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Category: particle physics

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University (SBU) have shown that particles produced in collimated sprays called jets retain information about their origins in subatomic particle smashups. The study was recently published as an Editor’s Suggestion in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“Despite extensive research, the connection between a jet’s initial conditions and its final particle distribution has remained elusive,” said Charles Joseph Naim, a research associate at the Center for Frontiers in Nuclear Science (CFNS) in SBU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. “This study, for the first time, establishes a direct connection between the ‘entanglement entropy’ at the earliest stage of jet formation and the particles that emerge as a jet evolves.”

The evidence comes from an analysis of jet particles emerging from captured by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile-circumference circular collider located at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. In these powerful collisions, the individual building blocks of the colliding protons, known as quarks and gluons, scatter off one another and sometimes get knocked free with enormous amounts of energy. But quarks can’t stay free for long. They and the gluons that normally hold them together immediately begin to split and reconnect through a branching process called fragmentation. The result is the formation of many new composite particles made of pairs or triplicates of quarks—collectively known as hadrons—that spray out of the collision in a coordinated way, that is, as a jet.

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IN A NUTSHELL 🔬 Toponium discovery at CERN could revolutionize our understanding of particle physics. 📊 The CMS collaboration detected an unexpected excess of top quark-antiquark pairs, hinting at this elusive particle. 🚀 If confirmed, toponium would be the smallest hadron ever discovered, challenging existing theories. 🧩 Researchers aim to refine their models and collaborate

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Here we report on low temperature transport measurements of encapsulated bilayer graphene nano constrictions fabricated employing electrode-free AFM-based local anodic oxidation (LAO) nanolithography. This technique allows for the creation of constrictions as narrow as 20 nm. While larger constrictions exhibit an enhanced energy gap, single quantum dot (QD) formation is observed within smaller constrictions with addition energies exceeding 100 meV, which surpass previous experiments on patterned QDs. These results suggest that transport through these narrow constrictions is governed by edge disorder combined with quantum confinement effects. Our findings introduce electrode-free AFM-LAO lithography as an easy and flexible method for creating nanostructures with tunable electronic properties without relying on patterning techniques such as e-beam lithography. The excellent control and reproducibility provided by this technique opens exciting opportunities for carbon-based quantum electronics and spintronics.

Citation.

Physical Review B

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In seawater, boron exists as electrically neutral boric acid, so it passes through reverse osmosis membranes that typically remove salt by repelling electrically charged atoms and molecules called ions. To get around this problem, desalination plants normally add a base to their treated water, which causes boric acid to become negatively charged. Another stage of reverse osmosis removes the newly charged boron, and the base is neutralized afterward by adding acid. Those extra treatment steps can be costly.

“Our device reduces the chemical and energy demands of seawater desalination, significantly enhancing environmental sustainability and cutting costs by up to 15 percent, or around 20 cents per cubic meter of treated water,” said Weiyi Pan, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice University and a study co-first author.

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Dr. Ho Seong Jang and colleagues at the Extreme Materials Research Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) have developed an upconversion nanoparticle technology that introduces a core@multi-shell nanostructure, a multilayer structure in which multiple layers of shells surround a central core particle, and enables high color purity RGB light emission from a single nanoparticle by adjusting the infrared wavelength.

The work is published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

Luminescent materials are materials that light up on their own and are used in a variety of devices, including TVs, tablets, monitors, and smartphones, to allow us to view a variety of images and videos. However, conventional two-dimensional flat displays cannot fully convey the three-dimensional dimensionality of the real world, limiting the sense of depth.

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Technology for converting solar energy into thermal energy is ever evolving and has numerous applications. A breakthrough in the laboratory of Professor My Ali El Khakani at Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) has made a significant contribution to the field.

Professor El Khakani specializes in plasma-laser processes for the development of nanostructured materials. He and his team at the Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Center have developed a new photothermal material that converts sunlight into heat with unmatched efficiency. The results of their work were published in the journal Scientific Reports.

For several decades, stoichiometric titanium oxides have been known for their exceptional photocatalytic properties. A sub-stoichiometric form of this material, characterized by a slight deficiency in , is referred to as “Magnéli phases,” with specific compositions exhibiting distinct properties.

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Quasicrystals (QCs) are fascinating solid materials that exhibit an intriguing atomic arrangement. Unlike regular crystals, in which atomic arrangements have an ordered repeating pattern, QCs display long-range atomic order that is not periodic. Due to this ‘quasiperiodic’ nature, QCs have unconventional symmetries that are absent in conventional crystals.

Since their Nobel Prize-winning discovery, condensed matter physics researchers have dedicated immense attention toward QCs, attempting to both realize their unique quasiperiodic magnetic order and their possible applications in spintronics and .

Ferromagnetism was recently discovered in the gold-gallium-rare earth (Au-Ga-R) icosahedral QCs (iQCs). Yet scientists were not surprised by this observation because translational periodicity—the repeating arrangement of atoms in a crystal—is not a prerequisite for the emergence of ferromagnetic order.

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