News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have proposed a way to create a completely new source of radiation. Ultra-intense light pulses consist of the motion of a single wave and can be described as a tsunami of light. The strong wave can be used to study interactions between matter and light in a unique way. Their research is now published in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.

'Frustration' plus a pulse of laser light resulted in a stable 'supercrystal' created by a team of researchers led by Penn State and Argonne National Laboratory, together with University of California, Berkeley, and two other national laboratories.

Heavy elements are produced during stellar explosion or on the surfaces of neutron stars through the capture of hydrogen nuclei (protons). This occurs at extremely high temperatures, but at relatively low energies. An international research team headed by Goethe University has now succeeded in investigating the capture of protons at the storage ring of the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung.

Antifreeze is life's means of surviving in cold winters: Natural antifreeze proteins help fish, insects, plants and even bacteria live through low temperatures that should turn their liquid parts to deadly shards of ice. Strangely enough, in very cold conditions, the same proteins can also promote the growth of ice crystals.

Scientists have developed a pioneering new technique that could pave the way for the next generation of optical tweezers.

Understanding how defects can affect ground-state properties, promote phase transitions, or enable entirely new functionalities in some strongly correlated oxides has become a subject of major interest in the field of design and discovery of novel functional materials. SrMnO3 (SMO) is a particularly interesting example, but better characterization is needed. MARVEL researchers have now a developed a method that may lead to more accurate predictions of the energetics of defects associated with in-gap states in semiconductors or insulators.

Forces generated by the cytoskeleton activate a protein responsible for cell migration. These findings broaden knowledge of tumor cell migration during metastasis. The study was conducted by CNIO, the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, both in Germany.

Physicists from the University of Basel have demonstrated spin alignment of free electrons within a two-dimensional material. Writing in the latest edition of Nature Nanotechnology, they described their observation of spontaneous spin polarization, which cannot occur in ideal two-dimensional materials according to a well-known theorem from the 1960s.

While spectroscopic measurements are normally averaged over myriad molecules, a new method developed by researchers at the Technical University of Munich provides precise information about the interaction of individual molecules with their environment. This will accelerate the identification of efficient molecules for future photovoltaic technologies, for example.