Physics Buzz

  By Allison Kubo Hutchison Left: Glowing basaltic eruption in Iceland taken at night (image: Áslaug Arna Sigurbjörnsdóttir / twitter). Right: Grey ash clouds rise into the atmosphere over St. Vincent (image: University of West Indies Seismic Research Center / twitter). In Iceland, where we lay our scene, lava spills orange and black tendrils from three fissures in Geldingadalir. Meanwhile across the globe in St. Vincent ash rises into the sky in a large plume from the La Soufrière volcano. Both eruptions were preceded by numerous earthquakes which warned volcanologists that magma was coming toward the surface. However, these two eruptions have very different behaviors and thus very different hazards (though both do have hazards). On St. Vincent 16,000 people have been evacuated from their homes meanwhile hundreds gather to watch the fissures in Iceland. The eruption at St. Vincent is what volcanologists call explosive behavior. The ash plume rising 20,000 feet high is produced

By Hannah Pell  On 7 April 2021, physicists at Fermi National Laboratory announced the first results of their Muon g-2 (“g minus 2”) experiment, which have hinted that muons may behave in a way not predicted by the Standard Model, a self-consistent yet incomplete theory of fundamental particles and their interactions. You can picture a muon like a tiny, spinning top; they act as if they have an internal magnet, twirling around in response to an applied magnetic field. The strength of a muon's internal magnet is known as the “ g-factor ,” a dimensionless quantity characterizing the magnetic moment and angular momentum of a particle. The experiment is named “g minus 2” because both the theoretical value and new experimental average of the muon magnetic moment are slightly greater than 2. However, they are not equivalent; although the difference between them is incredibly small, it has been observed to be anomalous . Image Credit: Reidar Hahn/Fermilab. The Muon g-2 experiment

  \documentclass[10pt]{article}  \usepackage{geometry}  \usepackage{hyperref}  \usepackage{braket}  \usepackage{amsmath}  \usepackage{esint}  \usepackage{tikz-feynman}  \geometry{a4paper} \title{A Brief History of \LaTeX} \author{By: Hannah Pell} \date{} \begin{document} \maketitle {\it{START HERE: This post was written according to \LaTeX -style typesetting. I encourage you to copy and paste this text exactly as it appears into \href{www.overleaf.com}{Overleaf} and click `Recompile' or by downloading TeXShop to see what the document printout looks like.}}\\ Have you ever browsed physics preprints on the \href{www.arXiv.org}{arXiv}, and noticed that many of the documents have a similar appearance? Obviously the {\it{content}} differs, but the font, style, and general formatting of many preprints seem nearly uniform when you take a closer look. Why is this? The answer can be found with a document preparation program called LaTeX (usually pronounced ``lay-tekh"). L

  By Allison Kubo New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that in the last 1.1 Ma the Greenland Ice sheet melted at least once and reformed. The team found fossilized plants buried under 1 million years of snow based on the Camp Century Ice Core. The long core samples the layers of snow in the Greenland Ice Sheet. Silvan Leinss , Radar reflector installation Greenland , CC BY-SA 4.0 The deeper the core the older the ice is and at its deepest point the Greenland Ice Sheet measures approximately 1.9 miles. Finding dirt and plant material in the core under layers of ice indicates it was once covered with plants and maybe even trees. The researchers used cosmogenic isotopes , atoms that are only formed when radiation from space and the sun interact with dirt, to show that it melted at least once within the last 1 million years. Although it may seem like a long time, 1 million years is an eyeblink to geologists. This research indicates that

  By: Hannah Pell On 29 March 2021, the Biden administration announced another ambitious clean energy goal: deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. According to the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the U.S. offshore wind capacity was 28,521 megawatts (or 28.5 gigawatts) in 2019. Deploying an additional 30 gigawatts over a decade would more than double the current U.S. offshore wind energy generation capability. How much power is 30 GW? It could be enough to power 10 million homes for a full year, offsetting 78 million metric tons of CO2 emissions ( equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions from 16,851,398 cars driven over a year and CO2 emissions from more than 8.7 billion gallons of gasoline consumed or 20 coal-fired power plants over the course of a year). So how does energy generation from offshore wind work, and how is it different from land-based wind? What role does offshore wind play in our national energy portfolio? And what are the particular

