Category Physics

This image shows the first cosmic ray event recorded in the MicroBooNE TPC on Aug. 6. Credit: MicroBooNE

A school bus-sized detector packed with 170 tons of liquid argon has seen its first particle footprints. On Aug. 6, MicroBooNE, a liquid-argon time projection chamber recorded images of the tracks of cosmic muons, particles that shower down on Earth when cosmic rays collide with nuclei in our atmosphere.

“This is the first detector of this size and scale we’ve ever launched in the U.S. for use in a neutrino beam, so it’s a very important milestone for the future of neutrino physics,” said Sam Zeller, co-spokesperson for the MicroBooNE collaboration.

Picking up cosmic muons is just one brief stop during MicroBooNE’s expedition into particle physics...

Neutrinos are more abundant than any particle other than photons, yet they interact so weakly with other matter that every second, more than 100 billion stream — mainly unnoticed — through every square centimetre of Earth. Once thought to be massless, they in fact have a minuscule mass and can change type as they travel, a bizarre and entirely unexpected feature that physicists do not fully understand. Indeed, surprisingly little is known about the neutrino. “These are the most ubiquitous matter particles in the Universe that we know of, and probably the most mysterious,” says Nigel Lockyer, director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois.

4 unprecedented experiments look poised to change this...

The Next Generation Wearable Display Using Fiber Based Light Emitting Diodes. Credit: Copyright KAIST

Professor Kyung-Cheol Choi and his team from the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST have developed fiber-like LED’s, which can be applied in wearable displays. Traditional wearable displays were manufactured on a hard substrate, which is later attached to the surface of clothes. Such technique has posed limitations in applying it for wearable displays because inflexible displays were not adequate in practice, and the characteristics of fabric were ignored.

Dip-Coating Process to Create Fiber-Based Light-Emitting Diodes

Solution? They focused on fibers, a component of fabrics, and developed a fiber-like light emitting diode that has the characteristics of both fabrics and displays...

A schematic shows the layered structure of tantalum oxide, multilayer graphene and platinum used for a new type of memory developed at Rice University. The memory device overcomes crosstalk problems that cause read errors in other devices. Credit: Tour Group/Rice University

The memories are based on tantalum oxide, a common insulator in electronics. Applying voltage to a 250-nm-thick sandwich of graphene, tantalum, nanoporous tantalum oxide and platinum creates addressable bits where the layers meet. Control voltages that shift oxygen ions and vacancies switch the bits between ones and zeroes.

The discovery by Rice lab chemist James Tour could allow for crossbar array memories that store up to 162 gigabits, much higher than other oxide-based memory systems...