News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Researchers at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering are using a novel means of studying how methane and water form methane hydrate that allows them to examine discrete steps in the process faster and more efficiently.

Results from its first run indicate that XENON1T is the most sensitive dark matter detector on Earth. The sensitivity of the detector -- an underground sentinel awaiting a collision that would confirm a hypothesis - stems from both its size and its 'silence.'

Smartphones put state-of-the-art 3-D particle tracking in the hands of the masses.

What makes quasicrystals so interesting? Their unusual structure. A Cornell lab has joined scientists pursuing this relatively new area of study.

As graphene's popularity grows as an advanced 'wonder' material, the speed and quality at which it can be manufactured will be paramount. With that in mind, the research group of SungWoo Nam, assistant professor of mechanical science and engineering at Illinois, has developed a cleaner and more environmentally friendly method to isolate graphene using carbon dioxide (CO2) in the form of carbonic acid as the electrolyte solution.

With their remarkable electrical and optical properties, along with biocompatibility, photostability and chemical stability, gold nanoclusters are gaining a foothold in a number of research areas, particularly in biosensing and biolabeling. An international research team has now shown that the fluorescence is an intrinsic property of the gold nanoparticles themselves. The researchers used Au20, gold nanoparticles with a tetrahedral structure. Their findings were reported this week in The Journal of Chemical Physics.

Hall thrusters are used in earth-orbiting satellites and show promise to propel robotic spacecraft long distances, and the plasma ejected from the exhaust end of the thruster can deliver great speeds. Cylindrical Hall thrusters lend themselves to miniaturization and have a smaller surface-to-volume ratio that prevents erosion of the thruster channel. Investigators in China have developed a new design for CHTs that significantly increases thrust; they report their work in this week's Physics of Plasmas.

Graphene Flagship scientists based at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, have created a device based on a blilayer of graphene and boron nitride which shows unprecedented spin transport efficiency at room temperature. Highlighting the potential of creating devices containing graphene and related materials, the spin signal measured here is so large that it can be used in real life applications such as spin based logic and transistors.

Physicists at the University of Bonn have managed to create optical hollows and more complex patterns into which the light of a Bose-Einstein condensate flows. The creation of such highly low-loss structures for light is a prerequisite for complex light circuits, such as for quantum information processing for a new generation of computers. The researchers are now presenting their results in the journal Nature Photonics.