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For the first time, a superconducting current limiter based on YBCO strip conductors has now been installed at a power plant. At the Boxberg power plant of Vattenfall, the current limiter protects the grid for own consumption that is designed for 12 000 volts and 800 amperes against damage due to short circuits and voltage peaks.

Using a heating system, physicists have succeeded for the first time in preventing the development of instabilities in an efficient alternative way relevant to a future nuclear fusion reactor. It’s an important step forward in the effort to build the future ITER reactor.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Accelerator technology has made huge leaps forward, prompting important developments well beyond high energy physics in areas as diverse as energy and the environment, medicine, industry, national security and discovery science. But the capacity to translate accelerator breakthroughs into commercial applications has lagged behind.

While physicists at the Large Hadron Collider smash together thousands of protons and other particles to see what matter is made of, they're never going to hurl electrons at each other. No matter how high the energy, the little negative particles won't break apart.

Scientists from IBM and the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) have built the world's smallest magnetic data storage unit. It uses just twelve atoms per bit, the basic unit of information, and squeezes a whole byte (8 bit) into as few as 96 atoms. A modern hard drive, for comparison, still needs more than half a billion atoms per byte

University of Illinois researchers have shown that by tuning the properties of laser light illuminating arrays of metal nanoantennas, these nano-scale structures allow for dexterous optical tweezing as well as size-sorting of particles.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at D-Wave Systems have carried out a calculation involving 84 qubits on an experimental quantum computer, giving some credence to the plausibility of true quantum computers being created that could vastly surpass the abilities of all those that currently rely on existing technology.

(PhysOrg.com) -- For a couple of decades now, physicists have known that if a very small laser beam is pointed at a microscopic particle, it could be held in place due to the very small electrical field that is generated. Because of that, the technique has been used to hold objects in place for close examination, sort of like using a pair of tweezers to hold a grain of sand for study under a magnifying glass. One truly nice feature of the technique is that it’s very gentle, thus no harm comes to the particle being examined.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Optimizing the conductivity of ceria based oxides, or doped ceria, is crucial to their use as electrolytes in future solid oxide fuel cells.

Chroniclers of his time called him ‘despicable’, ‘mistrustful’ and ‘jealous’, and a rivalrous Isaac Newton might have had the only surviving portrait of him burnt, but, three centuries on, Robert Hooke is now regarded as one of the great Enlightenment scientists.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In the basement of Hoyt Laboratory at Princeton University, Alexei Tyryshkin clicked a computer mouse and sent a burst of microwaves washing across a silicon crystal suspended in a frozen cylinder of stainless steel.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Imagine dropping your phone on the hard concrete sidewalk—but when you pick it up, you find its battery has already healed itself.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Robert Nemiroff and his colleagues at Michigan Technological University will be discussing new constraints on the so-called lumpiness of space-time at this year’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Over the past several years, organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have become a popular light source due to their advantages including bright displays, wide viewing angles, and the ability to be printed on flexible substrates. A lesser known alternative to OLEDs, which has these advantages plus some additional ones such as low turn-on voltage, is electrochemical light-emitting cells (LECs).

(PhysOrg.com) -- A better understanding of the universe will be the outgrowth of the discovery of the Higgs boson, according to a team of University of Oklahoma researchers.