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Many modern industrial processes depend on complex chemistry. Take fertilizer production, for example: to make it, companies must first produce ammonia, a key ingredient.
These chemical processes need ingredients of their own—catalysts, which speed up reactions without being consumed or creating unwanted byproducts.
One emerging type of catalyst—known as a “single-atom” or “atomically dispersed” catalyst—is getting a lot of attention for its potential to make industrial processes cleaner and more efficient. Academic journals are overflowing with studies on them.
Dark energy makes up roughly 70% of the universe, yet we know nothing about it.
Around 25% of the universe is the equally mysterious dark matter, leaving just 5% for everything that we can see and touch—matter made up of atoms.
Dark energy is the placeholder name scientists have given to the unknown force causing the universe to expand faster and faster over time.
But now, a bold new idea is challenging this tidy system. Scientists at Rice University in Texas believe there may be a third kind of particle—one that doesn’t follow the rules of fermions or bosons. They’ve developed a mathematical model showing how these unusual entities, called paraparticles, could exist in real materials without breaking the laws of physics.
“We determined that new types of particles we never knew of before are possible,” says Kaden Hazzard, one of the researchers behind the study. Along with co-author Zhiyuan Wang, Hazzard used advanced math to explore this idea.
Their work, published in Nature, suggests that paraparticles might arise in special systems and act differently than anything scientists have seen before.
Quasicrystals, exotic states of matter characterized by an ordered structure with non-repeating spatial patterns, have been the focus of numerous recent physics studies due to their unique organization and resulting symmetries. Among the quasicrystals that have sparked significant interest among the physics community are so-called quantum quasicrystals, which are comprised of bosons (i.e., subatomic particles that have spin in integer values, such as 0, 1, 2, and so on, and can occupy the same quantum state simultaneously).
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPIPKS) recently introduced a new theoretical framework that describes low-energy excitations in bosonic quantum quasicrystals. Their newly devised theory, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, is an extension of conventional theories of elasticity, which also accounts for the unique symmetries of quantum quasicrystals.
“This paper is part of an ongoing collaboration with two colleagues, Prof. Francesco Piazza and Dr. Mariano Bonifacio, which began in 2022 when I was a guest scientist at MPIPKS in Dresden, Germany,” Alejandro Mendoza-Coto, first author of the paper, told Phys.org.
Researchers from Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU) and the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) have developed a novel top veto tracker system for the Taishan Antineutrino Observatory (TAO) experiment.
This system features a top veto tracker system with remarkable characteristics such as high light yield, distinct signal-background differentiation and high detection efficiency even at high thresholds, and provides the TAO experiment with a robust capability to suppress cosmic muon induced fast neutron and radioisotope events, which are significant correlated backgrounds for the neutrino signal. This scalable solution establishes a transferable technique for next-generation neutrino detectors requiring muon identification efficiency 99.5% across multi-ton volumes.
The findings are published in the journal Nuclear Science and Techniques.
Physicists are tapping into the strange world of quantum sensors to revolutionize particle detection in the next generation of high-energy experiments.
These new superconducting detectors not only offer sharper spatial resolution but can also track events in time—essential for decoding chaotic particle collisions. By harnessing cutting-edge quantum technologies originally developed for astronomy and networking, researchers are making huge strides toward identifying previously undetectable particles, including potential components of dark matter.
Unlocking the universe with particle colliders.
In 2023, EPFL researchers succeeded in sending and storing data using charge-free magnetic waves called spin waves, rather than traditional electron flows. The team from the Lab of Nanoscale Magnetic Materials and Magnonics, led by Dirk Grundler, in the School of Engineering, used radiofrequency signals to excite spin waves enough to reverse the magnetization state of tiny nanomagnets.
When switched from 0 to 1, for example, this allows the nanomagnets to store digital information, a process used in computer memory, and more broadly, in information and communication technologies.
This work was a big step toward sustainable computing, because encoding data via spin waves (whose quasiparticles are called magnons) could eliminate the energy loss, or Joule heating, associated with electron-based devices. But at the time, the spin wave signals could not be used to reset the magnetic bits to overwrite existing data.
British scientists could experiment with techniques to block sunlight as part of a £50 million government funded scheme to combat global warming. The geo-engineering project is set to be given the go-ahead within weeks and could see scientists explore techniques including launching clouds of reflective particles into the atmosphere or using seawater sprays to make clouds brighter. Another method involves thinning natural cirrus clouds, which act as heat-trapping blankets. If successful, less sunlight will reach the earth’s surface and in turn temporarily cool the surface of earth. It’s thought to be a relatively cheap way to cool the…
The willingness of the 4f orbitals of lanthanide metals to participate in chemical reactions is as rare as their presence in Earth’s crust. A recent study, however, witnessed the 4f orbital in a cerium-based compound actively participate in bond formation, triggering a unique chemical reaction.
The researchers observed that a cerium-containing cyclic complex formed a 4f-covalent interaction, leading to a ring-opening isomerization from cyclopropene to allene. The findings are published in Nature Chemistry.
Lanthanides are heavy, rare-earth metallic elements, occupying positions 57 through 71 in the periodic table —from lanthanum to lutetium—and are widely used in modern technologies ranging from electronics to clean energy. In nature, these elements are usually found together in their ore form and separating them using current methods is extremely challenging and energy-intensive. Understanding how these elements bond or interact with other atoms at an electronic level could help us to distinguish between lanthanides and design effective separation strategies.