Global Energy Awards

Researchers unlocked a new shortcut to quantum materials Scientists are learning how to temporarily reshape materials by nudging their internal quantum rhythms instead of blasting them with extreme lasers. By harnessing excitons, short-lived energy pairs that naturally form inside semiconductors, researchers can alter how electrons behave using far less energy than before. This approach achieves powerful quantum effects without damaging the material, overcoming a major barrier that has limited progress for years. Scientists have found a way to reprogram materials using internal quantum energy rather than powerful lasers. The breakthrough could make advanced quantum materials far easier to create and control. Credit: AI/ScienceDaily.com What if simply shining light on a material could give it entirely new abilities? That idea may sound like fantasy, but it sits at the heart of an emerging area of physics known as Floquet engineering. Researchers in this field study how repeating influen...

 Groundbreaking 2D Nanomaterial Rolls Into a New Dimension Drexel researchers have transformed flat MXenes into conductive nanoscrolls with a controllable, tubular structure that improves transport and mechanical performance. Credit: Shutterstock Nearly 15 years after identifying a versatile two-dimensional conductive nanomaterial known as MXene, researchers at Drexel University have unveiled a method to create its one-dimensional counterpart, called the MXene nanoscroll. These newly engineered structures are about 100 times thinner than a human hair and offer even greater electrical conductivity than flat MXene sheets. The team believes their unique properties could enhance technologies such as energy storage systems, biosensors, and wearable electronics. The results were recently published in the journal Advanced Materials and describe a scalable production technique that starts with conventional MXene flakes and transforms them into scrolls with tightly controlled shapes and che...

Scientists Discover Surprising Quantum Properties in Seemingly Ordinary Element Cobalt has long been considered a textbook ferromagnet, but new experiments reveal a hidden network of topological electronic states woven into its structure. Credit: Stock A well-known magnetic metal has emerged as a surprisingly versatile quantum platform. Cobalt has long been viewed as a textbook example of a ferromagnetic metal, with its structure and behavior thought to be thoroughly understood. Now, an international research team led by HZB physicist Dr. Jaime Sánchez-Barriga has revealed that this familiar element holds far more complexity than expected. Their experiments uncovered intricate topological features hidden within cobalt’s electronic structure.Using spin-resolved measurements of its band structure (spin-ARPES) at the BESSY II synchrotron, the scientists detected intertwined energy bands that intersect along extended pathways in specific crystallographic directions. Remarkably, these featu...

 New calcium-ion battery design delivers high performance without lithium Scientists at HKUST have unveiled a major leap forward in calcium-ion battery technology, potentially opening the door to safer, more sustainable energy storage for everything from renewable power grids to electric vehicles. By designing a novel quasi-solid-state electrolyte made from redox-active covalent organic frameworks, the team solved long-standing issues that have held calcium batteries back—namely poor ion transport and limited stability. Researchers have supercharged calcium-ion batteries with a new electrolyte that allows ions to move faster and last longer. The advance could pave the way for abundant, lithium-free batteries powering renewable energy and electric vehicles. Credit: Shutterstock Scientists at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have reported a major advance in calcium-ion battery (CIB) research that could reshape how energy is stored and used in daily life. By ...

 The mystery of nuclear 'magic numbers' has finally been resolved A special set of numbers has formed the backbone of nuclear physics research for decades, and now we finally know how it arises from the quantum mix of nuclear particles and forces. Nearly 80 years ago, physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer showed that when the nucleus of an atom contains certain numbers of protons and neutrons, such as 50 or 82, it becomes exceptionally stable. In the years since, researchers amassed evidence of more such “magic numbers”, which are found in the most stable, and therefore most abundant, elements in our universe. Global Energy Awards Nomination link: https://globalenergyawards.org/award-nomination/... Visit Our Website: globalenergyawards.org Contact Us: support@globalenergyawards.org

 Physicists Watch a Superfluid Freeze, Revealing a Strange New Quantum State of Matter Physicists have long wondered what happens when a superfluid is cooled even further, and now, experiments in bilayer graphene hint at an unexpected answer. Credit: SciTechDaily.com Physicists have observed a strange new quantum phase in a graphene-based system, where a superfluid appears to freeze into a solid-like state. Cooling usually pushes matter through a simple sequence. A gas condenses into a liquid, and with further cooling the liquid locks into a solid. Helium helped reveal that the quantum world can take a very different route. In the early 20th century, researchers found that helium, when chilled to extreme temperatures, can enter a superfluid state. In that form, it can move without dissipating energy and shows other counterintuitive behaviors, including creeping up and out of containers. That discovery left physicists with an even more intriguing puzzle: if a superfluid is cooled fu...

