Physics

A team of researchers at Rice University has engineered a new version of a well-known multiferroic that exhibits orders of magnitude higher performance at room temperature than its parent material. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes a modified version of bismuth ferrite that shows a 10-fold increase in […]

The concept of spacetime, first described in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, has since been widely studied by many physicists worldwide. Spacetime is described mathematically as a four-dimensional (4D) continuum in which physical events occur, which merges three-dimensional (3D) space, with one-dimensional (1D) time. Source link

Researchers have uncovered a counterintuitive phenomenon in collision dynamics: high-speed particles bounce back from wet walls much more strongly than expected. Integrating experimental observations with advanced numerical simulations revealed that increasing the impact speed induces a morphological transition in the post-collision liquid film, shifting it from a bridge to a dome shape. Further, it clarified

From wearable technology to industrial heat recovery, thermoelectric generators which convert waste heat into electricity have an enormous range of potential applications. So far, however, designing high-performing versions of these devices has remained a painstaking task. Source link

Sticking with the same people might feel safe and comfortable. But a new Northwestern University study suggests it can actually trap new ideas and behaviors inside tight echo chambers. By contrast, the research, published in Communications Physics, shows that when interactions shift away from familiar contacts—and toward new ones—activity can spread more widely. Source link

Researchers from Skoltech and the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics have developed an approach that helps optimize the parameters of a laser-plasma source of attosecond pulses—ultrashort flashes of light used in physics experiments. Instead of relying on a large number of time-consuming calculations, the team trained a neural network to quickly identify promising

A scientist from Tokyo Metropolitan University has proposed using safety monitoring at synchrotron facilities to study the properties of dark photons, hypothetical particles proposed to explain dark matter. Calculations show that the X-ray source at these sites and a Geiger-Muller counter behind safety shielding could be used to propose limits on how strongly dark photons

A detector buried deep in Antarctic ice has captured the first experimental evidence of a predicted but never-before-seen phenomenon: radio pulses generated when high-energy cosmic rays slam into the ice sheet and trigger particle cascades inside it. Through results published in Physical Review Letters, astronomers of the Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) Collaboration have validated a

For some time, researchers have assumed that solid materials could gain more useful properties by making their microscopic components more active. Now, a team led by Jack Binysh at the University of Amsterdam has found that this idea doesn’t always hold. Source link

Some innovations in physics come from entirely new technologies, others from fresh theoretical insights. Others still take shape by bringing together existing tools in new ways, working out how to combine them to outperform other solutions. The branch of particle physics that studies weakly interacting particles—such as neutrinos and some types of dark-matter candidates—could use