Measuring how efficiently an isotope captures neutrons of various energies both confirms and refutes some surprising recent results.
Category: futurism – Page 64
First helically dichroic hollow-core fiber demonstrated: New waveguide promises optical advances
Optical fibers provide an excellent platform for transmitting light over long distances, manipulating it and enhancing light-matter interaction. Now, the “Ultrafast & Twisted Photonics” research group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) has developed a new hollow-core fiber that selectively guides optical vortices depending on their helicity and has potential applications in chiral sensing, vortex mode generation, and optical communications.
The results were recently published in the journal ACS Photonics.
In addition to transmitting light over long distances, optical waveguides provide convenient ways of enhancing the interaction of light with matter and manipulating the properties of the guided light. Among several light attributes, pure polarization states are crucial for many applications and research areas.
Additional phase factor provides new insights into the behavior of random light
Led by researchers at the University of Eastern Finland, a recent study demonstrates that random light acquires an additional phase factor, known as the geometric phase, when its oscillation direction (i.e., polarization) is altered in a deterministic manner.
Light is an electromagnetic wave that oscillates periodically, and its phase refers to a specific point in the cycle. Light can be highly organized, meaning the waves oscillate in a specific direction, or its direction may involve randomness.
Previous studies have shown that altering the polarization of well-organized light leads to an accumulation of an additional phase. The current study extends the analysis to random light.
Discovery of a crucial clue to accelerate the development of carbon-neutral porous materials
Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have been gaining attention as promising carbon-neutral porous materials, thanks to their high performance in gas storage, separation, and conversion. The geometric building blocks of MOFs, metal clusters and organic linkers, allow chemists to predict and synthesize new structures like assembling LEGO. However, finding new metal building blocks is still a daunting challenge due to the complex nature of metal ions in synthesis.
A research team, led by Professor Wonyoung Choe at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), South Korea, was inspired by the molecular metal clusters previously synthesized before realized in porous materials. This implies one can predict future MOFs by looking closely at their metal building blocks.
The research team compared zirconium metal clusters found in both MOFs and molecules. Zirconium-based MOFs are one of the representative metal-organic porous materials with remarkable stability and a broad range of applications. The researchers identified seven types of zirconium building blocks in MOFs and discovered additional fourteen types of potential metal building blocks.
Harry Potter votes like you do: Fictional heroes seen as political allies and villains as opponents
People think that Harry Potter, Spiderman and Gandalf would vote the same way they do, whereas Darth Vader, Cruella de Vil and Joffrey Baratheon would vote for the rival party.
New research from the University of Southampton shows how people in the UK and U.S. believe that fictional characters they admire would share their voting preferences, while those they dislike would vote the other way.
The paper “Heroes and villains: motivated projection of political identities” is published in Political Science Research & Method.
Tsunami Propagation Observed via Seafloor Fiber Optics ― A Case Study of Tsunami Near Torishima in October 2023
Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS)※1, which measures the strain on optical fibers installed on the seafloor, has enabled earthquakes to be observed along fiber optic cable transects, in contrast to the conventional observations using ocean bottom instruments. DAS observations were conducted on seafloor fiber optic cables offshore of Muroto, Japan to observe slow earthquakes※2 in the Nankai Trough region.