Category Physics

Squeezing iron-containing ferrocene (not to scale) in the pores of the metal-organic framework known as MIL-101 lets ferrocene’s iron snag oxygen from passing air. Credit: PNNL

Inexpensive materials called MOFs pull gases out of air or other mixed gas streams, but fail to do so with oxygen. Now, a team has overcome this limitation by creating a composite of a MOF and a helper molecule in which the 2 work in concert to separate oxygen from other gases simply and cheaply. The results might help with a wide variety of applications, including making pure oxygen for fuel cells, using that oxygen in a fuel cell, removing oxygen in food packaging, making oxygen sensors, or for other industrial processes...

The miniaturized CubeSat payload called both CuPID and WASP returned data about a physical phenomenon called charge exchange. Credit: NASA

The camera, which incorporated a never-before-flown focusing technology when it debuted in late 2012, is a gift that keeps giving. NASA recently selected a miniaturized version of the original X-ray camera to fly as a CubeSat mission to study Earth’s magnetic cusps – regions in the magnetic cocoon around our planet near the poles where the magnetic field lines dip down toward the ground...

The magnetic structure of a skyrmion is symmetrical around its core; arrows indicate the direction of spin. Credit: Ill./©: Benjamin Krüger

JGU and MIT joint teams have for the first time achieved targeted shifting of individual skyrmions at room temperature using electrical impulses. The idea is that electronic storage units (bits) will not be stored on rotating hard disks as is currently standard practice but on a nanowire in the form of magnetic vortex structures, ie skyrmions, using a process similar to that of a shift register. The magnetic skyrmion bits would be rapidly accessible, while storage density would be high and there would be improved energy efficiency.

Magnetic skyrmions are special spin configurations that can occur in materials especially in thin layer structures when ...

3 sources of single photons: represented by a red dot at the center of the cavity, the semiconductor quantum dots (of nanometric size) is inserted in the center of the cavity, which consists of a 3 µm pillar connected to a circular frame by guides that are 1.3 µm wide. By applying electrical voltage to the cavity, the wavelength of the emitted photons can be tuned and the charge noise totally eliminated. Credit: © Niccolo Somaschi – Laboratoire de photonique et de nanostructures (CNRS)

A new ultra-bright source of single photons – 15X brighter than commonly used sources and emitting photons that are 99.5% indistinguishable from one another – has been developed by researchers from the CNRS, Université Paris Diderot, and Université Paris-Sud...