  A New Way To Cool Quantum Computers Could Change How They’re Built Schematic illustration of the quantum refrigerator in a superconducting quantum circuit. Two microwave channels act as hot and cold heat reservoirs, highlighted by a reddish and a bluish glow, respectively. The heat reservoirs are coupled to an artificial molecule consisting of two qubits. Controlled microwave noise (white zigzag arrows) is injected through the side ports to drive and regulate heat transport. Credit: Simon Sundelin. Quantum technology has the potential to reshape many core areas of society, including drug discovery, artificial intelligence, logistics, and secure communications. Despite this promise, major engineering hurdles still stand in the way of practical applications. One of the most serious challenges is maintaining control over quantum states, which are extremely sensitive and form the foundation of quantum computing. Superconducting quantum computers push this challenge to an extreme. To ...

  Solitons Take Their Lumps in Two Dimensions Solitons are solitary waves that travel like particles without changing shape. They have primarily been observed in settings where the underlying physics is 1D, such as along narrow water channels or inside thin optical fibers, but they can occur in higher dimensions as well. Davide Pierangeli from Sapienza University in Italy and his colleagues have used a structured light beam to become the first to produce a lump soliton, a mathematically exact soliton in two dimensions. Solitary waves are known to occur in higher dimensions, with the most familiar example being “rogue waves” in the ocean. But these waves are not “integrable” solitons, Pierangeli explains. By that he means they are not exact solutions to a nonlinear model describing the wave behavior. “Genuine solitons have an elegant mathematical formulation that makes their behavior deterministic,” he says. Thanks to this property, integrable solitons maintain their shapes and can ...

 Clearest Black Hole Collision Ever Recorded Puts Einstein to the Test For scientists who follow gravitational waves as they arrive from deep space, GW250114 stands out as an extraordinary event. It is the most precise gravitational wave signal ever captured from a pair of merging black holes, offering researchers a rare chance to closely examine Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, known as general relativity. “What’s fantastic is the event is pretty much identical to the first one we observed 10 years ago, GW150914. The reason it’s so much clearer is purely because our detectors have become much more accurate in the past 10 years,” said Cornell physicist Keefe Mitman, a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science in the College of Arts and Sciences. A Global Collaboration Behind the Discovery Mitman is one of the authors of the study that analyzed this signal, titled “Black Hole Spectroscopy and Tests of General Relativity with GW2...

Physicists Perform “Quantum Surgery” To Fix Errors While Computing Quantum computers promise powerful new capabilities, but their sensitivity to errors remains a major obstacle. Researchers have now demonstrated a method for performing quantum operations on protected logical qubits while continuously correcting errors, even during the operation itself. Credit: SciTechDaily.com By combining surface codes with lattice surgery, researchers have shown how logical qubits can be manipulated and entangled while remaining protected from errors.Quantum computers are often described as a glimpse of a faster, more powerful future. The catch is that today’s devices are fragile in a way ordinary computers are not. Their biggest headache is decoherence, the gradual loss of the delicate quantum behavior that makes them useful in the first place. When decoherence sets in, it can trigger two common kinds of mistakes: bit flips and phase flips. A bit flip is the more intuitive problem. A qubit that shou...

 The universe may be hiding a fundamentally unknowable quantum secret From the vantage point of quantum physics, the universe may in some ways be fundamentally unknowable. In quantum physics, every object, such as an electron, is matched to a mathematical formula called the wave function. The wave function encodes all the details of an object’s quantum state, which means physicists can predict what an object might do in an experiment by combining its wave function with other equations. But if we accept that the whole world is quantum – and many researchers do – then much larger objects ought to have wave functions, including the whole universe. This is a point of view that was previously argued by, for instance, physics luminaries like Stephen Hawking. Global Energy Awards Nomination link: https://globalenergyawards.org/award-nomination/... Visit Our Website: globalenergyawards.org Contact Us: support@globalenergyawards.org

Scientists Discover Crystals That Spin, Twist, and Heal Themselves These newly discovered spinning crystals twist, break, and heal themselves, revealing a strange new side of solid matter. It may seem hard to believe, but crystals made from spinning components are real. Researchers from Aachen, Düsseldorf, Mainz, and Wayne State University have examined these unusual materials and uncovered a range of surprising behaviors. The crystals can easily split into separate pieces, form unusual internal boundaries, and develop defects that researchers can deliberately influence. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the team describes how a unified theoretical approach can be used to predict new properties in systems governed by what are known as “transverse interaction” forces. Transverse Forces in Materials and Living Systems “Transverse forces” are not limited to laboratory materials. They can appear in engineered systems such as certain magnetic solids, but...

