The work was conducted at the Geosoilenvirocars beamline operated by University of Chicago at the Advanced Photon Source housed at Argonne.
The US Department of energy Office of Science funded the use of the Advanced Photon Source. Study authors contributed from the Ecole Normale Supã rieure in France Universitã de Granoble in France the University of Chicago and UMET CNRS â##Universitã Lille 1 and UC Riverside.
Inside that murky vial attached to the negative electrode bacteria feast on particles of organic waste
and convert it into biological fuel their excess electrons flow into the carbon filaments and across to the positive electrode
which is made of silver oxide a material that attracts electrons. The electrons flowing to the positive node gradually reduce the silver oxide to silver storing the spare electrons in the process.
After a day or so the positive electrode has absorbed a full load of electrons and has largely been converted into silver says Xing Xie an interdisciplinary researcher.
At that point it is removed from the battery and re-oxidized back to silver oxide releasing the stored electrons.
Engineers estimate that the microbial battery can extract about 30 percent of the potential energy locked up in wastewater.
Next the researchers used a technique called two-photon lithography to turn that design into a three-dimensional polymer lattice.
and then watching the microscopic matchstick particles move towards it a phenomenon known as chemotaxis. For the purposes of this experiment the researchers placed silica##manganese oxide eadson the matchstick material and introduced hydrogen peroxide as the chemical fuel in one particular place.
The reaction was so strong that more than half of the matchstick particles did not reverse their orientation once over their 90 seconds of travel towards the hydrogen peroxide
and Brownian rotation. e choose high aspect ratio rodlike particles as they are a favorable geometry for chemotactic swimmers as seen for example in nature in the shapes of certain motile organismssays Bon. e placed the engine
When photons-particles of light-strike the beams they cause the beams to vibrate. And the particulate nature of the light introduces quantum fluctuations that affect those vibrations.
light is neither a particle nor a wave; you need both explanations to understand this experiment#says Safavi-Naeini.#
#You need the particle nature of light to explain these quantum fluctuations and you need the wave nature of light to understand this interference.#
##Shifty#neutrinos hint at antimatter mystery Boston University Duke university Stony Brook University University of Pittsburgh University of Rochester University of Washington Posted by Leonor Sierra-Rochester
ROCHESTER/STONY BROOK (US)# Scientists have announced the first definitive observation of the transformation of muon neutrinos to electron neutrinos#a type of neutrino oscillation that had never been observed.#
#In 1998 the discovery of neutrino oscillation in the atmospheric neutrinos by the Super-Kamiokande experiment led us to a new journey into the fascinating and mysterious world of neutrinos
#This discovery of electron neutrino appearance from muon neutrinos by the T2k experiment opens another critical door in our journey to unveil the secrets of our universe.#
when matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts in the Big bang? Somehow this balance changed over time to a dominance of matter.
whether or not it would be feasible to explore CP violation in neutrinos. CP violation has only been observed in another type of particle quarks (for
which Nobel prizes were awarded in 1980 and 2008) never in neutrinos. The observed type of neutrino oscillation is sensitive to CP violation
and the T2k experiment will try to observe this process in neutrinos over coming years.
It could be that the asymmetry between matter and antimatter lies with neutrinos which is why observing CP violation in neutrinos would be exciting Manly adds.#
#Our goal now is to push to better understand the errors in the measurements and continue to collect sufficient data to explore this possible CP violation.#
#One in a trillionthe T2k experiment based in Tokai Japan expects to collect 10 times more data in the near future including data with an antineutrino beam.
Manly explains that neutrinos are notoriously difficult to study and the oscillation that the researchers seek can be mimicked by other processes.
For that reason the University of Rochester group has focused on understanding these other processes to ensure that what is measured is really the neutrino oscillation they have sought.
The probability that random statistical fluctuations alone would produce the observed excess of electron neutrinos is less than one in a trillion.
In the T2k experiment a muon neutrino beam is produced in the Japan Proton accelerator Research Complex called J-PARC located in Tokai village Ibaraki Prefecture on the east coast of Japan.
The neutrino beam is monitored by a detector complex in Tokai and aimed at the gigantic Super-Kamiokande underground detector in Kamioka near the west coast of Japan 295 kilometers (185 miles) away from Tokai.
