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(PhysOrg.com) -- For some years now, NASA has been using what are called thermoelectric materials to power its space probes. The probes travel such great distances from our sun that solar panels are no longer an efficient source of power

On April 8, 2011, the scientific community will celebrate the centennial of the discovery of superconductivity—the ability of certain materials to conduct electricity without resistance when cooled below a specific temperature.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland have created the first nontrivial "atom circuit," a donut-shaped loop of ultracold gas atoms circulating in a current analogous to a ring of electrons in a superconducting wire. The circuit is "nontrivial" because it includes a circuit element—an adjustable barrier that controls the flow of atom current to specific allowed values. The newly published work was done at the Joint Quantum Institute, a NIST/UM collaboration.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Completing the story they started by creating synthetic magnetic fields, scientists from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a collaboration of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland, have now made atoms act as if they were charged particles accelerated by electric fields.

(PhysOrg.com) -- In new work, high-energy physicists have observed two long-sought quantum states in the bottomonium family of sub-atomic particles.

University of Washington physicists are detecting radioactivity from Japanese nuclear reactors that have been in crisis since a mammoth March 11 earthquake, but the levels are far below what would pose a threat to human health.

(PhysOrg.com) -- When most of us think of entanglement, our minds jump immediately to quantum communication. "Entanglement has become very well known and useful in quantum communication," Robert Prevedel tells PhysOrg.com. Prevedel, a scientist at the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, believes that entanglement can be used in classical communication as well.

Using data from experiments performed in 2010 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, scientists are studying rare particle decays that could explain why the universe has more matter than antimatter.

By successfully changing the spin of a molecule, researchers have been able to perform an on/off operation for a molecular magnet. Such reversible switching paves the way for single molecule memory.

Superlenses earned their superlative by being able to capture the "evanescent" light waves that blossom close to an illuminated surface and never travel far enough to be "seen" by a conventional lens. Superlenses hold enormous potential in a range of applications, depending upon the form of light they capture, but their use has been limited because most have been made from elaborate artificial constructs known as metamaterials. The unique optical properties of metamaterials, which include the ability to bend light backwards - a property known as negative refraction - arise from their structure rather than their chemical composition.

Attic pottery is the iconic red and black figure-pottery produced in ancient Greece from the 6th to the 4th centuries B.C. Like the vessel shown above from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, such pottery required immense precision to produce, and the means by which craftsman created these vessels is still not completely understood.

(PhysOrg.com) -- David D.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The Fermi level position and band structure of gallium manganese arsenide has been determined for the first time, shedding light on the precise mechanism behind ferromagnetism in the material.

MIT scientists have synthesized, for the first time, a crystal they believe to be a two-dimensional quantum spin liquid: a solid material whose atomic spins continue to have motion, even at absolute zero temperature.

(PhysOrg.com) -- German scientists from the Forschungszentrum Julich and the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle have discovered the basis for the next generation of memory devices. In a ferroelectric material, they have, for the first time, been able to observe directly how dipoles, which store the information in this material, continuously rotate and therefore may be organised in circular structures. The report was published in the journal Science