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Ocean microplastics have become a major source of concern, especially since they are so hard to track down, but researchers found an ingenious solution using satellites.

Ocean plastics have become a major source of concern for evironmental conservationists and public health professionals in recent years, and there hasn’t been a good way to track how these plastics are moving or their concentrations. But now, researchers from the University of Michigan have developed an ingenious way to track the ebb and flow of these microplastics around the world thanks to NASA satellites.


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Microplastics are the remnant pieces of larger plastics that have disintegrated over time due to chemical and physical processes, and are typically measured as less than 5mm in size. The underlying plastic compounds remain intact even as the plastic fiber or particle gets physically smaller, and plastics do not chemically decompose.

An algorithm that allows more precise forecasts of the positions and velocities of a beam’s distribution of particles as it passes through an accelerator has been developed by researchers with the Department of Energy (DOE) and the University of Chicago.

Traveling at nearly light speed, the linear accelerator at the DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory fires bursts of close to one billion electrons through long metallic pipes to generate its particle beam. Located in Menlo Park, California, the facility, originally called the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, has used its 3.2-kilometer accelerator since its construction in 1962 to propel electrons to energies as great as 50 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).

The powerful particle beam generated by SLAC’s linear accelerator is used in the study of everything from innovative materials to the behavior of molecules on the atomic scale, despite how the beam itself remains somewhat mysterious since researchers have a hard time gauging its appearance as it passes through an accelerator.

Exceptionally well-preserved fossils from the Cambrian period have helped fill a gap in our understanding of the origin and evolution of major animal groups alive today.

A new analysis of fossils belonging to an extinct invertebrate called Rotadiscus grandis have helped place this species in the animal tree of life, revealing how some characteristics of living species may have evolved independently rather than originating in a single common ancestor.

Half a billion years ago, an unusual-looking animal crawled over the sea floor, using tentacles to pick up food particles along the way.

A surprise observation of negative mass in exciton–polaritons has added yet another dimension of weirdness to these strange light-matter hybrid particles.

Dr. Matthias Wurdack, Dr. Tinghe Yun and Dr. Eliezer Estrecho from the Department of Quantum Sciences and Technology (QST) were experimenting with exciton polaritons when they realized that under certain conditions the dispersion became inverted—equating to a negative .

To add to the surprise, the unexpected cause has turned out to be losses.

The exotic particles are called non-Abelian anyons, or nonabelions for short, and their Borromean rings exist only as information inside the quantum computer. But their linking properties could help to make quantum computers less error-prone, or more ‘fault-tolerant’ — a key step to making them outperform even the best conventional computers. The results, revealed in a preprint on 9 May1, were obtained on a machine at Quantinuum, a quantum-computing company in Broomfield, Colorado, that formed as the result of a merger between the quantum computing unit of Honeywell and a start-up firm based in Cambridge, UK.

“This is the credible path to fault-tolerant quantum computing,” says Tony Uttley, Quantinuum’s president and chief operating officer.

Other researchers are less optimistic about the virtual nonabelions’ potential to revolutionize quantum computing, but creating them is seen as an achievement in itself. “There is enormous mathematical beauty in this type of physical system, and it’s incredible to see them realized for the first time, after a long time,” says Steven Simon, a theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford, UK.

Physicists have discovered “stacked pancakes of liquid magnetism” that may account for the strange electronic behavior of some layered helical magnets.

The in the study are magnetic at cold temperatures and become nonmagnetic as they thaw. Experimental physicist Makariy Tanatar of Ames National Laboratory at Iowa State University noticed perplexing electronic behavior in layered helimagnetic crystals and brought the mystery to the attention of Rice theoretical physicist Andriy Nevidomskyy, who worked with Tanatar and former Rice graduate student Matthew Butcher to create a that simulated the quantum states of atoms and electrons in the layered materials.

Magnetic materials undergo a “thawing” transition as they warm up and become nonmagnetic. The researchers ran thousands of Monte Carlo computer simulations of this transition in helimagnets and observed how the magnetic dipoles of atoms inside the material arranged themselves during the thaw. Their results were published in a recent study in Physical Review Letters.

A time crystal, as originally proposed in 2012, is a new state of matter in which the particles are in continuous oscillatory motion. Time crystals break time-translation symmetry. Discrete time crystals do so by oscillating under the influence of a periodic external parametric force, and this type of time crystal has been demonstrated in trapped ions, atoms and spin systems.

Continuous time crystals are more interesting and arguably more important, as they exhibit continuous time-translation symmetry but can spontaneously enter a regime of periodic motion, induced by a vanishingly small perturbation. It is now understood that this state is only possible in an open system, and a continuous quantum-time-crystal state has recently been observed in a quantum system of ultracold atoms inside an optical cavity illuminated with light.

In a paper published in Nature Physics, researchers at University of Southampton in the U.K. showed that a classical metamaterial nanostructure can be driven to a state that exhibits the same key characteristics of a continuous time crystal.

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The motion of an electron in a strong infrared laser field is tracked in real time by means of a novel method developed by MPIK physicists and applied to confirm quantum-dynamics theory by cooperating researchers at MPI-PKS. The experimental approach links the absorption spectrum of the ionizing extreme ultraviolet pulse to the free-electron motion driven by the subsequent near-infrared pulse. Their paper is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

For this experimental scheme, the classical description of the electron motion is justified even though it is a quantum object. In the future, the new method demonstrated here for helium can be applied to more such as larger atoms or molecules for a broad range of intensities.

High-harmonic generation, namely the conversion of optical or near-infrared (NIR) light into the extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) regime, is fundamental to strong-field physics, since it is an extremely nonlinear process. In the famous three-step model the driving light field ionizes the electron by tunnel ionization, accelerates it away and back to the ionic core, where the electron re-collides and emits XUV light if it recombines.

A new low-temperature growth and fabrication technology allows the integration of 2D materials directly onto a silicon circuit, which could lead to denser and more powerful chips.

Researchers from MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances. Their stated goal is to make a better world through education, research, and innovation.