  By Jill Kathleen Wenderott Women Supporting Women in the Sciences (WS2) , an international organization unifying and supporting graduate and professional-level women and allies in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), has recently been awarded an American Physical Society (APS) Innovation Fund to form international teams that will design and distribute low-cost physics and materials science lab kits to 5000 elementary and secondary school students, predominantly in eastern Africa. These teams will work with WS2 Partners in eastern Africa who wish to participate in outreach delivering and teaching these science lab kits to their local communities. The origin of WS2 can be traced to an intensive two-week-long live-in program of the Joint Undertaking for an African Materials Institute (JUAMI) held in Arusha, Tanzania (TZ), in 2016. JUAMI was co-founded by Sossina Haile, African Academy of Sciences Fellow and the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science

  By Allison Kubo Hutchison Synthetic diamond created using vapour deposition process. Steve Jurvetson , Apollo synthetic diamond , CC BY 2.0 In late 1940, the Debeers Diamond company started using the slogan “Diamonds are forever” to popularize diamond engagement rings. What they didn’t know is that in terms of quantum mechanics that might be true. Diamonds are formed of pure carbon with the atoms arranged tetrahedrally in a strong, rigid crystal structure. They are the hardest known material meaning that they have a hardness of 70-150 GPa in the Vickers Hardness test . This hardness is inherited from its strong crystal structure and is exactly what makes diamond forever. Green indicates carbon atoms within a diamond crystal structure. When a nitrogen a vacancy can form, basically an empty hole in the crystal. NIST, Nitrogen-vacancy center , marked as public domain. All materials have specific quantum states which are extremely fragile. They must be isolated from everything to be m

  By: Hannah Pell “Go out and make the world a better place.” So ends the foreword to CDR Primer, an online, freely available digital booklet co-authored by more than a dozen climate scientists, social scientists, engineers, and writers in dialogue about carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technology and its important role in addressing our climate crisis. CDR technologies — including carbon capture use or sequestration (CCUS), reforestation, carbon-friendly soil management, among others — are used to remove carbon dioxide pollution, transport it to a storage site, and deposit it in such a way that it cannot reenter the atmosphere. Carbon removal processes are usually characterized by three different methods : biological, using forests, agricultural systems, or marine environments to capture carbon; geologic methods, capturing and storing carbon underground or in rock formations; and carbon-utilization, capturing carbon and using it to produce products like plastic or cement. Carbon

  By Allison Kubo Hutchison Noah Friedlander , San Francisco from the Marin Headlands in March 2019 , CC BY-SA 4.0  As you walk the pavement of your city, the buildings rising around you, the impact of a city on the landscape is clear. It changes the skyline and the view. But how does it change the ground below? Does the weight of a city bend the crust below? Thirty years from now it is estimated that 70% of Earth’s population will concentrate into high-density metropolitan regions most of which are coastal. It is evident that our human activities influence the air we breathe but how do the concrete structures influence the land below? Recent research published in the AGU Advances estimated the weight of the San Fransisco Bay region home to about 7.75 million people at 1.6x1012 kg. Author Tom Parsons of the US Geologic Survey calculated the weight by satellite-based building footprints across the Bay area then applied average values for the dead load, the weight of the building its

By: Hannah Pell Pictures are a helpful way to express abstract ideas. Whether through Gedanken experiment s like the famous Schroedinger’s Cat or Feynman diagrams (some of which have been described as " penguin diagrams "), physicists often draw on everyday language, sketches, and well, animals, to characterize complex scientific theories. You can take a quick visit to the Particle Zoo and see more examples for yourself. Hedgehogs have also entered the condensed matter physics vocabulary. Papers with titles such as “ Topological Transport of Deconfined Hedgehogs in Magnets ,” “ Finding Spin Hedgehogs in Chiral Crystals ,” and “ Magnetic hedgehog lattices in noncentrosymmetric metals ,” were published in Physical Review Letters last year. So you’re probably wondering (as was I): what does a small, pokey tiny, pokey animal have to do with condensed matter systems? The answer has to do with magnetism, thin films, and a very interesting particle called the skyrmion. Image Cr

  By: Hannah Pell I recently relocated from the bustling Washington, D.C. metro area back to my south-central Pennsylvania hometown. My new space is in a quiet, wooded area; outside my back window I see an expanse full of trees (“Pennsylvania” actually means “Penn’s Woods”) — and a small solar farm is nestled in between them. As the sun shines onto the panels, I can’t help but wonder: how much of the electricity powering my laptop is sourced from the sun? What’s the science behind it all, and where does solar fit within Pennsylvania’s diverse energy portfolio? Physics of solar cells and their efficiency The fundamental physics principle underlying solar cell technology is the photoelectric effect. Photons (light particles) can be thought of as discrete packets of energy. The energy of the electrons emitted when some form of radiation (such as light) strikes a material directly depends on the frequency of that incident radiation. Solar cells are designed using semiconducting mat

