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Physics researchers at the University of North Florida’s Atomic LEGO Lab discovered a new electronic phenomenon they call “asymmetric ferroelectricity”. The research led by Dr. Maitri Warusawithana, UNF physics assistant professor, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Illinois and the Arizona State University, demonstrated this phenomenon for the first time in engineered two-dimensional crystals.

Albert Einstein’s most famous equation, E = mc², used in the theory of general relativity, has been used to create matter from light, scientists have said in a new study.

Researchers from New York’s Brookhaven National Laboratory used the Department of Energy’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), ordinarily used for nuclear physics research, to speed up two gold ions that are positively charged, in a loop.

Researchers from Skoltech, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and Uppsala University have predicted the existence of antichiral ferromagnetism, a nontrivial property of some magnetic crystals that opens the door to a variety of new magnetic phenomena. The paper was published in the journal Physical Review B.

Chirality, or handedness, is an extremely important fundamental property of objects in many fields of physics, mathematics, chemistry and biology; a chiral object cannot be superimposed on its mirror image in any way. The simplest chiral objects are human hands, hence the term itself. The opposite of chiral is achiral: a circle or a square are simple achiral objects.

Chirality can be applied to much more complex entities; for instance, competing internal interactions in a magnetic system can lead to the appearance of periodic magnetic textures in the structure that differ from their mirror images—this is called chiral ferromagnetic ordering. Chiral crystals are widely considered promising candidates for magnetic data storage and processing device realization as information can be encoded via their nontrivial magnetic textures.

Researchers announced the achievement of an important milestone on the road to nuclear fusion and we’re at the threshold of fusion ignition.

Quick – define common sense

Despite being both universal and essential to how humans understand the world around them and learn, common sense has defied a single precise definition. G. K. Chesterton, an English philosopher and theologian, famously wrote at the turn of the 20th century that “common sense is a wild thing, savage, and beyond rules.” Modern definitions today agree that, at minimum, it is a natural, rather than formally taught, human ability that allows people to navigate daily life.

Continue reading “An AI expert explains why it’s hard to give computers something you take for granted: Common sense” »

At the center of galaxies, like our own Milky Way, lie massive black holes surrounded by spinning gas. Some shine brightly, with a continuous supply of fuel, while others go dormant for millions of years, only to reawaken with a serendipitous influx of gas. It remains largely a mystery how gas flows across the universe to feed these massive black holes.

UConn Assistant Professor of Physics Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, lead author on a paper published today in The Astrophysical Journal, addresses some of the questions surrounding these massive and enigmatic features of the universe by using new, high-powered simulations.

“Supermassive black holes play a key role in galaxy evolution and we are trying to understand how they grow at the centers of galaxies,” says Anglés-Alcázar. “This is very important not just because black holes are very interesting objects on their own, as sources of gravitational waves and all sorts of interesting stuff, but also because we need to understand what the central black holes are doing if we want to understand how galaxies evolve.”

Determining if particular extreme hot or cold spells were caused by climate change could be made easier by a new mathematical method.

The statistical method, developed by physicists at the University of Reading and Uppsala University in Sweden, looks at the characteristics, or “fingerprints,” of a specific extreme weather event of interest, like a heatwave, in order to ascertain whether it can be attributed to natural climate variability of the climate or is a unique product of global warming.

The method also allows predictions to be made about how likely extreme climate events will be in the future.

Congratulations to Dr. Emmanuel Ríos López and her co-advisor Dr. X’opher Añorve and to our collaborators, Dr. Hector Javier Ibarra Medel, the Dr. Mabel Valerdi, the Dr. Gabriela Ileana Tudorica Iacobuta and the lng. Physics. Joaquin Alvira Enriquez. Three generations of summer students (VICI): Alvira-Enriquez, Valerdi and Iacobuta. Three generations of PhD students: Añorve, Ibarra-Medel and Rios-Lopez.

In this work we analyzed a sample of 101 brilliant galaxies using a two-dimensional decomposition of the shallow shine. This work serves to explore the formation of galaxies and their relationship with the supermassive holes black houses in their cores. We fixed some errors that the original sample came dragging.

We are grateful to Prof. Thomas Jarrett and Dr. Chien Peng for helping us along the generation of the work. We are standing on their shoulders, Prof. generated the Large Galaxy Atlas and Dr. Peng gave us GALFIT the best software for galaxy 2D surface brightness analysis.

Continue reading “Article Accepted in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” »

But a team of physicists is proposing a radical idea: Instead of forming black holes through the usual death-of-a-massive-start route, giant dark matter halos directly collapsed, forming the seeds of the first great black holes.

Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) appear early in the history of the universe, as little as a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. That rapid appearance poses a challenge to conventional models of SMBH birth and growth because it doesn’t look like there can be enough time for them to grow so massive so quickly.

Continue reading “The bonkers connection between massive black holes and dark matter” »