news 2017

Physicsts are developing quantum simulators, to help solve problems that are beyond the reach of conventional computers. However, they first need new tools to ensure that the simulators work properly. Innsbruck researchers around Rainer Blatt and Christian Roos, together with researchers from the Universities of Ulm and Strathclyde, have now implemented a new technique in the laboratory that can be used to efficiently characterize the complex states of quantum simulators.

Researchers have now succeeded in formulating a mathematical result that provides an exact answer to the question of how chaos actually behaves. The researchers have analysed chaotic states at the atomic level. What does chaos look like in the smallest of worlds that we can imagine - inside atoms' The world in there behaves a lot differently to the world that we experience; the protons and neutrons in the nucleus are waves.

Thanks to a new technique developed at EPFL, optical diffraction gratings can now be made out of pure diamond, with their surfaces smoothed down to the very last atom. These new devices can be used to alter the wavelength of high-powered lasers or in cutting-edge spectrographs. A team of EPFL researchers has developed an unconventional way of microscopically cutting diamonds into a particular shape and smoothing them at an atomic level.

Research news Chemistry live: Using a scanning tunneling microscope, researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) were able for the very first time to witness in detail the activity of catalysts during an electro-chemical reaction. The measurements show that the surface structure of the catalyst has a strong influence on their activity.

There could be water on multiple Earth-sized planets orbiting the recently discovered TRAPPIST-1 dwarf star - making them potentially habitable - according to an international collaboration of researchers, including the University of Warwick. Using the NASA/ESA Hubble telescope to estimate whether there might be water on the surface of the seven planets around TRAPPIST-1, the researchers found that although the innermost planets must have lost most - if not all - of their water, the outer planets of the system might still harbour substantial amounts.

'Primordial black holes,' believed to have formed shortly after the Big Bang, might explain how gold, platinum and uranium are created Katherine Kornei UCLA physicists have proposed new theories for how the universe's first black holes might have formed and the role they might play in the production of heavy elements such as gold, platinum and uranium.

In everyday life, ultraviolet, or UV, light earns a bad reputation for being responsible for sunburns and other harmful effects on humans. However, research suggests that UV light may have played a critical role in the emergence of life on Earth and could be a key for where to look for life elsewhere in the Universe.

Motorised molecules driven by light have been used to drill holes in the membranes of individual cells, including cancerous ones. The technique shows promise for either bringing therapeutic agents into the cells or directly inducing the cells to die. Dr Robert Pal at Durham University worked with researchers at Rice and North Carolina State universities in the USA to demonstrate in laboratory tests how rotors in single-molecule nanomachines can be activated by ultraviolet light to spin at two to three million rotations per second and open membranes in cells.

Seven Earth-sized exoplanets circle the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, just 40 light-years from our own blue planet. Now an international team of scientists at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, MIT, and elsewhere, report that the outer planets in this system may still hold significant stores of water.

Astronomers have measured magnetic fields in a galaxy 4.6 billion light-years away - a big clue to understanding how magnetic fields formed and evolved over cosmic time. Hubble Space Telescope image of the gravitational lensing system in the new research. The background quasar is lensed by the foreground galaxy into images A and B. Image courtesy of Sui Ann Mao In an article published Aug.

A new way of operating a powerful X-ray laser has enabled researchers to detect and measure fluctuations in magnetic structures being considered for new data storage and computing technologies.

Research news Six young scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) will receive Starting Grants from the European Research Council (ERC). The prestigious awards have been granted to two projects in cardiology and neurosciences, which are key research areas of the TUM School of Medicine , to a physics project related to a special form of plasma, and one on the structure of chromosomes.

In an effort to better study a promising class of materials that could energize the solar cell industry, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a new method of analyzing the material's molecular-scale structure. By combining advanced X-ray spectroscopy measurements with calculations based on fundamental "first principles" theory, researchers obtained an atomic-scale view of organo-lead halide perovskites not easily achieved with current technology.

How do birds navigate over long distances' This complex question has been the subject of debate and controversy among scientists for decades, with Earth's magnetic field and the bird's own sense of smell among the factors said to play a part. Now, researchers from the universities of Oxford, Barcelona and Pisa have shown in a new experiment that olfaction - or sense of smell - is almost certainly a key factor in long-distance oceanic navigation, eliminating previous misgivings about this hypothesis.

Queensland researchers have shown that single crystals, typically thought of as brittle and inelastic, are flexible enough to be bent repeatedly and even tied in a knot. Researchers from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and The University of Queensland (UQ) determined and measured the structural mechanism behind the elasticity of the crystals down to the atomic level.

Visualization of color-coded crystal orientations in a Stylophora pistillata coral skeleton, demonstrating that coral forms via attachment of particles. The map is 280 micrometers wide, and has 60 nanometer resolution. Pupa Gilbert, Chang-Yu Sun, Cayla Stifler/UW-Madison, Matthew Marcus, Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Coral skeletons are the building blocks of diverse coral reef ecosystems, which has led to increasing concern over how these key species will cope with warming and acidifying oceans that threaten their stability.

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have developed a simple device that mimics complex birdsongs. The device, developed by the group of  L. Mahadevan , the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics, uses air blown through a stretched rubber tube to recreate birdsongs found in nature, including the songs of zebra and Bengalese finches.

Berkeley Lab-led team also provides most precise band gap measurement yet for hotly studied monolayer moly sulfide Two-dimensional materials are a sort of a rookie phenom in the scientific community. They are atomically thin and can exhibit radically different electronic and light-based properties than their thicker, more conventional forms, so researchers are flocking to this fledgling field to find ways to tap these exotic traits.

Research news Each atomic layer thin, tear-resistant, and stable. Graphene is seen as the material of the future. It is ideal for e.g. producing ultra-light electronics or highly stable mechanical components. But the wafer-thin carbon layers are difficult to produce. At the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Jürgen Kraus has manufactured self-supporting graphene membranes, and at the same time systematically investigated and optimized the growth of the graphene crystals.

Physicist at Freie Universität Berlin Receives Freigeist Fellowship from the Volkswagen Foundation No 225/2017 from Aug 24, 2017 The physicist Dr. Andreas Elsaesser from Freie Universität Berlin has been granted a Freigeist Fellowship from the Volkswagen Foundation for his research project "Finding Life: Spectral Biomarkers in Planetary Atmospheres.