Category Physics

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a technique that uses light to get flat, plastic sheets to curve into shapes such as spheres, tubes or bowls. Credit: Amber Hubbard

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a technique that uses light to get two-dimensional plastic sheets to curve into three-dimensional (3D) structures. The advance builds on earlier work by the same team, which focused on self-folding 3D structures. The key advance here is that rather than having the plastic fold along sharp lines – into polygonal shapes such as cubes or pyramids – the plastics bend and curve.

Researchers Michael Dickey and Prof. Jan Genzer f NC State, were early leaders in the field of self-folding 3D structures...

Portals can allow the exploration of the dark sector with the Standard Model particles Portals mix or connect the dark sector particles with the Standard Model particles. Through the portals it is possible to explore the dark sector particles using the Standard Model particles. The portals play a basic and critical role in the study of the dark sector particles both theoretically and experimentally. Credit: Image courtesy of Institute for Basic Science

Once upon a time, the Universe was just a hot soup of particles. In those days, together with visible particles, other particles to us hidden or dark might have formed. Billions of years later scientists catalogued 17 types of visible particles, with the most recent one being the Higgs boson, creating the ‘Standard Model’...

University of Michigan researchers have created a transparent silver film that could be used in touchscreens, flexible displays and other advanced applications. L. Jay Guo, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, holds up a piece of the material. Image credit: Joseph Xu/Michigan Engineering.

The thinnest, smoothest layer of silver that can survive air exposure has been laid down at the University of Michigan, and it could change the way touchscreens and flat or flexible displays are made. It could also help improve computing power, affecting both the transfer of information within a silicon chip and the patterning of the chip itself through metamaterial superlenses.

By combining silver with a little bit of aluminum, they found that it was possible to produce exceptionally...

Scientists have discovered that a sphere of cold helium atoms (in green) — interacting with a surrounding larger container of the same kind of atoms (in blue) — follows a bizarre rule of physics, called an entanglement area law, also observed in black holes. This discovery points to a “deeper reality,” says University of Vermont physicist Adrian Del Maestro and may be a step toward using superfluid helium as the fuel of a new generation of ultra-fast quantum computers. Credit: Adrian Del Maestro/Nature Physics

A team has discovered that a law controlling the bizarre behavior of black holes out in space – is also true for cold helium atoms that can be studied in laboratories. “It’s called an entanglement area law,” says Adrian Del Maestro, a physicist at the University of Vermont...