  By Allison Kubo Hutchison The same animal was once described by paleontologists as a shrimp, jellyfish, sea cucumber, and a sponge at different times during its study. Anomalocaris, Latin for “abnormal shrimp”, is a creature of exceeding strangeness to modern hominids; it is related to modern-day shrimp with a flat segmented body, faceted eyes on stalks, and two grabbing appendages which more closely resemble tentacles. Artistic Rendering of Anomalocaris magnabasis Species could grow up to a meter long, significantly larger than most other beasts in the Cambrian. It swam by undulating the segmented flaps along the sides of its body and its large faceted eyes offset from the body mass could peer around for prey. Despite its strange appearance, the scientist has often thought the ecological niche of the Anomalocaris can be likened to that of the majestic lion or humans ourselves. Nothing could take it on and all feared it. It was long thought that Anomalocaris was an apex predator

  By Allison Kubo Hutchison Reproduced Wootz Damascus blade showing both a ladder and rose pattern made by Alfred Pendray. Photo by JD Verhoeven, AH Pendray and WE Dauksh. Material science and nanoengineering are emerging fields promising to revolutionize the industry, medicine, and energy technologies. But our understanding of both is rooted in ancient knowledge. Would it surprise you to know that we had knowledge of and used nanoparticles as far back as 400 CE? Roman technologists were using gold-silver nanoparticles to make colored glass and the Mayans used indigo dyes stored in clay nanopores to make brilliant long-lasting pigments. One of the most impactful of these technologies was Damascus steel developed in 300 CE in the Middle East.   Although you may have seen the beautiful wavy patterns in kitchen knives, this is not ancient Damascus. The modern “Damascus steel” is formed by welding different pieces of steel together then folding it together. The technique to make true d

  By: Hannah Pell “The most important car in 100 years.” Such is how James May, co-host of the British car show Top Gear, described the Honda Clarity during his test drive several years ago. “This is the future of motoring.” What is it about this car that seemed so revolutionary? It’s the fact that it’s not powered by an engine or a battery — but by a hydrogen fuel cell. Hydrogen technology has been getting a lot of coverage lately, and I wanted to know a bit more about the science behind it, as well as its role in the future of fuel. Hydrogen production   Hydrogen is the lightest element at #1 on the periodic table and the most abundant in the universe. Its chemical structure contains only one proton and one electron, making it highly reactive (flammable!) and therefore not freely found in nature. In order to get hydrogen by itself, it must be extracted from naturally occurring compounds. There are several processes for producing hydrogen: steam methane reforming, gasifica

  By Allison Kubo Hutchison  Elizabeth Ann, the first cloned black-footed ferret taken on Jan 29,2021. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via AP. Although all births are special and joyous occasions, on December 10, 2020, researchers celebrated the birth of an extraordinary ferret kit. Elizabeth Ann, born from a domestic ferret surrogate, is not biologically related to her birth mother. She is a clone of the endangered black-footed ferret, a wild US-native species. The ferret she was cloned from died in 1988. Elizabeth Ann is the first US-native endangered species to be cloned. The black-footed ferret was thought completely extinct due to habitat loss until a small colony was discovered in 1981. Conservationists engaged in a captive breeding program to preserve the species but only seven females were able to reproduce meaning that 40 years later all the approximately 1,000 remaining black-footed ferrets have a limited gene pool. The lack of genetic diversity leaves the population susc

  Nuclear science first penetrated American consciousness with the building of the atomic bomb. It has become both a beneficial and destructive force that influences many aspects of human life from energy, to the environment, to medicine. Yet this field of study —that peers into the atomic nuclei — is something people generally don’t teach or talk too much about. University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (UWL) Physics Professor Shelly Lesher is working to change that. Lesher launched a new podcast, “My Nuclear Life,” in December that explores the intersection of nuclear science and society through interviews with historians, policymakers, and other experts. “I wanted to share my love for physics and the excitement of the field with the public, and I hope they become excited about physics too,” she says. Episodes of the podcast series cover topics such as: nuclear sanctions, the start of radium therapy to treat cancer, and the beginning of the environmental movement in the U.S. They don’t