Category Physics

Vacuum fluctuations may be thought of as a flickering of the quantum light field even in total darkness. The positive (red) and negative (blue) regions are randomly distributed in space and they change constantly at high speed — similar to black-and-white noise on a TV screen with no signal input. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Konstanz

What are the properties of the vacuum, the absolute nothingness? So far, physicists have assumed that it is impossible to directly access the characteristics of the ground state of empty space. Now, a team of physicists has succeeded in doing just that. They demonstrated a first direct observation of the so-called vacuum fluctuations by using short light pulses while employing highly precise optical measurement techniques.

The duration of their lig...

Diagram showing how mushrooms are turned into a material for battery anodes.

Researchers have created a new type of lithium-ion battery anode using portabella mushrooms, which are inexpensive, environmentally friendly and easy to produce. Porous structure of portabella mushrooms is key to making efficient batteries that could power cell phones, electric vehicles. The current industry standard for rechargeable lithium-ion battery anodes is synthetic graphite, which comes with a high cost of manufacturing because it requires tedious purification and preparation processes that are also harmful to the environment.

UC Riverside engineers were drawn to using mushrooms as a form of biomass because past research has established they are highly porous, meaning they have a lot of small spaces for li...

Left: Schematic of the coupling of photonic crystal effect and multiple-beam interference in the CPhCs E-F-E double heterostructure; Middle and Right: Illustration and SEM image of an E-F-E double heterostructure (Scale bar is 1 μm).

Researchers report breakthrough due to novel and multi-layer colloidal photonic crystal structure. It could drive the next advances in sensor technology, energy saving and harvesting, lasers and optoelectronics...

(Left) Hinode observation of a developing sunspot. An elongated bright feature called a ‘light bridge’ appears between the merging pores (darkest parts). (Right) Computer simulation of sunspot formation. A light bridge resembling the one observed is formed between the pores. (Credit: NAOJ/JAXA/LMSAL/NASA)

Sunspots are planet-sized conglomerates of bundles of intense magnetic field lines on the surface of the Sun. They are known to cause solar flares which can directly impact our technological infrastructure. Shin Toriumi’s team analyzed observations of sunspots as they formed taken by Hinode, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) satellites.

The team modeled the observations using state-of-the-art numerical simulations performed on the Pl...