Category Physics

An illustration shows what happens in a typical experiment with SLAC’s LCLS X-ray laser, top, versus what happened in this study with an especially intense X-ray pulse. Normally the X-ray pulses — which are shown coming in from the right — scatter off electrons in a sample and produce a pattern in a detector. But when researchers cranked up the intensity of the X-ray pulses, the pulses seemed to go straight through the sample, as if it were not there, and the pattern in the detector vanished. Two recent papers describe and explain this surprising result, which is due to a ‘nonlinear’ effect where particles of X-ray light team up to cause unexpected things to happen. Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Between two mirrors, the quantum dot filters the light beams with just one photon per package out of the laser, so that only packages with multiple photons remain. Credit: Leiden Institute of Physics

An illustration of the Migration Enhance Encapsulated Growth (MEEG) process to stabilize novel wide-bandgap two-dimensional nitride semiconductors that are not naturally occurring. MEEG is facilitated by defects in the graphene lattice that act as pathways for intercalation. When the gallium and nitrogen adatoms meet at the graphene/SiC interface, they chemically react to form two-dimensional gallium nitride. Credit: Z. Al Balushi and Stephen Weitzner, Penn State MatSE

In the proposed experiment, two energy reservoirs (S and D) made of trapped ions transport energy quanta to each other by coupling to the spins in a quantum magnet placed between them. Credit: Alejandro Bermudez and Tobias Schaetz, New Journal of Physics. CC-BY-3.0