An analysis of the data from the Super-Kamiokande detector associated with the neutrino beam time from J-PARC reveals that there are more electron neutrinos (a total of 28 events) than would be expected (4. 6 events) without this new process.
the particles heat up so quickly they instantly vaporize water and create steam. The technology has an overall energy efficiency of 24 percent.
In the new experiments, the Rice lab mixed graphene nanoribbons and tin oxide particles about 10 nanometers wide in a slurry with a cellulose gum binder and a bit of water, spread it on a current collector
he adds. ince the tin oxide particles are only a few nanometers in size and permitted to remain that way by being dispersed on GNR surfaces,
#First boson laser could save power Stanford university University of Michigan rightoriginal Studyposted by Bjorn Carey-Stanford on May 24 2013stanford (US)# Scientists have demonstrated a revolutionary electrically driven polariton laser
The new system however makes use of the unique physical properties of bosons subatomic particles that scientists have attempted to incorporate into lasers for decades.#
Charged particles such as electrons exist in discontinuous energy levels like rungs on a ladder. An electron provided with enough energy can become excited
and#jump up to a higher energy level. Excited electrons can spontaneously fall down to an available lower energy level shooting off the difference in energy as a bit of light called a photon.
The amount of time that passes before an excited electron drops down and releases a photon is usually random.
However Einstein predicted that if an electron in an upper energy level was exposed to a photon with proper energy the electron would instantly fall down
and release a second photon identical to the first one. A laser keeps this process going by continually providing energy for electrons to move into higher energy levels.
As more and more electrons are stimulated to release photons the additional photons stimulate more and more electrons. Some of the photons are allowed to escape from the device to serve a purpose such as reading data off a CD or etching a circuit board.
The process however is inefficient. There is a hard limit to the number of electrons that can inhabit a given energy level at any given time
and conventional lasers waste energy unnecessarily exciting electrons to higher energy levels even when the lower levels are too full to accept the excited electrons
when they fall. Exciting excitonskim s polariton laser however pairs electrons with so-called#holes#to form another type of particle an exciton.
A hole is a gap where an electron could exist in a structure and is treated by physicists as a real separate particle.
These excitons are bosons and an unlimited number of them can inhabit any given energy level.
Using bosons in lasers has been a scientific goal for decades but Yamamoto s team is the first to successfully build an electrically driven laser using bosons.
The result was reproduced recently and confirmed by scientists at the University of Michigan who published their work in the journal Physical Review Letters.)
This change drastically reduces the amount of power required to run the laser. The current iteration of the polariton laser requires two to five times less energy than a comparable conventional laser
but could require 100 times less energy in the future.##The outcome would look similar to that of the traditional photon lasers
but the physical mechanisms inside are very different#Kim says. The laser consists of an electron reservoir and a hole reservoir.
When a current is applied electrons and holes come together to form excitons in excited energy levels.
When a photon hits an exciton it forms a polariton and emits an identical photon.
The entire process is like a solar cell in reverse Kim says.##In a solar cell you use light to form excitons
and separate them into an electron and a hole electrically#she says.##We bring together an electron
and a hole electrically to emit light.##One benefit of the electrically driven polariton laser is it only needs to be attached to a power supply to emit photons allowing it to be integrated easily with existing semiconductor chips in the future.
Still too coolthe current polariton laser can run only at a chilly 4 degrees Kelvin (minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit)
and requires constant cooling by liquid helium to prevent the excitons inside the gallium arsenide semiconductors from being pulled apart by thermal energy.
The team hopes switching to a material that requires more energy to break apart excitons will allow them to build polariton lasers that work at room temperature an important step toward widespread use.#
#We re hoping we can replace conventional semiconductor lasers with these polariton lasers in the future#Kim says.#
#There are a lot of hurdles in the way but we aim to bring novel devices built on sound physical understanding for cost-effectiveness and efficient power consumption.#
The nanocrystalline materials the scientists have been working on are created those from nanosized particles, in this case from copper.
While electrons ordinarily flow freely through the nanotubes, any ethylene molecules present in the vicinity will bond with the copper atoms,
obstructing the flow of those electrons. Tiny beads of polystyrene are used also, which absorb ethylene and concentrate it near the nanotubes.
