news 2020

Researchers have succeeded in directly observing the formation and interaction of highly ionized krypton plasma Light The last decade has been marked by a series of remarkable discoveries identifying how the universe is composed. It is understood that the mysterious substance dark matter makes up 85 % of the matter in the universe.

A team of researchers at the University of Chicago recently embarked on the search of a lifetime-or rather, a search for the lifetime of long-lived supersymmetric particles. Supersymmetry is a proposed theory to expand the Standard Model of particle physics. Akin to the periodic table of elements, the Standard Model is the best description we have for subatomic particles in nature and the forces acting on them.

An international team of scientists has defied nature to make diamonds in minutes in a laboratory at room temperature - a process that normally requires billions of years, huge amounts of pressure and super-hot temperatures. The team, led by The Australian National University (ANU) and RMIT University, made two types of diamonds: the kind found on an engagement ring and another type of diamond called Lonsdaleite, which is found in nature at the site of meteorite impacts such as Canyon Diablo in the US.

Physicists from the University of Göttingen use computer simulation to investigate aging in living glassy systems Aging is a process that affects not only living beings. Many materials, like plastics and glasses, also age - ie they change slowly over time as their particles try to pack better - and there are already computer models to describe this.

Some viruses can get inside cells via a mechanism that involves sulfur organic molecules. Chemists at UNIGE have discovered effective inhibitors and blocked the uptake of SARS-CoV-2. The cell membrane is impermeable to viruses: to get inside and infect a cell, they use a range of strategies to exploit the cellular and biochemical properties of the membranes.

Combined efforts of experiment and simulation pave the way to new applications Materials consisting of inorganic and organic components can combine the best of two worlds: under certain circumstances, the so-called MOFs - short for metal-organic frameworks - are structured in the same order as crystals and are at the same time porous and deformable.

By studying the site of a spectacular stellar explosion seen in April 2020, a team of scientists including many from the Anton Pannekoek Institute of the University of Amsterdam have used four European radio telescopes to confirm that astronomy's most exciting puzzle is about to be solved. Fast radio bursts, unpredictable millisecond-long radio signals seen at huge distances across the universe, are generated by extreme stars called magnetars - and are astonishingly diverse in brightness.

Sometimes, the inside of a material can determine what happens on the outside. A team of physicists from the University of Amsterdam has devised a new way to make use of this general truth, in particular in systems that do not conserve energy. The results were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.

Chemists at the University of Göttingen and Goethe University Frankfurt characterise key compound for catalytic nitrogen atom transfer Catalysts with a metal-nitrogen bond can transfer nitrogen to organic molecules. In this process short-lived molecular species are formed, whose properties critically determine the course of the reaction and product formation.

Removing one charged molecule from a one-dimensional array causes the others to alternately turn 'on' or 'off,' paving the way for information transfer in tiny circuits Small electronic circuits power our everyday lives, from the tiny cameras in our phones to the microprocessors in our computers. To make those devices even smaller, scientists and engineers are designing circuitry components out of single molecules.

Scientists today announced that they have observed the most luminous kilonova candidate on record, a find which challenges conventional theories of what happens in the aftermath of a gamma-ray burst. The findings appear in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal , and points to the possible of birth of a massive, highly magnetized neutron star called a magnetar.

In a groundbreaking study , a group of University of Chicago scientists announced they were able to turn IBM's largest quantum computer into a quantum material itself. They programmed the computer such that it turned into a type of quantum material called an exciton condensate, which has only recently been shown to exist.

Rice, MD Anderson team models complex that immune system uses to recognize viruses "Position 4" didn't seem important until researchers took a long look at a particular peptide. That part of the peptide drawn from a SARS-CoV virus turned out to have an unexpected but significant influence on how it stably binds with a receptor central to the immune system's ability to attack diseased cells.

With their ability to harness the strange powers of quantum mechanics, qubits are the basis for potentially world-changing technologies-like powerful new types of computers or ultra-precise sensors. Qubits (short for quantum bits) are often made of the same semiconducting materials as our everyday electronics.

For years, physicists at TU Wien have been studying strange phenomena - now they have found an explanation that could help to understand unconventional types of superconductivity. Materials can assume completely different properties - depending on temperature, pressure, electrical voltage or other physical quantities.

Bristol researchers have developed a tiny device that paves the way for higher performance quantum computers and quantum communications, making them significantly faster than the current state-of-the-art. Researchers from the University of Bristol's Quantum Engineering Technology Labs (QET Labs) and Université Côte d'Azur have made a new miniaturized light detector to measure quantum features of light in more detail than ever before.

Publication by Laboratoire de physique in Physical Review X on June 22, 2020. Abstract Active matter, composed of self-propelled entities, forms a wide class of out-of-equilibrium systems that display striking collective behaviors, among which, the so-called active turbulence where spatially and time-disordered flow patterns spontaneously arise in a variety of active systems.

Using a unique material, EPFL scientists have been able to design and study an unusual state of matter, the Quantum Spin Liquid. The work has significant implications for future technologies, from quantum computing to superconductivity and spintronics. In 1973, physicist and later Nobel laureate Philip W. Anderson proposed a bizarre state of matter: the quantum spin liquid (QSL).

Astrophysicists consider that around 40% of the ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets and galaxies remains undetected, concealed in the form of a hot gas in the complexe cosmic web. Today, scientists at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (CNRS/Université Paris-Saclay) may have detected, for the first time, this hidden matter through an innovative statistical analysis of 20-year-old data.

'Unfolding' techniques used to improve the accuracy of particle detector data can also improve the readout of quantum states from a quantum computer Borrowing a page from high-energy physics and astronomy textbooks, a team of physicists and computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has successfully adapted and applied a common error-reduction technique to the field of quantum computing.