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Category: particle physics

“FUJIFILM Corporation (President: Kenji Sukeno) is pleased to announce that it has achieved the world’s record 317 Gbpsi recording density with magnetic tapes using a new magnetic particle called Strontium Ferrite (SrFe)*4. The record was achieved in tape running test, conducted jointly with IBM Research. This represents the development of epoch-making technology that can produce data cartridges with the capacity of 580TB (terabytes), approximately 50 times greater than the capacity of current cartridges*5. The capacity of 580TB is enough to store data equivalent to 120000 DVDs.”

TOKYO, December 162020 — FUJIFILM Corporation (President: Kenji Sukeno) is pleased to announce that it has achieved the world’s record 317 Gbpsi recording density with magnetic tapes using a new magnetic particle called Strontium Ferrite (SrFe) *4. The record was achieved in tape running test, conducted jointly with IBM Research. This represents the development of epoch-making technology that can produce data cartridges with the capacity of 580TB (terabytes), approximately 50 times greater than the capacity of current cartridges *5. The capacity of 580TB is enough to store data equivalent to 120000 DVDs.

SrFe is a magnetic material that has very high magnetic properties and is stable to maintain high performance even when processed into fine particles. It is widely used as a raw material for producing magnets for motors. Fujifilm has applied its proprietary technology to successfully develop ultra-fine SrFe magnetic particles, which can be used as a magnetic material for producing particulate magnetic tape media for data storage. The company has been conducting R&D for commercial use of SrFe magnetic particles as potential replacement of Barium Ferrite (BaFe) magnetic particles, currently used in magnetic tape data storage media. Magnetic tapes used in this test have been produced at the company’s existing coating facility, confirming the ability to support mass production and commercialization.

The amount of data in the society is exponentially increasing due to the introduction of high-definition 4K / 8K video, advancement in IoT / ICT, and the proliferation of Big Data analysis. “Cold Data,” or data that was generated a long time ago and rarely accessed, is said to account for over 80% of all data available today. There is a fast-growing trend of utilizing such Cold Data and other accumulated data, creating the need to secure safe, affordable and long-term data storage. Magnetic tapes have been used by major data centers and research organizations for many years as they not only offer benefits including large storage capacity, low cost and long-term storage performance, but also create air gap data protection, physically isolated from the network, thereby minimizing the risk of data damage or loss caused by cyberattacks.

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The LHCb experiment at CERN has developed a penchant for finding exotic combinations of quarks, the elementary particles that come together to give us composite particles such as the more familiar proton and neutron. In particular, LHCb has observed several tetraquarks, which, as the name suggests, are made of four quarks (or rather two quarks and two antiquarks). Observing these unusual particles helps scientists advance our knowledge of the strong force, one of the four known fundamental forces in the universe. At a CERN seminar held virtually on 11 August, LHCb announced the first signs of an entirely new kind of tetraquark with a mass of 2.9 GeV/c²: the first such particle with only one charm quark.

First predicted to exist in 1964, scientists have observed six kinds of quarks (and their antiquark counterparts) in the laboratory: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. Since quarks cannot exist freely, they group to form composite particles: three quarks or three antiquarks form “baryons” like the proton, while a quark and an antiquark form “mesons”.

The LHCb detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is devoted to the study of B mesons, which contain either a bottom or an antibottom. Shortly after being produced in proton–proton collisions at the LHC, these heavy mesons transform – or “decay” – into a variety of lighter particles, which may undergo further transformations themselves. LHCb scientists observed signs of the new tetraquark in one such decay, in which the positively charged B meson transforms into a positive D meson, a negative D meson and a positive kaon: B+→D+D−K+. In total, they studied around 1300 candidates for this particular transformation in all the data the LHCb detector has recorded so far.

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O,.o Circa 2018

Light might have no mass, but it can still push things around. This is known as radiation pressure. Light particles (photons) carry a momentum with them, but how this momentum is transferred is not exactly clear. However, new research has come up with a way to actually study these interactions between light and matter.

An international team constructed a very special experiment to study the momentum of light. Photons carry a tiny momentum and their effect can only be studied cumulatively. Still, there were no devices sensitive enough to measure the effect. This is why it has been so difficult to study how radiation pressure is converted into force or movement.

As reported in Nature Communications, the team built a mirror fitted with acoustic sensors. They shot laser pulses at the mirror and studied the effects.

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Famous medieval poet and author Geoffrey Chaucer once wrote that “‘time and tide wait for no man,” and that certainly rings true whether you’ve still got a ’90s Swatch watch strapped to your wrist, your name is Doc Brown, or you’re a brilliant scientist working on the latest atomic clock design — which employs lasers to trap and measure oscillations of quantum entangled atoms to maintain precise timekeeping.

The official time for the United States is set at the atomic clock located at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, where this Cesium Fountain Atomic Clock remains accurate to within one second every 300 million years. Its cesium-133 atom vibrates exactly 9, 192, 631, 770 times per second, a permanent statistic that has officially measured one second since the machine’s inception and operational rollout back in 1968.

