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Category: particle physics

Roads that can charge electric cars or buses while you drive aren’t a new concept, but so far the technology has been relatively expensive and inefficient. However, Indiana’s Department of Transport (INDOT) has announced that it’s testing a new type of cement with embedded magnetized particles that could one day provide efficient, high-speed charging at “standard roadbuilding costs,” Autoblog has reported.

With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), INDOT has teamed with Purdue University and German company Magment on the project. They’ll carry out the research in three phases, first testing if the magnetized cement (called “magment,” naturally) will work in the lab, then trying it out on a quarter-mile section of road.

In a brochure, Magment said its product delivers “record-breaking wireless transmission efficiency [at] up to 95 percent,” adding that it can be built at “standard road-building installation costs” and that it’s “robust and vandalism-proof.” The company also notes that slabs with the embedded ferrite particles could be built locally, presumably under license.

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Hemispherical array of ultrasound transducers lifts objects off reflective surfaces.

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have developed a new technology which allows non-contact manipulation of small objects using sound waves. They used a hemispherical array of ultrasound transducers to generate a 3D acoustic fields which stably trapped and lifted a small polystyrene ball from a reflective surface. Although their technique employs a method similar to laser trapping in biology, adaptable to a wider range of particle sizes and materials.

The ability to move objects without touching them might sound like magic, but in the world of biology and chemistry, technology known as optical trapping has been helping scientists use light to move microscopic objects around for many years. In fact, half of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics, awarded to Arthur Ashkin (1922−2020) was in recognition of the remarkable achievements of this technology. But the use of laser light is not without its failings, particularly the limits placed on the properties of the objects which can be moved.

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Project offers new step toward study of emergence, ‘materials by design,’ and future nanomagnets.

Using a D-Wave quantum-annealing computer as a testbed, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have shown that it is possible to isolate so-called emergent magnetic monopoles, a class of quasiparticles, creating a new approach to developing “materials by design.”

“We wanted to study emergent magnetic monopoles by exploiting the collective dynamics of qubits,” said Cristiano Nisoli, a lead Los Alamos author of the study. “Magnetic monopoles, as elementary particles with only one magnetic pole, have been hypothesized by many, and famously by Dirac, but have proved elusive so far.”

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Circa 2005 o,.o.

Stable and reproducible spontaneous self-ignition and self-supporting combustion have been achieved at room temperature by exposing nanometer-sized catalytic particles to methanol/air or ethanol/air gas mixtures. Without any external ignition, structurally supported platinum nanoparticles instantaneously react with the gas mixtures. The reaction releases heat and produces CO2 and water. Such reactions starting at ambient temperature have reached both high (]600 °C) and low (a few tenths of a degree above room temperature) reaction temperatures. The reaction is controlled by varying the fuel/air mixture. Catalytic activity could be dramatically changed by reducing particle size and changing particle morphology.

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Ever wonder what an atom looks like?

A remarkable photography of a single atom by Ph.D. student David Nadlinger has won the EPSRC science photography contest. The atom photo was captured using a long exposure while the atom emitted light from a laser in a vacuum chamber.

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Zeolitic imidazolate frameworks are promising as high-capacity iodine adsorbents. Here the authors image the gaseous I2 adsorption on single ZIF-90 particles, clarifying the inter-particle heterogeneity in adsorption reactivity and performance improvement after introduction of linker defects.

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A pair of studies in Nature show that a quasiparticle, known as a plasmon polariton, can be pulled with and against a flow of electrons, a finding that could lead to more efficient ways of manipulating light at the nanoscale.

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In the depths of space, there are celestial bodies where extreme conditions prevail: Rapidly rotating neutron stars generate super-strong magnetic fields. And black holes, with their enormous gravitational pull, can cause huge, energetic jets of matter to shoot out into space. An international physics team with the participation of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has now proposed a new concept that could allow some of these extreme processes to be studied in the laboratory in the future: A special setup of two high-intensity laser beams could create conditions similar to those found near neutron stars. In the discovered process, an antimatter jet is generated and accelerated very efficiently. The experts present their concept in the journal Communications Physics.

The basis of the new concept is a tiny block of plastic, crisscrossed by micrometer-fine channels. It acts as a target for two lasers. These simultaneously fire ultra-strong pulses at the block, one from the right, the other from the left — the block is literally taken by laser pincers. “When the laser pulses penetrate the sample, each of them accelerates a cloud of extremely fast electrons,” explains HZDR physicist Toma Toncian. “These two electron clouds then race toward each other with full force, interacting with the laser propagating in the opposite direction.” The following collision is so violent that it produces an extremely large number of gamma quanta — light particles with an energy even higher than that of X-rays.

The swarm of gamma quanta is so dense that the light particles inevitably collide with each other. And then something crazy happens: According to Einstein’s famous formula E=mc2, light energy can transform into matter. In this case, mainly electron-positron pairs should be created. Positrons are the antiparticles of electrons. What makes this process special is that “very strong magnetic fields accompany it,” describes project leader Alexey Arefiev, a physicist at the University of California at San Diego. “These magnetic fields can focus the positrons into a beam and accelerate them strongly.” In numbers: Over a distance of just 50 micrometers, the particles should reach an energy of one gigaelectronvolt (GeV) — a size that usually requires a full-grown particle accelerator.

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One of the most important open questions in science is how our consciousness is established. In the 1990s, long before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his prediction of black holes, physicist Roger Penrose teamed up with anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to propose an ambitious answer.

They claimed that the brain’s neuronal system forms an intricate network and that the consciousness this produces should obey the rules of quantum mechanics —the theory that determines how tiny particles like electrons move around. This, they argue, could explain the mysterious complexity of human consciousness.

Penrose and Hameroff were met with incredulity. Quantum mechanical laws are usually only found to apply at very low temperatures. Quantum computers, for example, currently operate at around -272°C. At higher temperatures, classical mechanics takes over. Since our body works at room temperature, you would expect it to be governed by the classical laws of physics. For this reason, the quantum consciousness theory has been dismissed outright by many scientists—though others are persuaded supporters.

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