High Energy Physics and Computational Science

  Under certain conditions—usually exceedingly cold ones—some materials shift their structure to unlock new, superconducting behavior. This structural shift is known as a "nematic transition," and physicists suspect that it offers a new way to drive materials into a superconducting state where electrons can flow entirely friction-free. But what exactly drives this transition in the first place? The answer could help scientists improve existing superconductors and discover new ones. Now, MIT physicists have identified the key to how one class of superconductors undergoes a nematic transition, and it's in surprising contrast to what many scientists had assumed. The physicists made their discovery studying  iron   selenide  (FeSe), a  two-dimensional material  that is the highest-temperature iron-based superconductor. The material is known to switch to a  superconducting state  at temperatures as high as 70 kelvins (close to -300 degrees Fahrenheit...

  Recently astronomers caught a strange mystery: extremely high-energy particles spitting out of the surface of the Sun when it was relatively calm. Now a team of theorists have proposed a simple solution to the mystery. We just have to look a little bit under the surface. In 2022 the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory detected a flash of extremely high gamma ray radiation coming from the disk of the sun. To generate that kind of radiation required a particle with TeV energies slamming into another particle. This observation came on the heels of over six years worth of observations with the Fermi Large Area Telescope in orbit of the Earth. That telescope found significant gamma ray detections also coming from the Sun. Those detections were of lower energy than the HAWC results, but pointed in the same general direction. What was especially surprising about these observations was that these remarkably high-energy particles seemed to be emitted from the Sun when it was ...

  Scientists are using the intense magnetic fields generated by the world's largest atom smasher to search for one of the most elusive particles of all -- the magnetic monopole, a hypothetical particle with either a "north" or "south" magnetic charge, but which has never been seen. A study  published this month  in the journal  Nature  describes the latest experiments with the MoEDAL instrument -- the Monopole and Exotics Detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -- which was installed in 2015. So far, it's never found any monopoles, but that might be because previous MoEDAL experiments looked for monopoles created in collisions between particles like protons and neutrons.  However, "we realized there is a different mechanism for producing monopoles, not based on collisions of elementary particles," said Arttu Rajantie, a professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London and a co-author of the study. Instead, the latest experiments look...

  Controlling chemical reactions to generate new products is one of the biggest challenges in chemistry. Developments in this area impact industry, for example, by reducing the waste generated in the manufacture of construction materials or by improving the production of catalysts to accelerate chemical reactions. For this reason, in the field of polariton chemistry—which uses tools of chemistry and quantum optics—in the last 10 years different laboratories around the world have developed experiments in optical cavities to manipulate the chemical reactivity of molecules at room temperature, using electromagnetic fields. Some have succeeded in modifying chemical reactions products in organic compounds, but to date, and without relevant advances in the last two years, no research team has been able to come up with a general physical mechanism to describe the phenomenon and to reproduce it to obtain the same measurements in a consistent manner. Now a team of researchers from Universid...

  Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University has become a member of the international MPD and SPD colliders of the NICA complex of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna). The Nuclotron-based Ion Collider fAcility (NICA) is a new acceleration complex being built at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research to study the properties of dense baryonic matter. Scientists from more than 20 countries are participating in this project. In fact, after the NICA collider is launched, JINR scientists will be able to recreate under laboratory conditions the special state of matter in which our Universe was in the first moments after the Big Bang — the quark-gluon plasma. SPbPU became an official participant in unique experiments at the NICA hadron collider Scientists from SPbPU are taking part in experiments at the collider’s two main facilities, the MPD (Multi-Purpose Detector) and the SPD (Spin Physics Detector). The MPD is designed for experiments in nuclear physics relate...

Introduction: Welcome to our cosmology blog, where we embark on a captivating journey into the depths of the universe. Join us as we unravel the mysteries of cosmic origins, delve into the nature of space and time, and explore the remarkable phenomena that shape our cosmic landscape. The Big Bang and the Birth of the Universe: Discover the profound implications of the Big Bang theory, the explosive event that marked the beginning of our universe. Explore the evidence supporting this cosmic birth and learn about the cosmic microwave background radiation, a remarkable echo of the universe's earliest moments. Dark Matter and Dark Energy: Dive into the mysterious realms of dark matter and dark energy, two invisible forces that dominate the universe. Learn about their enigmatic nature, their roles in shaping the cosmic structure, and the ongoing efforts to understand their origins and properties. Galaxies: Building Blocks of the Universe: Uncover the captivating world of galaxies, cosmi...