Ultrashort laser pulses induce unusual sound waves via a structural instability in a material.
RIKEN physicists have initiated unusual sound waves in a flake using ultrashort pulses of laser light and then created videos of their movement using electron microscopy. This advance should help engineers to achieve higher precision control of heat flow and sound in nanodevices using light.
Scientists can use some pretty wild forces to manipulate materials. There’s acoustic tweezers, which use the force of acoustic radiation to control tiny objects. Optical tweezers made of lasers exploit the force of light. Not content with that, now physicists have made a device to manipulate materials using the force of… nothingness.
OK, that may be a bit simplistic. When we say nothingness, we’re really referring to the attractive force that arises between two surfaces in a vacuum, known as the Casimir force. The new research has provided not just a way to use it for no-contact object manipulation, but also to measure it.
The implications span multiple fields, from chemistry and gravitational wave astronomy all the way down to something as fundamental and ubiquitous as metrology — the science of measurement.
A nuclear physics professor from Florida International University was among a team of researchers that proposed something so out of this world, colleagues first hesitated to accept it was possible.
In 1993, they boldly predicted how the densest materials in the universe—known to exist only in rare neutron stars —could be made here on Earth. Ultimately, their research was published in Physical Review C, a leading academic journal focused on nuclear physics.
It spawned a wave of follow up research that in 2006 confirmed their prediction was true. For the tiniest sliver of a second, researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia were able to briefly create the material that exists inside a neutron star.
Must watch astronomy events this month.
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Comet NEOWISE made July 2020 a memorable month. Here are the astronomy events that will occur in August 2020.
In a study published earlier this month, a team of theoretical physicists is claiming to have discovered the remnants of previous universes hidden within the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. Our universe is a vast collection of observable matter, like gas, dust, stars, etc., in addition to the ever-elusive dark matter and dark energy. In some sense, this universe is all we know, and even then, we can only directly study about 5% of it, leaving 95% a mystery that scientists are actively working to solve. However, this group of physicists is arguing that our universe isn’t alone; it’s just one in a long line of universes that are born, grow, and die. Among these scientists is mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, who worked closely with Stephen Hawking and currently is the Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University. Penrose and his collaborators follow a cosmological theory called conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) in which universes, much like human beings, come into existence, expand, and then perish.
Statistical studies of the motions of millions of stars may reveal the subtle imprint of dark matter.
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