Lifeboat Foundation

Swedish and Chinese scientists have developed organic solar cells optimised to convert ambient indoor light to electricity. The power they produce is low, but is probably enough to feed the millions of products that the internet of things will bring online.

As the internet of things expands, it is expected that we will need to have millions of products online, both in public spaces and in homes. Many of these will be the multitude of sensors to detect and measure moisture, particle concentrations, temperature and other parameters. For this reason, the demand for small and cheap sources of renewable energy is increasing rapidly, in order to reduce the need for frequent and expensive battery replacements.

This is where organic solar cells come in. Not only are they flexible, cheap to manufacture and suitable for manufacture as large surfaces in a printing press, they have one further advantage: the light-absorbing layer consists of a mixture of donor and acceptor materials, which gives considerable flexibility in tuning the solar cells such that they are optimised for different spectra – for light of different wavelengths.

BERLIN, August 21, 2019 (Newswire.com) — The Neutrino Energy Group cooperates with a worldwide team of scientists and various international research centers, which deal with application research, the conversion of invisible radiation spectra of the sun, among other things the neutrinos (high-energy particles, which ceaselessly reach the earth) in electric power.

Is renewable energy hurting consumers?

During the last decade or so, consumers around the world have been encouraged to install solar panels on top of their houses. In certain climates, these rooftop photovoltaic installations can more than cover the electrical needs of an individual home, and many solar-equipped houses feature photovoltaic systems that wire directly into the grid. At times when the home has excess solar-generated electricity left over, this energy feeds back into the grid and helps out with the electricity needs of other energy company customers.

DARK MATTER researchers could be on the verge of cracking the cosmic mystery, thanks to a revolutionary device that will “listen” for dark matter particles.

Semiconductors are the basic building blocks of today’s digital, electronic age, providing us a multitude of devices that benefit our modern life, including computer, smartphones and other mobile devices. Improvements in semiconductor functionality and performance are likewise enabling next-generation applications of semiconductors for computing, sensing and energy conversion. Yet researchers have long struggled with limitations in our ability to fully understand the electronic charges inside semiconductor devices and advanced semiconductor materials, limiting our ability to drive further advances.

In a new study in the journal Nature, an IBM Research-led collaboration describes an exciting breakthrough in a 140-year-old mystery in physics—one that enables us to unlock the physical characteristics of semiconductors in much greater detail and aid in the development of new and improved semiconductor materials.

To truly understand the physics of semiconductors, we first need to know the fundamental properties of the charge carriers inside the materials, whether those particles are positive or negative, their speed under an applied electric field and how densely they are packed in the material. Physicist Edwin Hall found a way to determine those properties in 1879, when he discovered that a magnetic field will deflect the movement of electronic charges inside a conductor and that the amount of deflection can be measured as a voltage perpendicular to the flow of charge as shown in Fig. 1a. This voltage, known as the Hall voltage, unlocks essential information about the charge carriers in a semiconductor, including whether they are negative electrons or positive quasi-particles called “holes,” how fast they move in an electric field or their “mobility” (µ) and their density (n) inside the semiconductor.

It’s a pretty far-fetched idea.

CERN’s colossal complex of accelerators is in the midst of a two-year shutdown for upgrade work. But that doesn’t mean all experiments at the Laboratory have ceased to operate. The CLOUD experiment, for example, has just started a data run that will last until the end of November.

The CLOUD experiment studies how ions produced by high-energy particles called cosmic rays affect aerosol particles, clouds and the climate. It uses a special cloud chamber and a beam of particles from the Proton Synchrotron to provide an artificial source of cosmic rays. For this run, however, the cosmic rays are instead natural high-energy particles from cosmic objects such as exploding stars.

“Cosmic rays, whether natural or artificial, leave a trail of ions in the chamber,” explains CLOUD spokesperson Jasper Kirkby, “but the Proton Synchrotron provides cosmic rays that can be adjusted over the full range of ionisation rates occurring in the troposphere, which comprises the lowest ten kilometres of the atmosphere. That said, we can also make progress with the steady flux of natural cosmic rays that make it into our chamber, and this is what we’re doing now.”

Circa 2010

Ultra-fast pulses from a powerful laser can create droplets of water out of thin air, according to a new study. With the right conditions and large enough droplets, the researchers say, the technique could be used to make rain on demand.

Rain forms when water condenses around tiny particles in the atmosphere. Most of the time, dust or pollen do the job, but humans have long attempted to speed the process by seeding clouds with chemicals like silver iodide. Those chemicals provide the so-called “condensation nuclei” that trigger the consolidation of water into raindrops.

Continue reading “Laser could be used to make rain on demand” »

Scientists have observed a quantum vibration at normal room temperature for the first time, a phenomenon that usually requires ultra-cold, carefully calibrated conditions – bringing us another step closer to understanding the behaviour of quantum mechanics in common materials.

The team was able to spot a phonon, a quantum particle of vibration generated from high-frequency laser pulses, in a piece of diamond. These phonons are notoriously hard to detect, partly because of their sensitivity to heat.

What makes observing a phonon so important is that it shows a vibration acting as a single unit of energy (as described by quantum mechanics), as well as a wave (as described by classical physics). At room temperature in open air conditions, it brings quantum behaviour “closer to our daily life” in the words of the researchers.

Dive into the subatomic world, into the heart of protons or neutrons, and you’ll find elementary particles known as quarks. Measuring the mass of these quarks can be challenging, but new results from the CMS collaboration reveal for the first time how the mass of the top quark – the heaviest of six types of quarks – varies depending on the energy scale used to measure the particle.

The theory of quantum chromodynamics, a component of the Standard Model, predicts this energy-scale variation, known as running, for the masses of all quarks and for the strong force acting between them. Observing the running masses of quarks can therefore provide a way of testing quantum chromodynamics and the Standard Model.

Experiments at CERN and other laboratories have already measured the running masses of the bottom and charm quarks, the second and third heaviest quarks, and the results were in agreement with quantum chromodynamics. Now, the CMS collaboration has used data from high-energy proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider to chase out the running mass of the top quark.