Big impact on solar cells, television screens

21-11-2012

New research at King's College London may lead to improved solar cells and LED-displays. Researchers from the Biophysics and Nanotechnology Group at King's, led by Professor Anatoly Zayats in the department of Physics have demonstrated in detail how to separate colours and create 'rainbows' ...

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Findings could guide design of new embrittlement-resistant materials

20-11-2012

Hydrogen, the lightest element, can easily dissolve and migrate within metals to make these otherwise ductile materials brittle and substantially more prone to failures. Since the phenomenon was discovered in 1875, hydrogen embrittlement has been a persistent problem for the design of ...

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04-10-2012

In the field of nanotechnology, electrically-charged particles are frequently used as tools for surface modification. Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and the TU Vienna were at last able to reconcile important issues concerning the effects of highly charged ions ...

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24-08-2012

An international team has now measured the nuclear masses of two unstable superheavy elements for the first time. The results will help to predict the stability of even heavier elements. Researchers from eleven institutions have made the first precise measurements of nuclear shell effects in ...

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30-07-2012

A collaboration of physicists from MPQ, LMU, Harvard and Caltech detect Higgs-type excitations in a low-dimensional system of ultracold atoms at the transition between different phases of matter. The sudden breaking of symmetry plays a fundamental role in physics, in particular for the ...

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Scientists find new principle for spin transistor

25-07-2012

Performance of present day electronics is reaching its boundaries since faster transistor operation lead to high power consumption and heat generation. Several alternative schemes are being explored to possibly overcome these limitations, including the use of the electrons’ spin in ...

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05-07-2012

At a seminar held at CERN as a curtain raiser to the year’s major particle physics conference, ICHEP2012 in Melbourne, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their latest preliminary results in the search for the long sought Higgs particle. Both experiments observe a new particle in the mass ...

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21-06-2012

Previously undiscovered particles could be detected as they accumulate around black holes say scientists at the Vienna University of Technology. Finding new particles usually requires high energies – that is why huge accelerators have been built, which can accelerate particles to almost the ...

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30-04-2012

Physicists from the University of Zurich have discovered a previously unknown particle composed of three quarks in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator. A new baryon could thus be detected for the first time at the LHC. The baryon known as Xi_b^* confirms fundamental ...

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Physicists use ultrashort laser pulses to drive and accelerate electrons out of nanotips

12-03-2012

In 1905 Albert Einstein transformed physics with his explanation of the famous photoelectric effect. In his Nobel-Prize-winning work, Einstein abandoned classical principles and introduced the concept of light particles, known today as photons, to describe light-induced electron emission from ...

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