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Physicists using advanced muon spin spectroscopy at Paul Scherrer Institute PSI found the missing link between their recent breakthrough in a kagome metal and unconventional superconductivity. The team uncovered an unconventional superconductivity that can be tuned with pressure, giving exciting potential for engineering quantum materials.

A year ago, a group of physicists led by PSI detected evidence of an unusual collective electron behavior in a kagome metal, known as time-reversal symmetry-breaking charge order—a discovery that was published in Nature.

Although this type of behavior can hint towards the highly desirable trait of unconventional superconductivity, actual evidence that the material exhibited unconventional superconductivity was lacking. Now, in a new study published in Nature Communications, the team have provided key evidence to make the link between the unusual charge order they observed and unconventional superconductivity.

An international team of researchers has developed a technique that uses liquid metal to create an elastic material that is impervious to both gases and liquids. Applications for the material include use as packaging for high-value technologies that require protection from gases, such as flexible batteries.

“This is an important step because there has long been a trade-off between elasticity and being impervious to gases,” says Michael Dickey, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University.

“Basically, things that were good at keeping gases out tended to be hard and stiff. And things that offered elasticity allowed gases to seep through. We’ve come up with something that offers the desired elasticity while keeping gases out.”

Scientists have found the secret behind a property of solid materials known as ferroelectrics, showing that quasiparticles moving in wave-like patterns among vibrating atoms carry enough heat to turn the material into a thermal switch when an electrical field is applied externally.

A key finding of the study is that this control of thermal conductivity is attributable to the structure of the material rather than any random collisions among atoms. Specifically, the researchers describe quasiparticles called ferrons whose polarization changes as they “wiggle” in between vibrating atoms—and it’s that ordered wiggling and polarization, receptive to the externally applied electrical field, that dictates the material’s ability to transfer the heat at a different rate.

“We figured out that this change in position of these atoms, and the change of the nature of the vibrations, must carry heat, and therefore the external field which changes this vibration must affect the thermal conductivity,” said senior author Joseph Heremans, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, materials science and engineering, and physics at The Ohio State University.

We are on twitter, follow us to connect with us — @scholarsregion— Scholarship Region (@scholarsregion) January 13, 2022.

For many avid outdoorspeople, summertime and camping go hand in hand. But as climate change continues to drive summer temperatures higher, outdoor recreation could become less relaxing—and cooling technologies like fans and portable air conditioners require electricity that is seldom available at the average campsite.

Seeing an unmet need, UConn researcher Al Kasani, working with Technology Commercialization Services (TCS) and the university’s Center for Clean Energy Engineering (C2E2), has developed a new off-grid technology that allows a tent’s internal temperature to cool up to 20°F below the ambient temperature.

The tent requires just one external element to function, one that is typically found in abundance around campsites: water. A single gallon of water can power the tent’s cooling technology for up to 24 hours.

José Cordeiro, PhD, talking about his international bestseller “The Death of Death” during the coming DLD Tel Aviv Innovation Festival in Israel. Top news at i24 news discussing about aging as the “mother” of all chronic diseases!

José Cordeiro is an international fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, vicechair of HumanityPlus, director of The Millennium Project, founding faculty at Singularity University in NASA Research Park, Silicon Valley, and former director of the Club of Rome (Venezuela Chapter), the World Transhumanist Association and the Extropy Institute.

Continue reading “The Death of Death during the coming #DLD Tel Aviv Innovation Festival in Israel. Top news at #i24” »

We might all have been in a situation where we had to put our trust in our work to hold up and do what it needed to do, but Margaret Hamilton’s work was particularly important — it was responsible for putting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in July 1969.

When warning lights started going off in the middle of the Eagle module’s descent toward the lunar surface, NASA faced a tough decision: continue with the landing or abort.

Continue reading “Margaret Hamilton: Pioneering Software Engineer Who Saved the Moon Landing” »

Physical systems evolve at a particular speed, which depends on various factors including the system’s so-called topological structure (i.e., spatial properties that are preserved over time despite any physical changes that occur). Existing methods for determining the speed at which physical systems change over time, however, do not account for these structural properties.

Two researchers at Keio University in Japan have recently derived a speed limit for the evolution of physical states that also accounts for the topological structure of a system and of its underlying dynamics. This speed limit, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, could have numerous valuable applications for the study and development of different physical systems, including quantum technologies.

“Figuring out how fast a system state can change is a central topic in classical and quantum mechanics, which has attracted the great interest of scientists,” Tan Van Vu and Keiji Saito, the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “Understanding the mechanism of controlling time is relevant to engineering fast devices such as quantum computers.”

I posted about Japan releasing radioactive water, and thought it was a bad idea, because of this MIT revelation.

Nuclear power continues to expand globally, propelled, in part, by the fact that it produces few greenhouse gas emissions while providing steady power output. But along with that expansion comes an increased need for dealing with the large volumes of water used for cooling these plants, which becomes contaminated with radioactive isotopes that require special long-term disposal.

Now, a method developed at MIT provides a way of substantially reducing the volume of contaminated water that needs to be disposed of, instead concentrating the contaminants and allowing the rest of the water to be recycled through the plant’s cooling system. The proposed system is described in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, in a paper by graduate student Mohammad Alkhadra, professor of chemical engineering Martin Bazant, and three others.

Continue reading “A new way to remove contaminants from nuclear wastewater” »