News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

An international research group has developed a new X-ray spectroscopy method based on the classical double-slit experiment to gain new insights into the physical properties of solids.

Insulators that are conducting at their edges hold promise for interesting technological applications. However, until now their characteristics have not been fully understood. Physicists at Goethe University have now modelled what are known as topological insulators with the help of ultracold quantum gases. In the current issue of Physical Review Letters, they demonstrate how the edge states could be experimentally detected.

Experimental proof of a decades-old prediction opens a pathway to recreate possible conditions of the early universe here on earth.

Lehigh University's Rosi Reed presents findings from new Beam Energy Scan at Brookhaven National Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider that tests the limits of quark-gluon plasma (QGP), the mysterious liquid thought to have existed in the micro-seconds after the Big Bang

A team of researchers from Russia, Great Britain, Japan, and Italy has created a graphene-based terahertz detector. Their device doubles up as a sensitive detector and a spectrometer operating in the terahertz range, and it's also a tool for studying plasmons in two-dimensional materials. All of these things existed before, but they took up a whole optical table. Researchers packed the same functionality into a dozen micrometers.

The last missing particle of the Standard Model, the Higgs boson, was discovered in 2012 in the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Since then, searching for new, related particles has been underway. Predicted by various theories that go beyond known physics, Higgs bosons with positive or negative electric charge are among the favorites to be observed. But do these particles really exist?

An international team of researchers has described an extended quantum Maxwell's demon, a device locally violating the second law of thermodynamics in a system located 1-5 meters away from the demon. The device could find applications in quantum computers and microscopic refrigerators cooling down tiny objects with pinpoint accuracy.