Category Physics

Schematic shows the components of a CHAMP cylinder-piston assembly used to create hydrogen from methane and steam via variable volume catalytic reaction. The process also concentrates carbon dioxide emissions from the process. (Credit: David Anderson, Georgia Tech) DOW

When is an internal combustion engine not an internal combustion engine? When it’s been transformed into a modular reforming reactor that could make hydrogen available to power fuel cells wherever there’s a natural gas supply available...

UChicago researchers achieved levitation of macroscopic objects between warm and cold plates in a vacuum chamber. Credit: Chicago Jean Lachat

UChicago undergraduate physics students helped take the levitation science to a new level. 3rd-year Frankie Fung and 4th-year Mykhaylo Usatyuk led a team of UChicago researchers who demonstrated how to levitate a variety of objects – ceramic and polyethylene spheres, glass bubbles, ice particles, lint strands and thistle seeds – between a warm plate and a cold plate in a vacuum chamber. “They made lots of intriguing observations that blew my mind,” said Prof. Cheng Chin, whose ultracold lab in the Gordon Center for Integrative Science was home to the experiments.

In their work, researchers achieved a number of levitation breakthroughs, in terms of du...

Image sensor and lens size comparison. Credit: Simon Thiele

A new study presents a miniaturized camera inspired by the natural vision of predators such as eagles that captures images with a high central acuity. The camera demonstrates for the first time direct, 3D printing of a complex imaging system onto a chip to form a multi-aperture camera. The design has potential applications in areas such as endoscopy, optical sensors, and surveillance drones, and it builds upon the growing field of micro-optics that has been revolutionized by advances in 3D printing. The system presented here involves so-called “foveated imaging,” named after the fovea area of the eye, which gives the highest acuity in vision.

It is based on the idea that since many tasks do not require equal clarity across a field...

A new bilayer material, with each layer measuring less than one nanometer in thickness, someday could lead to more efficient and versatile light emission, such as bendy LED screens. Credit: Matthew Bellus

A new bilayer material, with each layer measuring < 1nm in thickness could lead to more efficient and versatile light emission. Researchers working at the Ultrafast Laser Lab at the University of Kansas successfully created the material by combining atomically thin layers of molybdenum disulfide and rhenium disulfide. “Both absorb light very well as semiconductors, and they’re both very flexible can be stretched or compressed,” said Hui Zhao, associate professor of physics and astronomy at KU...