 A Fundamental Quantum Rule May Entangle the Entire Universe At the most fundamental level of physics, nature does not behave locally. Particles separated by vast distances can act not as independent objects, but as components of a single quantum system. Researchers in Poland have now demonstrated that this kind of nonlocal behavior, which stems from the simple fact that particles of the same type are indistinguishable, can be observed experimentally for nearly all possible states of identical particles. According to quantum mechanics, every particle of a given type, such as photons or electrons, is inherently entangled with every other particle of that same type, whether it is nearby or located in a distant galaxy. This counterintuitive idea follows directly from a core principle of the theory: particles of the same type are fundamentally identical. This suggests the existence of a universal source of entanglement that underlies the strange nonlocal properties of the quantum world...

 A Tiny Particle Flip Could Reveal New Laws of the Universe A major international research effort led by scientists at Sun Yat-sen University and the Institute of Modern Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is behind a new experiment called MACE. The goal is to investigate whether muonium, a short-lived system made of a positive muon and an electron, can spontaneously convert into antimuonium, its antimatter counterpart. According to current physics theory, such a change should never occur. Detecting it would signal a breakdown of lepton flavor conservation, a core principle of the Standard Model of particle physics, and would provide direct evidence of physics beyond today’s framework. “The conversion of muonium to antimuonium represents a clean and unique probe of new physics in the leptonic sector,” explains the research team. “Unlike other charged lepton flavor violation processes, this conversion is sensitive to ∆Lℓ = 2 models that are fundamentally distinct and could re...

 New AI models trained on physics, not words, are driving scientific discovery While popular AI models such as ChatGPT are trained on language or photographs, new models created by researchers from the Polymathic AI collaboration are trained using real scientific datasets. The models are already using knowledge from one field to address seemingly completely different problems in another. While most AI models — including ChatGPT — are trained on text and images, a multidisciplinary team, including researchers from the University of Cambridge, has something different in mind: AI trained on physics. Recently, members of the Polymathic AI collaboration presented two new AI models trained using real scientific datasets to tackle problems in astronomy and fluid-like systems. The models — called Walrus and AION-1 —can apply the knowledge they gain from one class of physical systems to completely different problems. For instance, Walrus can tackle systems ranging from exploding stars to Wi...

 Public Physics Talk | How AI Is and Isn't Revolutionizing AI Artificial Intelligence (AI) I is a transformative technology that is quickly raising the ambitions of scientists. Last year's Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry highlighted the significance of these developments. However, the capabilities that AI enables and the ways those capabilities fit into the scientific method vary significantly. The incorporation of AI into scientific workflows raises important questions. For example, how do we maintain scientific rigor when incorporating AI components that are approximate or may ‘hallucinate’? These emerging patterns also are giving rise to a new set of questions in the philosophy of science. What is the role of interpretability, causality, prediction, hypothesis generation, etc.? What is the role of human understanding? I will describe some of the ways that AI is revolutionizing science, but I will also stress how these advances aren’t enabled by AI alone. I will end wit...

 100 Years Before Quantum Mechanics, a Physicist Spotted Its Hidden Clue Hamilton’s 19th-century insight connecting light and motion became a cornerstone of quantum mechanics and modern physics. William Rowan Hamilton, the Irish mathematician and physicist born 220 years ago last month, is often remembered for an unusual act in 1843, when he carved a mathematical formula into the stone of Dublin’s Broome Bridge.During his own lifetime, however, Hamilton’s standing rested on breakthroughs he made much earlier, in the 1820s and early 1830s, while he was still in his twenties. In that period, he introduced powerful new mathematical methods for analyzing the paths of light rays (or “geometric optics”) and describing how physical objects move (“mechanics”). An intriguing feature of Hamilton’s work was his use of an analogy between the trajectory of a light ray and the motion of a material particle. That comparison made sense if light were composed of particles, as Isaac Newton had argue...