The translucent crystal at the center of this illustration is a topological insulator, a quantum material where electrons (white dots) flow freely on its surface but not through its interior. By hitting a TI with powerful pulses of circularly polarized laser light (red spiral), SLAC and Stanford scientists generated harmonics that revealed what happens when … Read more
I’m a little nervous. In my right hand, I’m holding a priceless piece of human history. And that’s not hyperbole. It’s a weathered black binder, emblazoned with gold text on the front. In Gothic-style text it reads “A Leaf of The Gutenberg Bible (1450 – 1455).” Yes, that Gutenberg Bible. These original pages, that date … Read more
by Luke Barnes, Miroslav Filipovic, Ray Norris and Velibor Velović, The Conversation </p><div> <div class=”article-gallery lightGallery”> <div data-thumb=”https://scx1.b-cdn.net/csz/news/tmb/2022/astronomers-have-detec.jpg” data-src=”https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2022/astronomers-have-detec.jpg” data-sub-html=”Credit: Jurik Peter/Shutterstock”> <figure class=”article-img”> <img src=”https://scx1.b-cdn.net/csz/news/800a/2022/astronomers-have-detec.jpg” alt=”Astronomers have detected one of the biggest black hole jets in the sky” title=”Credit: Jurik Peter/Shutterstock” width=”800″ height=”394″/> <figcaption class=”text-darken text-low-up text-truncate-js text-truncate mt-3″> Credit: Jurik Peter/Shutterstock </figcaption> </figure> … Read more
Danielle Chase is a graduate student in the lab of Professor Howard Stone. Credit: David Kelly Crow It’s a little-known fact that tiny particles like blood cells drift sideways when moving past a rough surface, but this quirk has drawn much attention from researchers solving industrial problems. Why? Because if engineers can unlock the rules … Read more
Electron-beam’s eye view of the green laser light in the Compton beam polarimeter used for CREX in Hall A at Jefferson Lab. Credit: CREX Collaboration. The CREX Collaboration, a large group of researchers from different universities worldwide who are involved in the Calcium Radius Experiment (CREX), has recently collected a precise measurement of the broken … Read more
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain When some materials are cooled to a certain temperature, they lose electrical resistance, becoming superconductors. In this state, an electric charge can course through the material indefinitely, making superconductors a valuable resource for transmitting high volumes of electricity and other applications. Superconductors ferry electricity between Long Island and Manhattan. They’re used … Read more
Credit: CC0 Public Domain An advance in the use of antiferromagnetic materials in memory storage devices has been made by an international team of physicists. Antiferromagnets are materials that have an internal magnetism caused by the spin of electrons, but almost no external magnetic field. They are of interest because of their potential for data … Read more
In 2019, a conference held at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in California concluded with a fraught statement: “We wouldn’t call it a tension or a problem but rather a crisis.” David Gross, a particle physicist and former director of the KITP was talking about the rate at which our universe is expanding. But … Read more
Graphical representation of the crystal structure of the TbMn6Sn6 material at the atomic level. Here the Mn and Tb atoms appear as blue and green balls, respectively. Lines connecting near neighbors reveal the Mn Kagome and Tb triangular lattices. The magnetism present on this element is represented by arrows located on each individual atom. The … Read more
