Group items tagged

Scientists may have discovered a 4-quark particle...

A combination of two quark-antiquark pairs could be possible, maybe strongly interacting if they are all of similar types (charm and anti-charm in this case) or it may be via gluon exchange by the strong force.. Intriguing...

More than a century after the idea was first floated, physicists have finally figured out how to tie water in knots in the laboratory. The gnarly feat, described today in Nature Physics1, paves the way for scientists to experimentally study twists and turns in a range of phenomena - ionized gases like that of the Sun's outer atmosphere, superconductive materials, liquid crystals and quantum fields that describe elementary particles.

Lord Kelvin proposed that atoms were knotted "vortex rings" - which are essentially like tornado bent into closed loops and knotted around themselves, as Daniel Lathrop and Barbara Brawn-Cinani write in an accompanying commentary. In Kelvin's vision, the fluid was the theoretical 'aether' then thought to pervade all of space. Each type of atom would be represented by a different knot.

Related stories
Solar magnetism twists braids of superheated gas
Electron microscopy gets twisted
Topological insulators: Star material
More related stories
Kelvin's interpretation of the periodic table never went anywhere, but his ideas led to the blossoming of the mathematical theory of knots, part of the field of topology. Meanwhile, scientists also have come to realize that knots have a key role in a host of physical processes.

Rogue tea leaves have led physicists to the discovery of a counter-intuitive phenomenon: Particles can float upstream in moving water.

"Hbar Technologies plans a Kickstarter effort to raise US $200,000 for the next phase design of an antimatter-propelled spaceship. The two scientists behind this design effort are a veteran Fermilab particle accelerator scientist and a former Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist and founding director of the U.S. Center for Space Nuclear Research. They originally developed it for NASA at the turn of the millennium."

Normally we associate levitation of objects to superconducting materials. Here a new technique is shown where levitation of a whole new range of materials is shown. "The large temperature gradient leads to a force that balances gravity and results in stable levitation," said Fung, the study's lead author. "We managed to quantify the thermophoretic force and found reasonable agreement with what is predicted by theory. This will allow us to explore the possibilities of levitating different types of objects." Paper at http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4974489 New microgravity experiments possibility?

not really I fear .... "Typical sizes of the trapped particles are between 10 μm and 1 mm at a pressure between 1 and 10 Torr. The trapping stability is provided radially by the increasing temperature field and vertically by the transition from the free molecule to hydrodynamic behavior of thermophoresis as the particles ascend."

Might still be OK micro to mm sized experiments. The technique seems to be reliable and cheap enough to compete with other types of microgravity approaches - more research needed to define boundaries of course.

Find yourself in an area without breathable air? No problem... just use this!

A vast bubble of hot, rarefied gas has been revealed as a source of cosmic rays - the mysterious particles that batter the Earth continuously. The observation of the so-called superbubble, measuring more than 100 light-years across, was made using gamma rays collected by NASA's Fermi satellite and sheds light on the origin of cosmic rays in regions of massive-star formation.

According to BBC the abstract means they've found a new particle...

Physicists working on the LHCb experiment at the CERN particle-physics lab have released the best evidence yet for direct charge-parity (CP) violation in charm mesons....While more data must be analysed to confirm the result, the work could point to new physics beyond the Standard Model and help physicists understand why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.

lot of new physics this year ...

:-)

Well, it's not yet confirmed... That error would be worse than the magnetic moment of the muon about 10 years ago. There, it was "at least" a conflict of conventions used in the computer codes!

In a statement based on an earlier press release from the OPERA collaboration, CERN said two possible "effects" may have influenced the anomalous measurements. One of them, due to a possible faulty connection between the fiber-optic cable bringing the GPS signals to OPERA and the detector's master clock, would have caused the experiment to underestimate the neutrinos' flight time, as described in the original story. The other effect concerns an oscillator, part of OPERA's particle detector that gives its readings time stamps synchronized to GPS signals. Researchers think correcting for an error in this device would actually increase the anomaly in neutrino velocity, making the particles even speedier than the earlier measurements seemed to show. CERN's statement says OPERA scientists are studying the "potential extent of these two effects" but doesn't indicate which source of error (if either) is likely to outweigh the other. However, Lucia Votano, director of the Gran Sasso laboratory, says the "main suspicion" focuses on the optical-fiber connection. She adds that OPERA researchers deserve credit for "having tenaciously followed this particular evidence via checks completed in the last few days." The two effects will get a new round of tests in May, when the two labs are scheduled to make velocity measurements with short-pulsed beams designed to give readings much more precise than scientists have achieved so far.

News about the warp drive based on the original Alcubierre metric but with modified shape function. Focus of the reserach was on the interaction between warp bubble and cosmic particles. Result: People on board need shielding. People at the journey's destination might get roasted (by Gamma rays if you want to know).

anna, this is your shit ;) ...and they mentione albert einstein so it has to be an intelligent and good finding :)

and?

and?

Trends in materials and condensed matter. Check out the topological insulators. amazing field.

I will try my best. In a nutshell: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100714/full/466310a.html

*you* tried *your* best .... ??

crazy, the Maxwell's demon at work !

crazy indeed

See Also: Matter & Energy Nanotechnology Optics Physics Materials Science Graphene Organic Chemistry Reference White gold Electromagnetic radiation Nanomedicine Nanoparticle Any use for the smell project? "We have demonstrated resonant antenna-enhanced single-particle hydrogen sensing in the visible region and presented a fabrication approach to the positioning of a single palladium nanoparticle in the nanofocus of a gold nanoantenna,"

Who said that particles are round?