News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Researchers develop ways to measure and explain heat transport through a single molecule.

Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a graphene device that's thinner than a human hair but has a depth of special traits. It easily switches from a superconducting material that conducts electricity without losing any energy, to an insulator that resists the flow of electric current, and back again to a superconductor -- all with a simple flip of a switch.

Hailed as a pioneer by Photonics Media for his previous discoveries of supercontinuum and Cr tunable lasers, City College of New York Distinguished Professor of Science and Engineering Robert R. Alfano and his research team are claiming another breakthrough with a new super class of photons dubbed 'Majorana photons.' They could lead to enhanced information on quantum-level transition and imaging of the brain and its working.

Scientists at DESY have achieved a new world record for an experimental type of miniature particle accelerator: For the first time, a terahertz powered accelerator more than doubled the energy of the injected electrons. At the same time, the setup significantly improved the electron beam quality compared to earlier experiments with the technique, as Dongfang Zhang and his colleagues from the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) at DESY report in the journal Optica.

In a global first, NUS scientists have demonstrated that heat energy can be manipulated by utilising the quantum mechanical principle of anti-parity-time symmetry. Using this method, they were able to control the flow of heat in a material.

The collision of two neutron stars (GW170817) flung out an extraordinary fireball of material and energy that is allowing a Princeton-led team of astrophysicists to calculate a more precise value for the Hubble constant, the speed of the universe's expansion. Previous estimates put the value between 66 and 90 km/s/Mpc, which this team refined to between 65.3 and 75.6 km/s/Mpc.

The Tibet ASgamma experiment, a China-Japan joint research project, has discovered the highest energy cosmic gamma rays ever observed from an astrophysical source - in this case, the 'Crab Nebula.' The experiment detected gamma rays ranging from > 100 Teraelectron volts (TeV) to an estimated 450 TeV.