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Helping bridge the gap between photonics and electronics, researchers from Purdue University have coaxed a thin film of titanium nitride into transporting plasmons, tiny electron excitations coupled to light that can direct and manipulate optical signals on the nanoscale. Titanium nitride's addition to the short list of surface-plasmon-supporting materials, formerly comprised only of metals, could point the way to a new class of optoelectronic devices with unprecedented speed and efficiency.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Ranging in thickness from a few nanometers to several micrometers, thin films and coatings play a role in a wide variety of applications.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Sandia National Laboratories is using its Ion Beam Laboratory (IBL) to study how to rapidly evaluate the tougher advanced materials needed to build the next generation of nuclear reactors and extend the lives of current reactors.

Nowadays, ever smaller and more powerful computer chips are in demand. German physicists have discovered a new physical attraction that accelerates this progress.

Nowadays, ever smaller and more powerful computer chips are in demand. German physicists have discovered a new physical attraction that accelerates this progress.

In a new approach to invisibility cloaking, a team of French researchers has proposed isolating or cloaking objects from sources of heat—essentially "thermal cloaking." This method, which the researchers describe in the Optical Society's open-access journal Optics Express, taps into some of the same principles as optical cloaking and may lead to novel ways to control heat in electronics and, on an even larger scale, might someday prove useful for spacecraft and solar technologies.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Inflation, the brief period that occurred less than a second after the Big Bang, is nearly as difficult to fathom as the Big Bang itself. Physicists calculate that inflation lasted for just a tiny fraction of a second, yet during this time the Universe grew in size by a factor of 1078. Also during this time, a very important thing occurred: fluctuations in the quantum vacuum appeared, which later resulted in the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that in turn produced large-scale structures such as galaxies.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Inflation, the brief period that occurred less than a second after the Big Bang, is nearly as difficult to fathom as the Big Bang itself. Physicists calculate that inflation lasted for just a tiny fraction of a second, yet during this time the Universe grew in size by a factor of 1078. Also during this time, a very important thing occurred: fluctuations in the quantum vacuum appeared, which later resulted in the temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that in turn produced large-scale structures such as galaxies

Inspired from Mother Nature: The body of the brittlestar Ophiocoma wendtii is studded with tiny crystalline lenses made of calcium carbonate. Microlenses like these are of great interest technologically, yet they have always been extremely expensive to produce. However, scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces and colleagues from other institutes took their cue from biology and came up with a relatively simple and inexpensive method of producing calcium carbonate lenses packed together in a regular arrangement.

Inspired from Mother Nature: The body of the brittlestar Ophiocoma wendtii is studded with tiny crystalline lenses made of calcium carbonate. Microlenses like these are of great interest technologically, yet they have always been extremely expensive to produce

Researchers have devised a proposal for the first conclusive experimental test of a phenomenon known as "Bell’s nonlocality." This test is designed to reveal correlations that are stronger than any classical correlations, and do so between high-energy particles that do not consist of ordinary matter and light. These results are relevant to the so-called ‘CP violation’ principle, which is used to explain the dominance of matter over antimatter.

Researchers have devised a proposal for the first conclusive experimental test of a phenomenon known as "Bell’s nonlocality." This test is designed to reveal correlations that are stronger than any classical correlations, and do so between high-energy particles that do not consist of ordinary matter and light. These results are relevant to the so-called ‘CP violation’ principle, which is used to explain the dominance of matter over antimatter. These findings by Beatrix Hiesmayr, a theoretical physicist at the University of Vienna, and her colleagues, a team of quantum information theory specialists, particle physicists and nuclear physicists, have been published in the European Physical Journal C.

(AP) -- Sir Paul Callaghan, a top New Zealand scientist who gained international recognition for his work in molecular physics, has died after a long battle with bowel cancer. He was 64.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Transistors, resistors, capacitors, and diodes. All of these are examples of common electrical circuit elements that can be found on a computer motherboard, for instance.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s biggest magnet facility today met the grand challenge of producing magnetic fields in excess of 100 tesla while conducting six different experiments. The hundred-tesla level is roughly equivalent to 2 million times Earth’s magnetic field.