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A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.K. and one in Saudi Arabia has developed a way to produce jet fuel using carbon dioxide as a main ingredient. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes their process and its efficiency.

As scientists continue to look for ways to reduce the amount of emitted into the atmosphere, they have increasingly focused on certain business sectors. One of those sectors is the , which accounts for approximately 12% of transportation-related carbon dioxide emissions. Curbing in the aviation industry has proved to be challenging due to the difficulty of fitting heavy batteries inside of aircraft. In this new effort, the researchers have developed a that can be used to produce carbon-neutral jet fuel.

The researchers used a process called the organic combustion method to convert carbon dioxide in the air into jet fuel and other products. It involved using an iron catalyst (with added potassium and manganese) along with hydrogen, citric acid and carbon dioxide heated to 350 degrees C. The process forced the apart from the oxygen atoms in CO2 molecules, which then bonded with hydrogen atoms, producing the kind of hydrocarbon molecules that comprise liquid jet fuel. The process also resulted in the creation of water molecules and other products.

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Raise your hand if you ever wanted to get beamed onto the transport deck of the USS Enterprise. Maybe we haven’t reached the point of teleporting entire human beings yet (sorry Scotty), but what we have achieved is a huge breakthrough towards quantum internet.

Led by Caltech, a collaborative team from Fermilab, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Harvard University, the University of Calgary and AT&T have now successfully teleported qubits (basic units of quantum info) across almost 14 miles of fiber optic cables with 90 percent precision. This is because of quantum entanglement, the phenomenon in which quantum particles which are mysteriously “entangled” behave exactly the same even when far away from each other.

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Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have discovered a way to make self-assembled nanowires of transition metal chalcogenides at scale using chemical vapor deposition. By changing the substrate where the wires form, they can tune how these wires are arranged, from aligned configurations of atomically thin sheets to random networks of bundles. This paves the way to industrial deployment in next-gen industrial electronics, including energy harvesting, and transparent, efficient, even flexible devices.

Electronics is all about making things smaller—smaller features on a chip, for example, means more computing power in the same amount of space and better efficiency, essential to feeding the increasingly heavy demands of a modern IT infrastructure powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence. And as devices get smaller, the same demands are made of the intricate wiring that ties everything together. The ultimate goal would be a wire that is only an atom or two in thickness. Such would begin to leverage completely different physics as the electrons that travel through them behave more and more as if they live in a one-dimensional world, not a 3D one.

In fact, scientists already have materials like carbon nanotubes and transition metal chalcogenides (TMCs), mixtures of transition metals and group 16 elements which can self-assemble into atomic-scale nanowires. The trouble is making them long enough, and at scale. A way to mass produce nanowires would be a game changer.

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Light travels at a speed of about 300, 000, 000 meters per second as light particles, photons, or equivalently as electromagnetic field waves. Experiments led by Hrvoje Petek, an R.K. Mellon professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy examined ideas surrounding the origins of light, taking snapshots of light, stopping light and using it to change properties of matter.

Petek worked with students and collaborators Prof. Chen-Bin (Robin) Huang of the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, and Atsushi Kubo of the Tsukuba University of Japan on the experiments. Their findings were reported in the paper, “Plasmonic topological quasiparticle on the nanometre and femtosecond scales,” which was published in the Dec. 24 issue of Nature magazine.

Petek credited graduate student Yanan Dai for his foresight and work in the process.

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On the electromagnetic spectrum, terahertz light is located between infrared radiation and microwaves. It holds enormous potential for tomorrow’s technologies: Among other things, it might succeed 5G by enabling extremely fast mobile communications connections and wireless networks. The bottleneck in the transition from gigahertz to terahertz frequencies has been caused by insufficiently efficient sources and converters. A German-Spanish research team with the participation of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has now developed a material system to generate terahertz pulses much more effectively than before. It is based on graphene, i.e., a super-thin carbon sheet, coated with a metallic lamellar structure. The research group presented its results in the journal ACS Nano.

Some time ago, a team of experts working on the HZDR accelerator ELBE were able to show that graphene can act as a frequency multiplier: When the two-dimensional carbon is irradiated with light pulses in the low terahertz frequency range, these are converted to higher frequencies. Until now, the problem has been that extremely strong input signals, which in turn could only be produced by a full-scale particle accelerator, were required to generate such terahertz pulses efficiently.“This is obviously impractical for future technical applications,” explains the study’s primary author Jan-Christoph Deinert of the Institute of Radiation Physics at HZDR. “So, we looked for a material system that also works with a much less violent input, i.e., with lower field strengths.”

For this purpose, HZDR scientists, together with colleagues from the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), the University of Bielefeld, TU Berlin and the Mainz-based Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, came up with a new idea: the frequency conversion could be enhanced enormously by coating the graphene with tiny gold lamellae, which possess a fascinating property: “They act like antennas that significantly amplify the incoming terahertz radiation in graphene,” explains project coordinator Klaas-Jan Tielrooij from ICN2. “As a result, we get very strong fields where the graphene is exposed between the lamellae. This allows us to generate terahertz pulses very efficiently.”

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