Lifeboat Foundation

It is working with CERN to push the boundaries of clean aerospace.

Airbus and CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, have joined forces to launch Airbus UpNext, a project whose aim is to evaluate how superconductivity can contribute to the decarbonization of future aircraft systems, according to a press release by the aircraft manufacturer published last week.

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A team of researchers in China have developed a high-conductivity material that could greatly reduce contact resistance and Schottky barrier height within critical parts of electronic and optoelectronic microchips, paving the way for computer and digital imaging components that consume less power relative to their performance than existing chipsets.

The material, molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) is so thin that it falls into a classification of two-dimensional. That is, it is grown in sheets extending in two directions, X and Y, but virtually immeasurable on a Z axis because the material is often only a single molecule or atom in height.

The team, led by Professor Dong Li and Professor Anlian Pan, College of Materials Science and Engineering at Hunan University, published their findings in Nano Research.

For decades, astronomers and physicists have been trying to solve one of the deepest mysteries about the cosmos: An estimated 85% of its mass is missing. Numerous astronomical observations indicate that the visible mass in the universe is not nearly enough to hold galaxies together and account for how matter clumps. Some kind of invisible, unknown type of subatomic particle, dubbed dark matter, must provide the extra gravitational glue.

In underground laboratories and at particle accelerators, scientists have been searching for this dark matter with no success for more than 30 years. Researchers at NIST are now exploring new ways to search for the invisible particles. In one study, a prototype for a much larger experiment, researchers have used state-of-the-art superconducting detectors to hunt for dark matter.

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The Large Hadron Collider Beauty (LHCb) experiment at CERN is the world’s leading experiment in quark flavor physics with a broad particle physics program. Its data from Runs 1 and 2 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has so far been used for over 600 scientific publications, including a number of significant discoveries.

While all scientific results from the LHCb collaboration are already publicly available through open access papers, the data used by the researchers to produce these results is now accessible to anyone in the world through the CERN open data portal. The data release is made in the context of CERN’s Open Science Policy, reflecting the values of transparency and international collaboration enshrined in the CERN Convention for more than 60 years.

“The data collected at LHCb is a unique legacy to humanity, especially since no other experiment covers the region LHCb looks at,” says Sebastian Neubert, leader of the LHCb open data project. “It has been obtained through a huge international collaborative effort, which was funded by the public. Therefore the data belongs to society.”

Year 2019 😁 nanoscale fusion.

A research team of fusion scientists has succeeded in developing “the nano-scale sculpture technique” to fabricate an ultra-thin film by sharpening a tungsten sample with a focused ion beam. This enables the nano-scale observation of a cross-section very near the top surface of the tungsten sample using the transmission electron microscope. The sculpture technique developed by this research can be applied not only to tungsten but also to other hard materials.

Hardened materials such as metals, carbons and ceramics are used in automobiles, aircraft and buildings. In a fusion reactor study, “tungsten,” which is one of the hardest metal materials, is the most likely candidate for the armour material of the device that receives the plasma heat/particle load. This device is called divertor. In any hardened materials, nanometer scale damages or defects can be formed very near the top surface of the materials. For predicting a material lifetime, it is necessary to know the types of the damages and their depth profiles in the material. To do this, we must observe a cross-section of the region very near the top surface of the material with nano-scale level.

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Year 2021 face_with_colon_three

By exploiting polarization entanglement between photons, quantum holography can circumvent the need for first-order coherence that is vital to classical holography.

Novel materials could revolutionize computer technology. Research conducted by scientists at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI using the Swiss Light Source SLS has reached an important milestone along this path.

Microchips are made from silicon and work on the physical principle of a semiconductor. Nothing has changed here since the first transistor was invented in 1947 in the Bell Labs in America. Ever since, researchers have repeatedly foretold the end of the silicon era—but have always been wrong.

Silicon technology is very much alive, and continues to develop at a rapid pace. The IT giant IBM has just announced the first microprocessor whose transistor structures only measure two nanometers, equivalent to 20 adjacent atoms. So what’s next? Even tinier structures? Presumably so—for this decade, at least.

Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, with the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research via Chris Adami, Paul Davies, AIP Advances, EurekaAlert and University of Portsmouth

“Information,” wrote Arizona State University astrophysicist Paul Davies in an email to The Daily Galaxy, “is a concept that is both abstract and mathematical. It lies at the foundation of both biology and physics.”

Continue reading “Is Information the Fifth State of Matter in the Universe?” »

Today’s stories include Why a Puzzling New Image Of Jupiter Could Help Us Find Life Beyond Earth to Scientists Test Einstein’s Relativity On A Cosmological Scale…