Physics News Source

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Entangled quantum bits per second (ebps) indicates a quantum network’s throughput. In this study, researchers collected ebps measurements over a suite of fiber connections on a quantum network testbed. They then compared these measurements with capacity estimates for a conventional fiber-optic network at a range of distances. The study finds that ebps throughput decays sharply with distance in ways that differ from conventional networks.

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A research team led by Dr. Choi, Young-chan from the Clean Air Research Laboratory at the Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER) has successfully converted cashew nut shells, discarded during cashew nut food product manufacturing, into an eco-friendly biofuel.

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Researchers used the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument to map how nearly 6 million galaxies cluster across 11 billion years of cosmic history. Their observations line up with what Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts.

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In this week’s Physics of Fluids, researchers employ machine learning to more accurately model the boundary layer wind field of tropical cyclones. Conventional approaches to storm forecasting involve large numerical simulations run on supercomputers incorporating mountains of observational data, and they still often result in inaccurate or incomplete predictions. In contrast, the author’s machine learning algorithm is equipped with atmospheric physics equations that can produce more accurate results faster and with less data.

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In this week’s Physics of Fluids, researchers study how Champatis roll and bounce down inclines. The authors released a heap of the seeds down an inclined plane while a camera recorded their descent to analyze their speed and the dynamics of their movement. The grains start to spread out slowly, then decrease quickly as they move downstream, akin to rock avalanches.

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Case Western Reserve University President Eric W. Kaler and Provost Joy K. Ward announced that David Gerdes, a renowned physics scholar and department chair from University of Michigan, will become dean of the College of Arts and Sciences on March 1. Gerdes, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Physics and a professor of astronomy, has served on the University of Michigan faculty since 1998 and as chair of the physics department since 2019.

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A new method to increase fusion-fuel efficiency would involve aligning the quantum spin of deuterium and tritium and changing the mix of the two fuels. The approach could boost tritium-burn efficiency by up to 10 times, reducing tritium needs and lowering fusion system costs. The technique could lead to safer, more compact fusion systems, making fusion energy more practical and affordable.

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Banks of computer screens stacked two and three high line the walls. The screens are covered with numbers and graphs that are unintelligible to an untrained eye. But they tell a story to the operators staffing the particle accelerator control room. The numbers describe how the accelerator is speeding up tiny particles to smash into targets or other particles.

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The trace anomaly is one of the quantities that encodes the energy and momentum of particles built from quarks. Scientists believe the trace anomaly is crucial for keeping quarks bonded in subatomic particles. In this study, scientists calculated the trace anomaly for nucleons and pions. The calculations show that in the pion, the mass distribution is similar to the charge distribution of the neutron and in the nucleon, the mass distribution is similar to the charge distribution of the proton.

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Danielle Speller is the 2024 winner of the Joseph A Johnson award for her research on neutrinoless double beta decay and dark matter research, and for mentoring the next generation of aspiring physicists. Jessica Esquivel receives an Honorable Mention her work at Fermilab and for fostering equity, education, and community through the #BlackInPhysics social movement and Oyanova Enterprises.

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Syed Ayaz, a researcher at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), has published a paper in Scientific Reports that builds on an earlier first-of-its-kind study that examined kinetic Alfvén waves (KAW) as a possible explanation for why the solar corona, the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere, is approximately 200 times hotter than the surface of the sun itself.

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Hubble witnessed a dwarf galaxy crashing through the Milky Way galaxy's gaseous halo and living to tell the tale...though a bit worse for wear!

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How to keep stray radiation from “shorting” superconducting qubits; a pair of studies shows where ionizing radiation is lurking and how to banish it.

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So-called “XYZ states” defy the standard picture of particle behavior and have given rise to several attempts to understand their nature.

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As population growth and extreme temperatures strain the United States power grid, utilities and equipment manufacturers are looking for ways to increase the amount of electricity the grid can carry. The Powerline Conductor Accelerated Testing Facility, or PCAT, located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is one of the only facilities in the country where companies can try out new transmission line technologies for long time periods in extremes of wind, weather, temperature and electrical load conditions.

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The airflow from an indoor badminton court’s HVAC system and cross ventilation can affect the path of a birdie and have a significant role in play, but research published in Physics of Fluids proposes that different roof configurations could help mitigate wind drift. The authors recommend that important badminton games be played on courts with a barrel roof and a ventilation opening. The team modeled the airflow in a barrel roof stadium with different ventilation opening directions and tested this against a simulation of a flat roof to understand the roof effects.

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Much of modern life depends on the coding of information onto means of delivering it. Researchers at Aalto University’s Department of Applied Physics found a new way to create tiny hurricanes of light — known to scientists as vortices — that can carry large amounts of information via cable.

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The inner crust of a neutron star is characterized by the presence of a neutron superfluid. To accurately predict the properties of neutron matter in this state, researchers make theoretical calculations that typically assume that neutrons form “Cooper pairs.” This study used artificial neural networks to make accurate predictions without relying on this assumption.

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Researchers at the University of Minnesota have achieved a new material that will be pivotal in making the next generation of high-power electronics faster, transparent and more efficient.

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Researchers from the Florida State University Department of Physics and FSU-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory have published new findings that reveal how various physical manipulations of graphene, such as layering and twisting, impact its optical properties and conductivity. The study was published in the journal Nano Letters.