By measuring how much the electron flow has been slowed, the sensors are able to determine ethylene levels.
Zheng's color photodetector consists of an ultra-thin oxide coating atop a thin layer of aluminum that was deposited onto a silicon photodetector using a common technique called electron-beam evaporation.
It's these approximately 100-nanometers-wide slits that allow the device to differentiate between colors with plasmons waves of electrons that flow across metal surfaces) excited by light of a specific wavelength.
With DNATRAX the bacteria is replaced by particles of non-biological DNA that can be collected with simple forensic swabs
By applying the DNA particles to the exterior of the suit it is possible to identify
since it comes in super fine particles. Previous methods of binding it to larger matter have already been used
Panasonic has found a way to bind the Tio2 to another particle zeolite (a commercial adsorbent and catalyst)
because the two particles are bound together by electrostatic force. When the novel photocatalytic particles are stirred Tio2 is released from the zeolite and dispersed throughout the water.
As a result reaction speed is much faster than other methods of fixing Tio2 on the surface of substrates
they're made using carbon particles which are mediocre conductors at best and are only really good for a limited scope of simple low-power applications.
Voxel8 a Harvard spin-off founded by professor Jennifer Lewis has designed a new ink that replaces carbon with highly conductive silver particles
The tiny gelatin particles have a huge benefit: They can be administered nasally a noninvasive and direct route to the brain.
but when exposed to neutrons it will react to produce a particular isotope of uranium (U-233) that becomes the nuclear fuel.
Devices that manipulate the spin of individual electrons are the closest possible candidate but they re less mature,
#Researchers discover 3d material that behaves like graphene This illustration depicts fast-moving, massless electrons inside cadmium arsenide.
what happens after subatomic particles collide has been a long struggle for physicists. For decades, the best tool involved basic sketches (called Feynman diagrams) of each possible result.
The shape s dimensions length, width, height and other parameters (hencemultidimensional) represent information about the colliding particles,
and the equation describing its volume also describes the particles that emerge from the collision.
Unlike the older methods for exploring particle collisions, the amplituhedron is rooted not in a world where a particle starts in one place
and time before moving to the next location and moment. That is the shape does not exist in space-time it does not rely on a conception of the universe that theoretical physicists suspect might be incorrect.
says physicist Lance Dixon, a pioneer in the field of particle collisions, but he cautions that so far it can only describe particle collisions within a simplified version of quantum theory the results don t yet translate to the real world.
Arkani-Hamed acknowledges it is ababy example; he calls itstep zero in the journey to create a new kind of physics a project on par with the discovery of the probabilistic particle collisions themselves.
For now, the amplituhedron offers a hint of what this strange new world could look like. Via Discover Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorat c
lithium ions travel from the anode to the cathode through the electrolyte, creating a chemical reaction that allows electrons to be harvested along the way.
she hoped to treat them the same way as materials composed of synthetic particles. That idea might have been a bit naïve, she now acknowledges.
One reason for the high cost is that real-time simulations of ultrafast phenomena require small time steps to describe the movement of an electron
and opens the door for efficient real-time simulations of ultrafast processes and electron dynamics, such as excitation in photovoltaic materials and ultrafast demagnetization following an optical excitation."
Reducing the Dimension of the Problem Conventional computational methods cannot be used to study systems in which electrons have been excited from the ground state,
an excited system can be modeled with time-dependent quantum mechanical equations that describe the movement of electrons.
Many scientists have assumed that bottom feeders get most of their energy from tiny particles of organic matter that settle on the seafloor.
causing the particles to fall out of the air. There is an increase in the number of nozzles used and the water flow in marginally increased, in comparison to standard spray setups.
Entanglement is the weird instantaneous link that has been shown to exist between certain particles such as photons
or electrons even if they are separated by vast distances. Although entangled particles do not appear to have any physical connection they are capable of acting in concert.
For instance if you change the spin of one the spin of the other will also be altered.
even if the two particles exist at opposite ends of the universe as if they are one.
Entangled particles are frustratingly fickle difficult to capture and even more difficult to manipulate. But the breakthrough made by the Kavli Institute scientists could be a game-changer.
Previous attempts to teleport information by manipulating entangled particles have been promising but have fallen short of practical application.
