gazette writes …

This new system allows the atoms to be assembled in two-dimensional arrays of optical tweezers. This increases the achievable system size from 51 to 256 qubits. Using the tweezers, researchers can arrange the atoms in defect-free patterns and create programmable shapes like square, honeycomb, or triangular lattices to engineer different interactions between the qubits.

In a new study, a team of researchers proposed that Dark Matter detectors could also search for the elusive force that is causing our Universe to expand (Dark Energy)!

About 25 years ago, astrophysicists noticed something very interesting about the Universe. The fact that it was in a state of expansion had been known since the 1920s, thanks to the observation of Edwin Hubble. But thanks to the observations astronomers were making with the space observatory that bore his name (the Hubble Space Telescope), they began to notice how the rate of cosmic expansion was getting faster!

Continue reading “A Particle Physics Experiment Might Have Directly Observed Dark Energy” »

It turns out, Mars was always fated for a waterless destiny.

New observations from robotic explorers like NASA’s Perseverance and Curiosity have revealed much about the ancient past of the Red Planet, where liquid water flowed throughout the planet’s surface. It used to have lakes, streams, rivers, and perhaps even a colossal ocean stretching around the horizon of Mars’ northern hemisphere. For decades, scientists have thought the weakening of the Martian magnetic field enabled charged particles from the sun to strip away the atmosphere, literally blowing away the bodies of water.

Continue reading “Alien Planets Are Even Less Habitable Than We Thought” »

New technique delivers resolution improvement in ultrafast processes.

An international consortium of scientists, initiated by Reinhard Kienberger, Professor of Laser and X-ray Physics at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), several years ago, has made significant measurements in the femtosecond range at the U.S. Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).

However, on these minuscule timescales, it is extremely difficult to synchronize the X-ray pulse that sparks a reaction in the sample on the one hand and the laser pulse which ‘observes’ it on the other. This problem is called timing jitter, and it is a major hurdle in ongoing efforts to perform time-resolved experiments at XFELs with ever-shorter resolution.

Protons populate the nucleus of every atom in the universe. Inside the nucleus, they cling tightly to neighboring protons and neutrons. However, it may be possible to knock out protons that are in a smaller size configuration, so that they interact less with nearby particles as they exit the nucleus. This phenomenon is called color transparency. Nuclear physicists hunting for signs of color transparency in protons recently came up empty handed.

The Impact.

The theory that describes the behavior of particles made of quarks is called quantum chromodynamics (QCD). QCD includes many common subatomic particles, such as protons and neutrons. It also predicts the phenomenon of color transparency. Physicists have observed color transparency in simpler, two-quark particles called pions. If physicists can observe or rule out color transparency for protons, a more complicated three-quark system, they would gain important clues regarding the differences between two-and three-quark systems in QCD.

Thu, Sep 23 at 8 AM PDT.

Join us on-line from 4pm to 7pm on Thursday 23 September for a livestream event to learn about particle physics research at Oxford. Hear from researchers studying High Energy collisions, and phenomena like dark matter, antimatter, and neutrinos; follow a guided tour of our Minecraft model of the CERN laboratory; and watch exciting demonstrations from the Accelerate! show. Oxford particle physicists will be available through the evening to answer your questions.

Live, via the Oxford Physics YouTube channel. Everyone is welcome, regardless their knowledge of physics.

Continue reading “COLLIDE! Why particle physics at Oxford matters… | Facebook” »