Columbia researchers wired a single molecular cluster to gold electrodes to show that it exhibits a quantized and controllable flow of charge at room temperature.
Credit: Bonnie Choi/Columbia University

Researchers are first to reproducibly achieve the current blockade effect using atomically precise molecules at room temperature, a result that could lead to shrinking electrical components + boosting data storage + computing power. Current blockade is the ability to switch a device from the insulating to the conducting state where charge is added and removed one electron at a time.

Bonnie Choi, a graduate student in the Roy group created a single cluster of geometrically ordered atoms with an inorganic core made of just 14 atoms – resulting in a diameter of about 0...

The artist’s rendering shows how potential wells are created for the light in the microresonator through heating with an external laser beam (green). Credit: David Dung, Universität Bonn

Physicists create optical ‘wells’ for a super-photon for the first time. The creation of such highly low-loss structures for light is a prerequisite for complex light circuits, such as for quantum information processing for a new-gen computers. Many thousands of photons can be merged to form a single super-photon if they are sufficiently concentrated and cooled. The individual particles merge with each other, making them indistinguishable. Researchers call this a photonic Bose-Einstein condensate. It has long been known that normal atoms form such condensates. Prof...

Only 55 million lightyears away, this is one of the closest supernovae discovered in recent years. Credit: Image courtesy of University of California – Santa Barbara

In the 2009 film “Star Trek,” a supernova hurtles through space and obliterates a planet unfortunate enough to be in its path. Fiction, of course, but it turns out the notion is not so farfetched. Using the nearby Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO), astrophysicists from UC Santa Barbara have observed something similar: an exploding star slamming into a nearby companion star. What’s more, they detected the fleeting blue glow from the interaction at an unprecedented level of detail...

Side-by-side comparison of density “snapshots” produced in a 3-D simulation of jets beaming out from a black hole (at the base of images). Red shows higher density and blue shows lower density. The black directional lines show magnetic field streamlines. The perturbed magnetic lines reflect both the emergence of irregular magnetic fields in the jets and the large-scale deviations of the jets out of the image plane, both caused by the 3-D magnetic kink instability. Credit: Berkeley Lab, Purdue University

Theories and models show how instabilities develop in extreme energy releases from black holes, “These jets are notoriously hard to explain,” said Alexander “Sasha” Tchekhovskoy, a former NASA Edbolt Einsteinein fellow...