Through the Quantum Looking Glass

Green laser light illuminates a metasurface that is a hundred times thinner than paper, that was fabricated at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies. CINT is jointly operated by Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories for the Department of Energy Office of Science. (Photo by Craig Fritz) Click on the thumbnail for a high-resolution image.

A thin device triggers one of quantum mechanics’ strangest and most useful phenomena. An ultrathin invention could make future computing, sensing and encryption technologies remarkably smaller and more powerful by helping scientists control a strange but useful phenomenon of quantum mechanics, according to new research recently published in the journal Science.

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and the Max Planck Institute for the...

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Webb Telescope Captures ‘Breathtaking’ Images of Orion Nebula

Webb telescope captures 'breathtaking' images of Orion Nebula
Credit: NASA

The wall of dense gas and dust resembles a massive winged creature, its glowing maw lit by a bright star as it soars through cosmic filaments.

An international research team on Monday revealed the first images of the Orion Nebula captured with the James Webb Space Telescope, leaving astronomers “blown away.”

The stellar nursery is situated in the constellation Orion, 1,350 light-years away from Earth, in a similar setting in which our own solar system was birthed more than 4.5 billion years ago.

Astronomers are interested in the region to better understand what happened during the first million years of our planetary evolution.

The images were obtained as part of the Early Release Science program and involved more than 100 scientists in 18 countries, with insti...

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Unique Ferroelectric Microstructure revealed for first time

STEM image of polar nanoregions
An atomically resolved scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) image of the polar nanoregions (PNRs) embedded in the nonpolar matrix in the layered perovskite material (Ca, Sr)3Mn2O7. Bright contrast in the images can be directly interpreted as the atomic columns in the crystal. Aberration corrected STEM was employed to direct capture the arrangement of the atoms in the (a-type and b-type) polar nanoregions in the crystal and the displacement measurement at picometer precision were performed on the STEM images to extract the distortion in the structure. Credit: Alem Group/Jennifer M. McCann, MRI. All Rights Reserved.

A team of researchers have observed and reported for the first time the unique microstructure of a novel ferroelectric material, enabling the development of lead-...

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Astronomy: Is Overeating to blame for Bulges in Milky Way Bar?

A Milky-Way-like galaxy simulated by the supercomputer ATERUI II. Stars are clustered in a bar shape near the center of the galaxy. (Credit: Junichi Baba, Hirotaka Nakayama, 4D2U Project, NAOJ)

A new simulation conducted on the world’s most powerful supercomputer dedicated to astronomy has produced a testable scenario to explain the appearance of the bar of the Milky Way. Comparing this scenario to data from current and future space telescopes will help clarify the evolution of our home Galaxy.

Astronomy is revealing the structure of the Milky Way Galaxy in which we live in increasing detail. We know that it is a disk galaxy, with two- or four- armed spirals, with a straight bar in the middle connecting the spirals...

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