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Category: physics – Page 84

China touts ‘water battery’ with more energy capacity than lithium cells: study

Their findings “may expand aqueous battery applications in the power battery field”, said corresponding author Li Xianfeng, a professor at the CAS Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, who was quoted in a statement from the academy.

Lithium batteries are the standard used across the world because of their high energy density. Traditional lithium batteries contained a non-aqueous electrolyte – a component that allowed the battery to charge and discharge – which was flammable, the paper said.

Aqueous batteries are made up of a water-based electrolyte which does not present the same safety risks.

Einstein Challenged: Exploring the “Cosmic Glitch” in Gravity

Moving one step closer to understanding mysteries at the edge of the universe.

A group of researchers at the University of Waterloo and the University of British Columbia have discovered a potential “cosmic glitch” in the universe’s gravity, explaining its strange behavior on a cosmic scale.

For the last 100 years, physicists have relied upon Albert Einstein’s theory of “general relativity” to explain how gravity works throughout the universe. General relativity, proven accurate by countless tests and observations, suggests that gravity impacts not simply three physical dimensions but also a fourth dimension: time.

Physicists create an optical tweezer array of individual polyatomic molecules for the first time

A team of physicists at Harvard University has succeeded in trapping individual polyatomic molecules in optical tweezer arrays for the first time. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes how they achieved their feat and the possible uses for it. A Research Briefing also describes their work in the same journal issue.

Revealing the Mysteries of the Cosmos With Faster Gravitational Wave Detection

A new study will improve the detection of gravitational waves —ripples in space and time. Scientists at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities College of Science and Engineering co-led the research with an international team.

The research aims to send alerts to astronomers and astrophysicists within 30 seconds after the detection, helping to improve the understanding of neutron stars and black holes and how heavy elements, including gold and uranium, are produced.

The findings were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), a peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journal.

Decades in the Making: Laser Excites Atomic Nucleus in Groundbreaking Discovery

For the first time, lasers have successfully excited the “thorium transition,” a process long pursued by researchers. This breakthrough sets the stage for groundbreaking advancements in high-precision technologies, such as nuclear clocks.

Physicists have eagerly anticipated this breakthrough: scientists globally have spent years searching for a specific state of thorium atomic nuclei that could lead to groundbreaking technological advancements.

It could be used, for example, to build an nuclear clock that could measure time more precisely than the best atomic clocks available today. It could also be used to answer completely new fundamental questions in physics – for example, the question of whether the constants of nature are actually constant or whether they change in space and time.

Physicists discover new way to make strange metal

The work introduces a completely new way to create and study , whose electrons behave differently than those in a conventional metal like copper. “It is a potential new approach to designing these unusual materials,” says Joseph G. Checkelsky, lead principal investigator of the research and Associate Professor of Physics.

Linda Ye, MIT Ph.D. ‘21, is first author of a paper on the work published earlier this year in Nature Physics. “A new way of making strange metals will help us develop a unifying theory behind their behavior. That has been quite challenging to date, and could lead to a better understanding of other materials, including ,” says Ye, now an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology.

The Nature Physics paper is accompanied by a News & Views article titled, “A strange way to get a strange metal.”