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Physics and Matter News - November 2009 Archives
 | Even if you are not a cook, you might have wondered why a pinch of flour (or any small particles) thrown into a bowl of water will disperse in a dramatic fashion, radiating outward as if it was exploding. Pushpendra Singh, Ph.D., a mechanical engineering professor at NJIT who has studied and written about the phenomenon, has not only thought about it, but can explain why. ...> Full Article |
 | The dusty boxes that line the walls of Jeff Barrett's UC Irvine office mark a high point in his academic career. Their contents: pages and pages of notes, most more than 50 years old, penned by late quantum theorist Hugh Everett, III. ...> Full Article |
 | Dong Yang and Jens Eisert of the University of Potsdam have shown how to delicately comb out a snarl of entanglements among many qubits while keeping the information intact. ...> Full Article |
 | Physicists at UC Santa Barbara have made an important advance in electrically controlling quantum states of electrons, a step that could help in the development of quantum computing. The work is published online today on the Science Express Web site. ...> Full Article |
 | The ocean is a potentially vast source of electric power, yet as engineers test new technologies for capturing it, the devices are plagued by battering storms, limited efficiency and the need to be tethered to the seafloor. ...> Full Article |
 | Physicists at the National Institute of
Standards and Technology have demonstrated the
first "universal" programmable quantum information
processor able to run any program allowed by quantum
mechanics?the rules governing the submicroscopic
world -- using two quantum bits (qubits) of information. The
processor could be a module in a future quantum
computer, which theoretically could solve some important
problems that are intractable today. ...> Full Article |
To exploit the quantum world to the fullest, a key commodity is entanglement -- the spooky, distance-defying link that can form between objects such as atoms even when they are completely shielded from one another. Now, physicists at the Joint Quantum Institute, a collaborative organization of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland, have developed a promising new source of entangled photons using quantum dots tweaked with a laser.
...> Full Article
 | New MIT research points the way to a technology that might make it possible to harvest much of the wasted heat produced by everything from computer processor chips to car engines to electric power plants, and turn it into usable electricity. ...> Full Article |
 | Convincing experimental evidence has finally been found for directed percolation, a phenomenon that turns up in computer models of the ways diseases spread through a population or how water soaks through loose soil. ...> Full Article |
 | Scientists and curiosity seekers who want to know what a partially or completely cloaked object would look like in real life can now get their wish -- virtually. A team of researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany has created a new visualization tool that can render a room containing such an object, showing the visual effects of such a cloaking mechanism and its imperfections.
...> Full Article |
 | Scientists at the University of Adelaide have made a breakthrough that could change the world's thinking on what light is capable of. ...> Full Article |
 | Two independent teams have, for the first time, created Bose-Einstein condensates of strontium atoms. ...> Full Article |
 | A unique large-scale research device from Jülich went into operation in the US yesterday. At the strongest neutron source in the world, the spallation source SNS in Oak Ridge, Tenn., Forschungszentrum Jülich inaugurated a so-called neutron spin echo spectrometer. The NSE spectrometer enables detailed observations to be made of the motion of proteins and polymers. It will thus help to develop improved plastics or to understand metabolic processes in cells. ...> Full Article |
 | Scientists have always attempted to develop spin transistors by incorporating local ferromagnets into device architectures. A far better and practical way to manipulate the orientation of an electron's spin would be by using purely electrical means. A team of researchers led by the University of Cincinnati's Philippe Debray and Marc Cahay is the first to find an innovative and novel way to control an electron's spin orientation using purely electrical means. ...> Full Article |
A detailed picture of the seeds of structures in the universe has been unveiled by an international team co-led by a Cardiff University scientist.
...> Full Article
 | A time-varying bubble of electron density in the wake of an ultra-intense laser pulse traps the ambient plasma electrons and accelerates them to high energy producing collimated monoenergetic beams for medical, technological, and physics applications ...> Full Article |
 | An international team of physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory has succeeded in using intense laser light to accelerate protons to energies never before achieved. Using this technique, scientists can now accelerate particles to extremely high velocities that would otherwise only be possible using large accelerator facilities. Physicists around the world are examining laser particle acceleration and laser produced radiation for potential future uses in cancer treatment. ...> Full Article |
 | The University of Delaware has won a $4.4 million grant from the US Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency to lead a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research project to develop the next generation of high-performance permanent magnets. ...> Full Article |
 | Magnetized plasmas occupy a large fraction of our cosmic universe; they exist on our sun, in the earth's magnetosphere, and in astrophysical plasmas. ...> Full Article |
 | If you keep twisting a straight elastic string, at some moment it starts kinking in a wild way. ...> Full Article |
 | Physicists at Zhejiang University in China and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a new metamaterial structure that successfully demonstrates reverse Cerenkov radiation. ...> Full Article |
 | Using precision techniques for making superconducting thin films layer-by-layer, physicists at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have identified a single layer responsible for one such material's ability to become superconducting, i.e., carry electrical current with no energy loss. The technique, described in the Oct. 30, 2009, issue of Science, could be used to engineer ultrathin films with "tunable" superconductivity for higher-efficiency electronic devices. ...> Full Article |
 | Scientists at the University of Konstanz in Germany and the National Institute of Standards and
Technology in the United States have built the first optical frequency comb -- a tool for precisely
measuring different frequencies of visible light -- that actually looks like a comb. ...> Full Article |
Researchers from US and European universities and institutions are collaborating on plans to build an enormous WIMP detector, in hopes of finding the stuff of dark matter. The 20-ton liquid xenon experiment is proposed as a major experiment for the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory, a national lab planned for the former Homestake Mine beneath the Black Hills of South Dakota.
...> Full Article
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