matter

Scientists help explain scarcity of anti-matter
12/30/2012 - 20:50

A collaboration with major participation by physicists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has made a precise measurement of elusive, nearly massless particles, and obtained a crucial hint as to why the universe is dominated by matter, not by its close relative, anti-matter.

more
How black holes change gear
06/08/2012 - 09:10

By studying two active black holes researchers at the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research have now gathered evidence that suggests that each black hole can change between two different regimes, like changing the gears of an engine. The team's findings will be published in two papers in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

more
Looking through the glass transition on an ultrafast timescale
04/14/2012 - 11:57

When chemists look at a drinking glass filled with water and a few ice cubes, it's not clear to them whether the glass is more like the water or the ice. Glass is one of civilization's most valuable and versatile materials. To scientists, it's also one of the most intriguing, because it displays properties of both solids and liquids.

more
Physicists Find Patterns in New State of Matter
03/29/2012 - 14:13

In a paper published in the March 29 issue of the journal Nature, the scientists describe the emergence of “spontaneous coherence,” “spin textures” and “phase singularities” when excitons—the bound pairs of electrons and holes that determine the optical properties of semiconductors and enable them to function as novel optoelectronic devices—are cooled to near absolute zero. This cooling leads to the spontaneous production of a new coherent state of matter which the physicists were finally able to measure in great detail in their basement laboratory at UC San Diego at a temperature of only one-tenth of a degree above absolute zero.

more
Supercomputing the Difference between Matter and Antimatter
03/29/2012 - 09:59

An international collaboration of scientists has reported a landmark calculation of the decay process of a kaon into two pions, using breakthrough techniques on some of the world’s fastest supercomputers. This is the same subatomic particle decay explored in a 1964 Nobel Prize-winning experiment performed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), which revealed the first experimental evidence of charge-parity (CP) violation — a lack of symmetry between particles and their corresponding antiparticles that may hold the answer to the question “Why are we made of matter and not antimatter?”

more
The Next Big Step Toward Atom-Specific Dynamical Chemistry
01/06/2012 - 10:24

Belkacem’s research focuses on creating better ways to track the evolution of energy and charge on the molecular level. For this purpose, one of the sharpest tools in his chemist’s kit goes by the jawbreaking name “nonlinear multidimensional spectroscopy.”

more