Category Physics

The new camera was developed for filming chemistry and physics occurring at extreme speeds. Credit: Image courtesy of Lund University

Lund University, Sweden researchers has developed a camera that can film at a rate equivalent to 5 trillion images per second, or events as short as 0.2 trillionths of a second. This is faster than has previously been possible. The new camera will therefore be able to capture incredibly rapid processes in chemistry, physics, biology and biomedicine, that so far have not been caught on film. The researchers have successfully filmed how photons travels a distance corresponding to the thickness of a paper. In reality, it only takes a picosecond, but on film the process has been slowed down by a trillion times.

Currently, high-speed cameras capture images one by...

MIT researchers have designed a system that can 3-D print the basic structure of an entire building. The system consists of a tracked vehicle that carries a large industrial robotic arm, which has a smaller, precision-motion robotic arm at its end. Credit: Photo Steven Keating, Julian Leland, Levi Cai, and Neri Oxman/Mediated Matter Group

Tech could enable faster, cheaper, more adaptable building construction. Structures built with this system could be produced faster and less expensively than traditional construction methods allow. A building could also be completely customized...

Illustration of Kerr effect used to detect magnetization through the rotation of polarized light when it interacts with electron spins in a material. Shown are layers of chromium germanium telluride (CGT). The orange balls represent tellurium atoms, yellow is germanium, and blue is chromium. Credit: Zhenglu Li/Berkeley Lab

Study reveals unprecedented control of ferromagnetic behavior in 2D material. The scientists found that a 2D van der Waals crystal, part of a class of material whose atomically thin layers can be peeled off one by one with adhesive tape, possessed an intrinsic ferromagnetism.The discovery could have major implications for a wide range of applications that rely upon ferromagnetic materials, such as nanoscale memory, spintronic devices, and magnetic sensors...

UCI physicist Jing Xia (right, with graduate student Alex Stern) calls the fiber-optic Sagnac interferometer he built the most sensitive magnetic microscope in the world. He compares it to a telescope that an ornithologist in Irvine could use to inspect the eye of a bird in New York. Credit: Steve Zylius / UCI

New 2D quantum materials have been created with breakthrough electrical and magnetic attributes that could make them building blocks of future quantum computers and other advanced electronics. The research is conducted at extremely cold temperatures and that the signal carriers in all 3 studies are not electrons – as with silicon-based technologies – but Dirac or Majorana fermions, particles without mass that move at nearly the speed of light...