They did so by producing quantum bits using electrons trapped in diamonds at extremely low temperatures. These ultra-cold gemstones effectively acted as prisons trapping the electrons
and allowing the scientists to accurately establish their spin or value. If they can repeat the experiment over distances significantly larger than 10 feet it could mean that incomprehensibly fast quantum computers
The billboard's air filtration system is also capable of scrubbing the air of some pretty heavy-duty pollutants such as the dust metal and stone particles common around construction zones.
which two particles can become entangled so that even when separated by large distances, say light-years,
Using such entangled photons, or particles of light, the microscope reveals things that are completely transparent,
visualizing them in a much better quality than could be done with ordinary light. Physics guru Albert Einstein once famously called it"spooky action at a distance."
Creative microscopy The idea of using entangled photons to beat this limit was suggested first in a theoretical paper by physicist Jonathan Dowling and his colleagues at Louisiana State university in 2001.
they first generated entangled photons by converting a laser beam into pairs of photons that were in opposite polarization states
The physicists used special nonlinear crystals to achieve the superposition of the photons'polarization states,
The two photons in the pair would be considered entangled, and an action on one of them should affect the other regardless of the distance between them.
The researchers then focused the entangled photons on two adjacent spots on a flat glass platewith A q-shaped pattern made in relief on the plate's surface.
Entangled photons however, significantly improve the visibility of this pattern. The Hokkaido University researchers say the signal-to-noise ratio,
and measuring the difference in the phase of the light between the two photon states
Measuring this difference with entangled photons is much more precise, because a measurement on one entangled photon provides information about the other,
so together they provide more information than independent photons, resulting in the larger detection signal and sharper image.
As a result, with the same number of photons, the signal-to-noise ratio using entangled photons is better than that with ordinary light.
Importance for biology One classical way to image smaller objects without using entangled photons is to use shorter and shorter wavelengths of light.
This way, one could improve resolution by switching from visible light to X-rays. But X-ray microscopesare difficult to use and coherent X-ray sources like X-ray lasers, in
The biggest one is entangled that the photon light sources currently available are said very faint Dowling, and while they give the improved resolution, the rate at
"In this experiment the entangled photons arrive at about 5 photons per second. It's likely that to produce the image shown above they had to wait hours or days,
a much brighter source of entangled photons must be developed, as biologists and doctors are unlikely to be prepared to wait hours for an image to form. o
which is the weird instantaneous connection that exists between two entangled particles no matter their distance from one another.
reports Princeton News. The minuscule device is powered by individual electrons that tunnel through artificial atoms known as"quantum dots,
"It is basically as small as you can go with these single-electron devices, "said Jason Petta,
When turned on, electrons flow single-file through each double quantum dot which causes them to emit photons in the microwave region of the spectrum.
The photons can then be channeled into a coherent beam of light using mirrors. Aside from its importance in the development of quantum computers, the maser could also lead to advancements in a variety of fields such as communications, sensing and medicine,
or any other discipline that utilizes technology which relies on coherent light sources.""In this paper the researchers dig down deep into the fundamental interaction between light
and the moving electron,"said Claire Gmachl, professor of electrical engineering at Princeton.""The double quantum dot allows them full control over the motion of even a single electron,
and in return they show how the coherent microwave field is created and amplified. Learning to control these fundamental light-matter interaction processes will help in the future development of light sources
Nature News The ones and zeroes that propel the digital world the fording of electrons across a transistor,
or hard drives reliant on electrons'intrinsic spin are getting packed into smaller and smaller spaces. The limit was thought to be set:
no more than one bit of information could be encoded on an atom or electron. But now, researchers at Stanford university in Palo alto, California, have used another feature of the electron its tendency to bounce probabilistically between different quantum states to create holograms that pack information into subatomic spaces.
By encoding information into the electron's quantum shape, or wave function, the researchers were able to create a holographic drawing that contained 35 bits per electron."
"Our results will challenge some fundamental assumptions people had about the ultimate limits of information storage,
"says graduate student Chris Moon, one of the authors of the work published in Nature Nanotechnology1.
They would use the quantum properties of electrons, rather than photons, as their source of'illumination'.'Using a scanning tunnelling microscope, they stuck carbon monoxide molecules onto a layer of copper their holographic plate.
