Category Physics

Magnetic Spins that ‘Freeze’ when Heated: Nature in the wrong direction

Magnetische spins
At cooler temperatures, the spins in the material form random patterns, where each pattern whirls like a helix with a particular twist. When heating up the material, the spins choose one of the particular helix patterns, a phenomenon that normally occurs when the temperature decreases in magnetic materials.

Physicists observed a strange new type of behaviour in a magnetic material when it’s heated up. The magnetic spins ‘freeze’ into a static pattern when the temperature rises, a phenomenon that normally occurs when the temperature decreases. They publish their findings in Nature Physics on July 4th.

The researchers discovered the phenomenon in the material neodymium, an element that they described several years ago as a ‘self-induced spin glass’...

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A Ceramic Aerogel made with Nanocrystals and Embedded in a Matrix for use in Thermal Insulation Applications

A ceramic aerogel made with nanocrystals and embedded in a matrix for use in thermal insulation applications
Multiscale design of hypocrystalline ceramic nanofibrous aerogel. a, Deformation modes and the corresponding ν and α of crystalline (C), amorphous (A) and hypocrystalline (H) ceramic fibrous cells under mechanical and thermal excitations. The colored scale bar indicates the variation of ceramics from amorphous to crystal by using a local-entropy-based fingerprint to characterize the crystallinity of each atom in the simulated system. b, Illustration of the zig-zag architecture design based on hypocrystalline fibrous ceramics. The units of the colored scale bars are millimeters, presenting absolute displacement values in ν and α calculation. The triangle, square and pentagon cells are the building units to assemble the fibrous aerogel structure. Credit: Nature (2022). DOI: 10...
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ATLAS and CMS release results of most comprehensive studies yet of Higgs Boson’s properties

Atlas and CMS
From top to bottom, pictures of the ATLAS and CMS detectors (Image: CERN)

Today, exactly ten years after announcing the discovery of the Higgs boson, the international ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) report the results of their most comprehensive studies yet of the properties of this unique particle. The independent studies, described in two papers published today in Nature, show that the particle’s properties are remarkably consistent with those of the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics...

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Breaking AIs to Make them Better

Grahical abstract explaining Raw-Zero-Shot
Image recognition AIs are powerful but inflexible and cannot recognize images unless they are trained on specific data. In Raw Zero-Shot Learning, researchers give these image recognition AIs a variety of data and observe the patterns in their answers. The research team hopes that this methodology can help improve the robustness of future AI. Illustrated by Hiroko Uchida.

Researchers investigate ways to make AIs more robust by studying patterns in their answers when faced with the unknown. Current AIs are very accurate but inflexible at image recognition. Exactly why this is remains a mystery. Researchers have developed a method called ‘Raw Zero-Shot’ to assess how neural networks handle elements unknown to them...

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