News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Researchers in Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Physics have discovered that a technique known as nanopore sensing can be used to detect subtle changes in clusters, or extremely small chunks of matter that are bigger than a molecule but smaller than a solid.

JILA researchers have made a long-lived, record-cold gas of molecules that follow the wave patterns of quantum mechanics instead of the strictly particle nature of ordinary classical physics. The creation of this gas boosts the odds for advances in fields such as designer chemistry and quantum computing.

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have 'flash-frozen' a flat crystal of 150 beryllium ions (electrically charged atoms), opening new possibilities for simulating magnetism at the quantum scale and sensing signals from mysterious dark matter.

A Japanese research team at The University of Tokyo produced a 3-D cluster molecule based on palladium. First, they created a 'butterfly-shaped' Pd4 framewok, using an organosilicon compounds bearing the aromatic substitutents as both template and support for the palladium atoms. Then, using another template, they connected two butterfly-shaped Pd4 skeleton, via chlorine, into a Pd6 cluster based on edge-sharing tetrahedra. This strategy using organosilicons to design customized subnano-architectures may enable design of a range of functional materials and catalysts.

A careful re-analysis of data taken at DOE's Jefferson Lab has revealed a possible link between correlated protons and neutrons in the nucleus and a 35-year-old mystery. The data have led to the extraction of a universal function that describes the EMC Effect, the once-shocking discovery that quarks inside nuclei have lower average momenta than predicted, and supports an explanation for the effect.