The molecules were positioned to create speckled patterns that would result in a holographic'S'.The sea of electrons that exists naturally at the surface of the copper layer served as their illumination.
these electrons interfere with the carbon monoxide molecules to create a quantum hologram. The researchers read the hologram using the microscope to measure the energy state of a single electron wave function.
They showed they could read out an'S'for Stanford with features as small as 0. 3 nanometres.
They teased out the individual pages by scanning the hologram for electrons at different energy levels.
In encoding the'S',the researchers were concentrating the electron density at certain points and energy levels.
And a concentration of electrons in space is, in essence, a wire. That led study co-author Hari Manoharan to think about using the holograms as stackable quantum circuits
The quantum electron holography, for now, requires the tunnelling microscope, which traverses the hologram more slowly."
but sulphate and soot particles from fossil fuel burning are the main culprits, the team found."
aerosol particles can act as seeds for clouds, which help to reflect the Sun's rays back into space
which way the nitrogen s electrons are spinning. Reinhard s team placed different kinds of samples onto their diamond
and watched how the nuclear resonance in them influenced the spinning electrons in the nitrogen. The researchers worked out that most of the signal came from a volume just 5 nanometres across inside the sample.
which allowed them to manipulate the electrons of hydrogen atoms inside it. That was much more like a conventional NMR experiment,
bacteria accounted for around 20%of all particles#biological and non-biological#a higher proportion than in the near-Earth atmosphere."
when water molecules in the air coalesce around a seed particle, often dust or soot. Depending on temperature, these complexes can grow into large water droplets or frozen balls of ice,
the water s oxygen atoms share some of their electrons with vacant electron orbitals on the aluminium atoms,
and the oxygens in the ceramic share their electrons with hydrogen in the water. This binds the two together.
But what if a ceramic failed to accept electrons from water? Then the ceramic might actually be reasoned hydrophobic
The lanthanides'empty orbitals are buried beneath shells of other electrons, which should make them much less attractive to water s oxygen,
Researchers working with nanoscale fluorescent particles called quantum dots have predicted long groundbreaking achievements, such as ultra-efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDS) and solar cells,
and size affect the quantum properties of their electrons, in particular their energy gap#the energy needed to kick electrons into a higher energy band#which determines the colour of light that the mater#ial can emit.
Whereas a bulk semiconductor is limited to emitting a single colour of light researchers can tune the precise colour a quantum dot will absorb
Current atomic clocks are based on the microwave signals emitted by electrons inside an atom as they move from one energy level to another.
But those internal atomic oscillations are determined by the interactions between the atom s electrons and its nucleus
M#ller and his colleagues say that their work goes back to the basics of quantum mechanics#to Arthur Compton's demonstration in 1923 that X-ray photons can deliver a detectable momentum impulse to an electron,
and to Louis de Broglie's subsequent insight that moving electrons (and atoms) behave like waves.
The characteristic Compton frequency used to describe these matter waves is around 1020 Hz for an electron,
or tiny laser-photon impacts, which slow the Compton cycles by a precisely known amount.
"involves a reference using at least two particles that interact. This Compton clock is the first to be based entirely on a single particle s mass.
That means that the device, which in principle can be built with a single atom, M#ller says,
#Electron beams set nanostructures aglow Put a piece of quartz under an electron microscope and it will shine an icy blue.
But the light#emitted after a beam of electrons kicks a material s own electrons into a higher energy state#is faint and diffuse,
The technique combines the advantages of optical and electron-based imaging. An electron beam can in principle achieve a resolution of less than one nanometre,
compared with hundreds of nanometres for a beam of light. But maps made by scattered or reflected electrons are not typically sensitive to the way light behaves in the sample.
Cathodoluminescence, by contrast, can map the interaction of light and matter#but, because it is triggered by a narrow beam of electrons,
it promises the same nanometre scale resolution that those systems can achieve.""This has opened the door to understanding how light couples to matter in a more fundamental way,
The device includes a carefully shaped parabolic mirror that collects photons as they emerge from a sample bombarded with electrons.
Just as in an old-fashioned cathode ray tube-tube colour television, the electron beam scans the sample to build up an image line by line.
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