Laboratory Equipment

Physics Principles Can Be Observed in Bowls of Cereal

Andong He saw a phenomenon at work in his breakfast bowl that he couldn’t explain. It prompted this question: how does cereal shape influence the way cereals floating in the milk join? The Yale postdoctoral student offers an answer, along with collaborators Khoi Nguyen and Shreyas Mandre of Brown Univ., in a paper published in Europhysics Letters.

“Two floating objects, when they attract each other, will try to maximize the area of contact,” says He, of Yale’s Department of Geology & Geophysics. “Think about two ellipses — instead of tip to tip, they will try to align so that they are side to side.”

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/physics-principles-can-be-observed-bowls-cereal

First Evidence for Extraterrestrial High-Energy Neutrinos

A massive telescope in the Antarctic ice has reported the detection of 28 extremely high-energy neutrinos that might have their origin in cosmic sources. Two of these reached energies greater than one petaelectronvolt (PeV), an energy level thousands of times higher than the highest energy neutrino yet produced in a manmade accelerator.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, run by an international collaboration and headquartered at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) at the Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison, identified the neutrinos, which were described in a talk at the IceCube Particle Astrophysics Symposium at UW–Madison.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/first-evidence-extraterrestrial-high-energy-neutrinos

Earth’s Iron Core is Shockingly Weak

The massive ball of iron sitting at the center of Earth is not quite as “rock-solid” as has been thought, say two Stanford mineral physicists. By conducting experiments that simulate the immense pressures deep in the planet’s interior, the researchers determined that iron in Earth’s inner core is only about 40 percent as strong as previous studies estimated.

This is the first time scientists have been able to experimentally measure the effect of such intense pressure – as high as 3 million times the pressure Earth’s atmosphere exerts at sea level – in a laboratory. A paper presenting the results of their study is available online in Nature Geoscience.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/earths-iron-core-shockingly-weak

Researchers Watch Real-Time Charging of a Lithium-Air Battery

One of the most promising new kinds of battery to power electric cars is called a lithium-air battery, which could store up to four times as much energy per pound as today’s best lithium-ion batteries. But progress has been slow: the nature of the electrochemical reactions as these batteries are charged remains poorly understood.

Researchers at MIT and Sandia National Laboratories have used transmission electron microscope (TEM) imaging to observe, at a molecular level, what goes on during a reaction called oxygen evolution as lithium-air batteries charge; this reaction is thought to be a bottleneck limiting further improvements to these batteries. The TEM technique could help in finding ways to make such batteries practical in the near future.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/researchers-watch-real-time-charging-lithium-air-battery

Non-Destructive Method Measures at Atomic Scale

In an article published in Nature Photonics, researchers from ICFO - The Institute of Photonic Sciences, led by Prof. Morgan Mitchell report the observation of a highly fragile and volatile body through a new quantum-mechanical measurement technique.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/non-destructive-method-measures-atomic-scale

Device Enables Portable, Ultra-Precise Clocks, Sensors

Research led at the Univ. of Strathclyde has developed a portable device to produce ultracold atoms for quantum technology and quantum information processing.

The researchers have developed technology which is far more compact than previous setups but can still cool and trap large numbers of atoms for use in portable devices. They pattern the surface of a semiconductor chip to form a diffraction grating, splitting a laser into many beams that cool the atoms.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/device-enables-portable-ultra-precise-clocks-sensors

Math Explains How Bubbles Pop

Bubble baths and soapy dishwater, the refreshing head on a beer and the luscious froth on a cappuccino. All are foams, beautiful yet ephemeral as the bubbles pop one by one.

Two Univ. of California, Berkeley, researchers have now described mathematically the successive stages in the complex evolution and disappearance of foamy bubbles, a feat that could help in modeling industrial processes in which liquids mix or in the formation of solid foams such as those used to cushion bicycle helmets. Applying these equations, they created mesmerizing computer-generated movies showing the slow and sedate disappearance of wobbly foams one burst bubble at a time.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/videos/2013/05/math-explains-how-bubbles-pop

Exotic Atoms Shed Light on Physics Puzzle from Dawn of Universe

An international team of physicists has found the first direct evidence of pear shaped nuclei in exotic atoms.

The findings could advance the search for a new fundamental force in nature that could explain why the Big Bang created more matter than antimatter—a pivotal imbalance in the history of everything.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/exotic-atoms-shed-light-physics-puzzle-dawn-universe

Experiment Begins with 3,200-Mile Move of Electromagnet

Scientists from 26 institutions around the world are planning a new experiment that could open the doors to new realms of particle physics. But first, they have to bring the core of this experiment, a complex electromagnet that spans 50 feet in diameter, from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to the DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

The experiment is called Muon g-2 (pronounced gee-minus-two), and will study the properties of muons, tiny subatomic particles that exist for only 2.2 millionths of a second. The core of the experiment is a machine built at Brookhaven in the 1990s, and the centerpiece of that machine is a circular electromagnet made of steel and aluminum, 50 feet wide, with superconducting cable inside.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/videos/2013/05/experiment-begins-3200-mile-move-particle-storage-ring

Researchers Confirm Long-Theorized Magnetic Field

From powerful computers to super-sensitive medical and environmental detectors that are faster, smaller and use less energy — yes, we want them, but how do we get them?

In research that is helping to lay the groundwork for the electronics of the future, Univ. of Delaware scientists have confirmed the presence of a magnetic field generated by electrons which scientists had theorized existed, but that had never been proven until now.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/researchers-confirm-long-theorized-magnetic-field

Strain Improves Light Output from Green LEDs

Researchers in China have used strain engineering to improve the light output power of 530nm green light-emitting diodes (LEDs) by 28.9 percent at 150mA current injection. The research was carried out by Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Semiconductors, Beijing, and Univ. of Hong Kong.

Green-emitting nitride semiconductor LED structures tend to suffer from low light output due to the difficulty in producing the high-indium-content indium gallium nitride (InGaN) needed for longer-wavelength light emission. Apart from the material quality challenge, strain induced by the lattice mismatch with pure GaN leads to large piezoelectric effects, giving electric fields that tend to pull electrons and holes apart, reducing rates of recombination into photons (i.e. the quantum-confined Stark effect, or QCSE).

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/strain-improves-light-output-green-leds

Metamaterial Doubles up on Invisibility

One of the exciting possibilities of metamaterials – engineered materials that exhibit properties not found in the natural world – is the potential to control light in ways never before possible. The novel optical properties of such materials could lead to a “perfect lens” that allows direct observation of an individual protein in a light microscope or, conversely, invisibility cloaks that completely hide objects from sight.

Although metamaterials have revolutionized optics in the past decade, their performance so far has been inhibited by their inability to function over broad bandwidths of light. Designing a metamaterial that works across the entire visible spectrum remains a considerable challenge.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/videos/2013/05/metamaterial-doubles-invisibility

Chaos Superior to Order for Light Storage

An international team of physicists, including researchers from the Universities of York and St. Andrews, has demonstrated that chaos can beat order – at least as far as light storage is concerned.

In a collaboration led by the King Abdullah Univ. of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia, the researchers deformed mirrors in order to disrupt the regular light path in an optical cavity and, surprisingly, the resulting chaotic light paths allowed more light to be stored than with ordered paths.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/chaos-superior-order-light-storage