Physics news

CERN atom-smasher restarts after 14-month hiatus: official

Physics / General Physics

1hour ago | 4 / 5 (1) | 0

The world's biggest atom-smasher, shut down after its inauguration in September 2008 amid technical faults, restarted on Friday, a spokesman for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research said.

Tapering a Free-Electron Laser to Extract More Juice

Physics / General Physics

1hour ago | not rated yet | 0

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from the NSLS and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) have demonstrated a technique that could be used to significantly improve the quantity and quality of light ...

Ultra-Powerful Laser Reproduces How Star's Jets Travel through Interstellar Space

Physics / General Physics

2 hours ago | 4.3 / 5 (4) | 0

(PhysOrg.com) -- A multi-trillion-watt laser at the University of Rochester has simulated a stellar jet -- an outpouring of matter from a fledgling star -- with unprecedented realism.

Crashing the size barrier

Physics / General Physics

Nov 18, 2009 | 4.5 / 5 (13) | 5

Like surfers on monster waves, electrons can ride waves of plasma to very high energies in a very short distance. Scientists have proven that plasma acceleration works. Now they're developing it as a way to ...

Novel connector uses magnets for leak-free microfluidic devices

Physics / General Physics

Nov 18, 2009 | 4.8 / 5 (4) | 0

Like other users of microfluidic systems, National Institute of Standards and Technology researcher Javier Atencia was faced with an annoying engineering problem: how to simply, reliably and most of all, tightly, ...

JQI researchers create entangled photons from quantum dots

Physics / Quantum Physics

Nov 18, 2009 | 4.3 / 5 (8) | 1

To exploit the quantum world to the fullest, a key commodity is entanglement—the spooky, distance-defying link that can form between objects such as atoms even when they are completely shielded from one another. Now, physicists ...

Stimulus grant will improve physics arXiv

Physics / General Physics

Nov 18, 2009 | 3.5 / 5 (2) | 0

(PhysOrg.com) -- Stimulus funding will enhance Cornell's e-print arXiv of scientific papers to help users identify a work's main concepts, see research reports in context and easily find related work.

Researchers Find Innate Correlations Among Different Power Law Phenomena

Physics / General Physics

Nov 17, 2009 | 4.3 / 5 (15) | 12

(PhysOrg.com) -- Studying the patterns that emerge in natural and social phenomena is a popular area of research, although usually individual phenomena are studied separately from each other. In a recent study, ...

LHC nears restart after repairs

Physics / General Physics

Nov 17, 2009 | 4.4 / 5 (16) | 3

The European Organization for Nuclear Research says it expects to restart the world's largest atom smasher by this weekend after more than a year of repairs.

Spotting evidence of directed percolation

Physics / General Physics

Nov 17, 2009 | 3.5 / 5 (2) | 0

A team of physicists has, for the first time, seen convincing experimental evidence for directed percolation, a phenomenon that turns up in computer models of the ways diseases spread through a population ...

Rice ties in race for atomic-scale breakthrough

Physics / Quantum Physics

Nov 17, 2009 | 4.7 / 5 (3) | 0

Everybody loves a race to the wire, even when the result is a tie. The great irony is the ultraprecise clocks that could result from this competition could probably break any tie.

Engineer Discovers Why Particles Like Flour Disperse on Liquids

Physics / General Physics

Nov 16, 2009 | 4.3 / 5 (15) | 2

(PhysOrg.com) -- Even if you are not a cook, you might have wondered why a pinch of flour (or any small particles) thrown into a bowl of water will disperse in a dramatic fashion, radiating outward as if it ...

Building a more versatile laser

Physics / Optics & Photonics

Nov 16, 2009 | 4.4 / 5 (18) | 0

(PhysOrg.com) -- One of the drawbacks associated with using semiconductor lasers is that many of them can only produce a beam of a single wavelength, and can only send that beam in one direction at a time. ...

Measuring Electron Orbitals

Physics / General Physics

Nov 16, 2009 | 5 / 5 (6) | 0

(PhysOrg.com) -- For the first time, it has been possible to measure electron density in individual molecular states using what is known as the photoelectric effect. Now published in Science, this method repres ...

Scientists demonstrate 'universal' programmable quantum processor

Physics / Quantum Physics

Nov 15, 2009 | 4.6 / 5 (21) | 11

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have demonstrated the first "universal" programmable quantum information processor able to run any program allowed by quantum mechanics -- th ...

Invisibility visualized: German team unveils new software for rendering cloaked objects

Physics / Optics & Photonics

Nov 13, 2009 | 4.8 / 5 (4) | 1

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists and curiosity seekers who want to know what a partially or completely cloaked object would look like in real life can now get their wish -- virtually. A team of researchers at the ...

Researchers take the lead out of piezoelectrics

Physics / Condensed Matter

Nov 13, 2009 | 3 / 5 (2) | 0

There is good news for the global effort to reduce the amount of lead in the environment and for the growing array of technologies that rely upon the piezoelectric effect. A lead-free alternative to the current ...

A line on string theory

Physics / General Physics

Nov 12, 2009 | 4.7 / 5 (44) | 15

(PhysOrg.com) -- A Harvard theoretical physicist has discussed with scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland the possibility that they may discover a theorized "stau" particle, with a lifetime ...