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Team Detects 'Top Quark,' a Basic Constituent of Matter from PhysOrg.com
A group of 50 international physicists, led by UC Riverside’s Ann Heinson, has detected for the first time a subatomic particle, the top quark, produced without the simultaneous production of its antimatter partner – an extremely rare event. The discovery of the single top quark could help scientists better explain how the universe works and how objects acquire their mass, thereby assisting human understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe.

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Posted by Naboj at 08:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

New Technique Studies How Plastic Solar Cells Turn Sunlight into Electricity from PhysOrg.com
A new analytical technique that uses infrared spectroscopy to study light-sensitive organic materials could lead to the development of cheaper, more efficient solar cells. Using infrared (IR) spectroscopy to study the vibrations of atoms within the material, the technique provides information about the movement of electrons within a film of carbon-based materials.

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Posted by Naboj at 06:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

New technique reveals inner lives of red blood cells from PhysOrg.com
For the first time, researchers at MIT can see every vibration of a cell membrane, using a technique that could one day allow scientists to create three-dimensional images of the inner workings of living cells.

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Posted by Naboj at 06:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A recent article in PRL describes a discovery of two distinct states of superfluid lithium gas. These states are distingushed by the way the polarization of the core atoms behave:

The real-space densities of a polarized strongly interacting two-component Fermi gas of 6Li atoms reveal two low-temperature regimes, both with a fully paired core. At the lowest temperatures, the unpolarized core deforms with increasing polarization. Sharp boundaries between the core and the excess unpaired atoms are consistent with a phase separation driven by a first-order phase transition. In contrast, at higher temperatures the core does not deform but remains unpolarized up to a critical polarization. The boundaries are not sharp in this case, indicating a partially polarized shell between the core and the unpaired atoms. The temperature dependence is consistent with a tricritical point in the phase diagram.

A link to the full article can be found here.

Posted by Naboj at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Protein folding is a notoriously hard problem to study, both theoretically and experimentally. A pair of Physicists at the Università di Firenze, in Italy, has found a way of representing it as a motion in curved space of possible protein configurations. They publish their results in Physical Review Letters.

We study the geometric properties of the energy landscape of coarse-grained, off-lattice models of polymers by endowing the configuration space with a suitable metric, depending on the potential energy function, such that the dynamical trajectories are the geodesics of the metric. Using numerical simulations, we show that the fluctuations of the curvature clearly mark the folding transition, and that this quantity allows to distinguish between polymers having a proteinlike behavior (i.e., that fold to a unique configuration) and polymers which undergo a hydrophobic collapse but do not have a folding transition. These geometrical properties are defined by the potential energy without requiring any prior knowledge of the native configuration.

Full article can be found here.

Posted by Naboj at 08:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Turbulence is a notoriously hard field to study, both experimentally and theoretically. It seems that it has been observed for the first time in space:

Turbulence can be studied on Earth easily by mapping such things as the density or velocity of fluids in a tank. In space, however, where we expect turbulence to occur in such settings as solar wind, interstellar space, and the accretion disks around black holes, it's not so easy to measure fluids in time and space. Now, a suite of four plasma-watching satellites, referred to as Cluster, has provided the first definitive study of turbulence in space.

You can read more here. The original article on PRL can be read here.

Posted by Naboj at 03:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This years Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Roy Glauber, John Hall and Theodor Hansch. Their research was primarily in optics.

Posted by Naboj at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)