Layer Drawing Forest, Nobuhiro Nakanishi, 2008.

Scientists discover a 2-D magnet

Magnetic materials form the basis of technologies that play increasingly pivotal roles in our lives today, including sensing and hard-disk data storage. But as our innovative dreams conjure wishes for ever-smaller and faster devices, researchers are seeking new magnetic materials that are more compact, more efficient and can be controlled using precise, reliable methods.

A team led by the University of Washington and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has for the first time discovered magnetism in the 2-D world of monolayers, or materials that are formed by a single atomic layer. The findings, published June 8 in the journal Nature, demonstrate that magnetic properties can exist even in the 2-D realm – opening a world of potential applications.

“What we have discovered here is an isolated 2-D material with intrinsic magnetism, and the magnetism in the system is highly robust,” said Xiaodong Xu, a UW professor of physics and of materials science and engineering, and member of the UW’s Clean Energy Institute. “We envision that new information technologies may emerge based on these new 2-D magnets.”

Xu and MIT physics professor Pablo Jarillo-Herrero led the international team of scientists who proved that the material – chromium triiodide, or CrI3 – has magnetic properties in its monolayer form.

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Hyperboloid

Hubble Views The Final Frontier For Dark Matter

“This phenomenon of gravitational lensing stretches galaxies into streaks and arcs, magnifying them, and creating multiple images. It also enables us to reconstruct the mass distribution of the cluster, revealing that it’s mostly due to dark matter.”

When you look out at the distant Universe, you can see all sorts of things: stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, going as far back into the distant past as our telescopes can image. But where you have the greatest concentrations of mass, an extreme phenomenon emerges: that of gravitational lensing. Any foreground objects lying behind that mass will have their light stretched, magnified and distorted by the intervening matter. Recently, as part of the Hubble Frontier Fields program, the telescope followed-up on galaxy cluster Abell 370, and revealed the most spectacular gravitational lensing signal ever seen in a galaxy cluster. Most importantly, it provides some very strong evidence not only for dark matter’s existence, but for its presence distinct from any galaxies at all.

Come get the full story in images, videos, and no more than 200 words on this edition of Mostly Mute Monday!

“Ratio of oscillations.”  La méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médecine. 1885.

Quantum tunnelling

Tunneling is a quantum mechanical effect. A tunneling current occurs when electrons move through a barrier that they classically shouldn’t be able to move through. In classical terms, if you don’t have enough energy to move “over” a barrier, you won’t. However, in the quantum mechanical world, electrons have wavelike properties. These waves don’t end abruptly at a wall or barrier, but taper off quickly. If the barrier is thin enough, the probability function may extend into the next region, through the barrier! Because of the small probability of an electron being on the other side of the barrier, given enough electrons, some will indeed move through and appear on the other side. When an electron moves through the barrier in this fashion, it is called tunneling.

Quantum mechanics tells us that electrons have both wave and particle-like properties. Tunneling is an effect of the wavelike nature.

The top image shows us that when an electron (the wave) hits a barrier, the wave doesn’t abruptly end, but tapers off very quickly - exponentially. For a thick barrier, the wave doesn’t get past.

The bottom image shows the scenario if the barrier is quite thin (about a nanometer). Part of the wave does get through and therefore some electrons may appear on the other side of the barrier.

Because of the sharp decay of the probability function through the barrier, the number of electrons that will actually tunnel is very dependent upon the thickness of the barrier. The current through the barrier drops off exponentially with the barrier thickness

Source: nanoscience.com | Images: x | x | x

Scientists Have Set a Limit For Quantum Entanglement - And It's Really Freaking Powerful

Unbreakable at 30 times Earth's acceleration.

For the first time, scientists have subjected quantum entanglement to extreme levels of acceleration, and there’s nothing fragile about this “spooky action at a distance”- it’s way more robust than we thought.

In recent experiments, entangled particles held firm even while being accelerated to 30g - 30 times Earth’s acceleration - and the results could have a big impact on our search for a unified theory of modern physics.

“These experiments shall help [us] unify the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity,” says one of the team, Rupert Ursin, from the University of Vienna, Austria.

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The Meteor Shower Of 1833