Stimulus grant will improve physics arXiv

Physics / General Physics

created Nov 18, 2009 | popularity 4 / 5 (3) | comments 1

(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.


Novel connector uses magnets for leak-free microfluidic devices

Novel connector uses magnets for leak-free microfluidic devices

Physics / General Physics

created Nov 18, 2009 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (4) | comments 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

created Nov 18, 2009 | popularity 4.3 / 5 (8) | comments 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 ...


Turning heat to electricity

Turning heat to electricity... efficiently

Physics / General Physics

created Nov 18, 2009 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (62) | comments 9

(PhysOrg.com) -- In everything from computer processor chips to car engines to electric powerplants, the need to get rid of excess heat creates a major source of inefficiency. But new research points the way ...


Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

LHC nears restart after repairs

Physics / General Physics

created Nov 17, 2009 | popularity 4.4 / 5 (16) | comments 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.


Rice ties in race for atomic-scale breakthrough

Physics / Quantum Physics

created Nov 17, 2009 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (3) | comments 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.


Spotting evidence of directed percolation

Spotting evidence of directed percolation

Physics / General Physics

created Nov 17, 2009 | popularity 3.5 / 5 (2) | comments 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 ...


Researchers Find Innate Correlations Among Different Power Law Phenomena

Researchers Find Innate Correlations Among Different Power Law Phenomena

Physics / General Physics

created Nov 17, 2009 | popularity 4.3 / 5 (20) | comments 18

(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, ...


Engineer Discovers Why Particles Like Flour Disperse on Liquids

Engineer Discovers Why Particles Like Flour Disperse on Liquids

Physics / General Physics

created Nov 16, 2009 | popularity 4.3 / 5 (15) | comments 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

Building a more versatile laser

Physics / Optics & Photonics

created Nov 16, 2009 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (19) | comments 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

Measuring Electron Orbitals

Physics / General Physics

created Nov 16, 2009 | popularity 5 / 5 (8) | comments 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

Scientists demonstrate 'universal' programmable quantum processor

Physics / Quantum Physics

created Nov 15, 2009 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (23) | comments 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

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

Physics / Optics & Photonics

created Nov 13, 2009 | popularity 4 / 5 (5) | comments 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

Researchers take the lead out of piezoelectrics

Physics / Condensed Matter

created Nov 13, 2009 | popularity 3 / 5 (2) | comments 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

A line on string theory

Physics / General Physics

created Nov 12, 2009 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (46) | comments 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 ...