News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Quark-gluon plasma is formed as a result of high energy collisions of heavy ions. After a collision, for a dozen or so yoctoseconds this most perfect of all known fluids undergoes rapid hydrodynamic expansion with velocities close to the velocity of light. Scientists, associated with the IFJ PAN and the GSI, has presented a new model describing these extreme flows. For the first time effects resulting from the fact that the particles creating the plasma carry spin, are taken into account.

A deep neural network running on an ordinary desktop computer is interpreting highly technical data related to national security as well as -- and sometimes better than -- today's best automated methods or even human experts. The research probes incredibly complex data sets filled with events called radioactive decays.

A group of physicists experimentally confirmed that molecular fingerprints of toxic, explosive, polluting and other dangerous substances could be reliably detected and identified by surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) using black silicon (b-Si) substrate.

Researchers at Los Alamos and partners in France and Germany are exploring the enhanced potential of carbon nanotubes as single-photon emitters for quantum information processing. Their analysis of progress in the field is published in this week's edition of the journal Nature Materials.

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the US Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Md., have developed a novel 'melt-cast' explosive material that could be a suitable replacement for Trinitrotoluene, more commonly known as TNT.

What do atomic nuclei really look like? Are the protons and neutrons they contain distributed chaotically? Or do they perhaps bind into alpha clusters, that is, clumps made up of two protons and two neutrons? In the case of several light nuclei, experimental confirmation of the individualism or family nature of nucleons will now be simpler thanks to predictions presented by Polish physicists from Cracow and Kielce.

As the 150th anniversary of the formulation of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements looms, a Michigan State University professor probes the table's limits in a recent Nature Physics Perspective. In 2016, four new elements were added to it: nihonium, moscovium, tennessine, and oganesson. It took a decade and worldwide effort to confirm these last four elements. And now scientists wonder: how far can this table go?

A team has enlisted powerful supercomputers to calculate a quantity, known as the 'nucleon axial coupling' or gA, that is central to our understanding of a neutron's lifetime.