Tokamaks are machines that are meant to hold and harness the power of the sun. These fusion machines use powerful magnets to contain a plasma hotter than the sun's core and push the plasma's atoms to fuse and release energy. If tokamaks can operate safely and efficiently, the machines could one day provide clean and limitless fusion energy.
From computer chips to quantum dots—technological platforms were only made possible thanks to a detailed understanding of the used solid-state materials, such as silicon or more complex semiconductor materials. This understanding also includes being able to identify and control irregularities in the crystal lattice of such materials.
A team of researchers at the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has created a new breakthrough in photonics: the design of the first optical device that follows the emerging framework of optical thermodynamics.
An international team of researchers has developed a novel technique to efficiently excite and control highly-confined light-matter waves, known as higher-order hyperbolic phonon polaritons. Their method not only sets new records for the quality and propagation distance of these waves but also uses a sharp boundary to create a form of pseudo-birefringence, sorting and steering the waves by mode into different directions.
The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists on Tuesday for discovering that a bizarre barrier-defying phenomenon in the quantum realm could be observed on an electrical circuit in our classical world.
A new discovery about how cutting onions ejects pungent aerosols up to two-thirds of a meter into the air has led to practical advice for reducing the spray: Cut onions slowly with a sharpened blade or coat an onion in oil before cutting.
For decades, it's been known that subtle chemical patterns exist in metal alloys, but researchers thought they were too minor to matter—or that they got erased during manufacturing. However, recent studies have shown that in laboratory settings, these patterns can change a metal's properties, including its mechanical strength, durability, heat capacity, radiation tolerance, and more.
For decades, scientists have observed, but been unable to explain, a phenomenon seen in some soft materials: When force is applied, these materials exhibit not one, but two spikes in energy dissipation, known as overshoots. Because overshoots are generally thought to indicate the point at which a material yields, or transitions from solid-like to fluid-like behavior, the dual response was therefore assumed to indicate "double yielding"—the idea that to fully fluidize a material, it needed to yield twice.
Cornell researchers have built a programmable optical chip that can change the color of light by merging photons, without requiring a new chip for new colors.
Imagine zooming into matter at the quantum scale, where tiny particles can interact in more than a trillion configurations at once.
Every time you check the time on your phone, make an online transaction, or use a navigation app, you are depending on the precision of atomic clocks.
Magnetic materials have been known since ancient times and play an important role in modern society, where the net magnetic order offers routes to energy harvesting and data processing. It is the net magnetic moment of ferromagnets that has so far been key to their applications, with an alternative type of magnetic material, the antiferromagnet, deemed "useless" by their discoverer Louis Néel in his Nobel Prize lecture.
Scientists have created the world's hottest engine running at temperatures hotter than those reached in the sun's core. The team from King's College London and collaborators believe their platform could provide an unparalleled understanding of the laws of thermodynamics on a small scale, and provide the foundation for a new, efficient way to compute how proteins fold—the subject of last year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Quantum mechanics describes the weird behavior of microscopic particles. Using quantum systems to perform computation promises to allow researchers to solve problems in areas from chemistry to cryptography that have so many possible solutions that they are beyond the capabilities of even the most powerful nonquantum computers possible.
The world's most sensitive table-top interferometric system—a miniature version of miles-long gravitational-wave detectors like LIGO—has completed its first science run.
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