A research team working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found an explanation for the extreme sensitivity to mechanical pressure or voltage of a special class of solid materials called relaxors. The ability to control and tailor this sensitivity would allow industry to enhance a range of devices used in medical ultrasound imaging, loudspeakers, sonar and computer hard drives.

Relaxors are highly sensitive piezoelectrics — they change shape when a battery is connected across opposite ends of the material, or they produce a voltage when squeezed.

“Relaxors are roughly 10 times more sensitive than any other known piezoelectric,” explains NIST researcher Peter Gehring. They are extremely useful for device applications because they can convert between electrical and mechanical forms of energy with little energy loss.

When atoms form molecules, they share their outer electrons and this creates a negatively charged cloud. The electrons buzz around between the two positively charged nuclei, making it impossible to tell which nucleus they belong to. They are delocalized.

Is this also true for the electrons located closer to the nucleus? And are those electrons spread out too, or do they belong to just one nucleus, i.e. are they localized?

These questions have been hotly debated for the last 50 years, and an international team of scientists says they have an answer - in true quantum theory fashion, they are both right.

Physicists at Penn State say they have provided a mechanism by which information can be recovered from black holes; objects from which, according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, not even light can escape. The team's findings pave the way toward ending a decades-long debate sparked by renowned physicist Steven Hawking.

In the 1970s, Hawking stated that black holes evaporate by quantum processes; however, he asserted that information, such as the identity of matter that is gobbled up by black holes, is permanently lost. At the time, Hawking's assertion threatened to turn quantum mechanics--the most successful physical theory posited by humankind--on its head, since a fundamental tenet of the theory is that information cannot be lost.

Hawking's idea was generally accepted by physicists until the late 1990s, when many began to doubt the assertion. Even Hawking himself renounced the idea in 2004. Yet no one, until now, has been able to provide a plausible mechanism for how information might escape from a black hole. A team of physicists led by Abhay Ashtekar, Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Physics and director of the Penn State Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, say they have discovered such a mechanism. Broadly, their findings expand space-time beyond its assumed size, thus providing room for information to reappear.

With the Large Hadron Collider gearing up for its first test run this summer, physicists hope to discover the last missing particle predicted by the Electroweak theory, the Higgs boson.  Wrapped up in its own big theory, the Higgs Mechanism or Higgs Field, it supposedly confers mass or absolute weight on some paricles or collections of them like atoms and planets.  The Higgs Field is a must, otherwise the Electroweak theory falls flat, insisting that all particles are massless, that matter doesn't exist.

The LHC has been sold to politicians and the public as the experiment that will find the Higgs, though in fact the LHC, no ordinary atom smasher, aims to produce it with colossal energies applied to protons, lead ions later, collided together in a mini Big Bang.  The disaster scenarios also start here.

Designer labels aren't just cool to pretentious New York women - they're also the dream of nuclear physicists.

Designer isotopes, the relatively new power scientists have to make specific rare isotopes to solve scientific problems and open doors to new technologies, will compete with nanotechnology for big breakthroughs, according to Bradley Sherrill, a University Distinguished Professor of physics and associate director for research at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University.

Isotopes are the different versions of an element. Their nuclei have different numbers of neutrons, and thus give them different properties. Rare isotopes don’t always exist in nature – they must be coaxed out with high-energy collisions created by special machines, like those in MSU’s Coupled Cyclotron facility. As technology advances, newer equipment is needed.

For the first time, physicists have come up with a scheme that would allow a quantum mechanical expert to win every time in a con game with a victim who only knows about classical physics. Prior quantum cons have typically been vulnerable to simple countermeasures.

A pair of physicists at Tel-Aviv University in Israel came up with the quantum cheat by imagining two people betting on the location of a particle hidden among a set of boxes. In the game, a quantum mechanical con artist named Alice turns away as her classical victim, Bob, is allowed to look inside one of two boxes sitting on a table to see if there is a particle inside. He then closes the box and Alice guesses whether or not Bob found anything in the box he chose.

If she guesses correctly, she wins Bob's money, if not, she pays him.

As many parents know, it's often easier to keep your kids under control by exerting less authority rather than more. A child who fidgets uncontrollably in a confining booster seat, for example, may be perfectly content on a plain old chair. A team of physicists at the Universitat de Barcelona has found that the same is true in controlling the movement of particles suspended in liquids.

"Random lasers" are not what chooses the songs in your CD player in shuffle mode, they are a class of microlasers which use the principle of random light scattering as an integral part of the their operation.

In conventional lasers light is trapped between two highly reflecting mirrors where it is amplified by pumping from outside. When this amplification process is efficient enough, the laser begins to operate.

After the initiation of the modern study of random lasers by Nabil M. Lawandy at Brown University, it was demonstrated by Hui Cao (Northwestern and Yale) and coworkers that you don't actually elaborate mirrors to confine light long enough for lasing from micron sized devices. All you need to do is to put light into a highly disordered medium where scattering in random directions takes place.

A golden coil smaller in diameter than a human hair and a diamond pin embossed with gold may represent the future of high frequency electronics.

Carol L. Kory, who specializes in complex electromagnetic computer simulations, will present two papers describing the design and predicted performance of new backward wave oscillators at the Ninth International Vacuum Electronics Conference (IVEC) in Monterey, California.

James A. Dayton, Jr., chief technology officer of Teraphysics and inventor of the devices, will follow with two presentations describing the innovative fabrication technology that has been developed to create these two oscillators. Both structures are the essential components of novel 0.65-terahertz electronic oscillators under development at Teraphysics, located in Highland Heights, Ohio.

Throughout the history of Earth there have been numerous mass extinctions and there are just as many theories as to why they occurred.

The largest we know of occurred some 250 million years ago, give or take, but the mass extinction of the dinosaurs more recently has long been a favorite topic of scientists and philosophers.

Scientists at the Cardiff University Centre for Astrobiology have a new twist on an old idea and built a computer model to try and support it. Their model mapped our solar system’s movement and found that it continually “bounces” up and down through the plane of the galaxy. As we pass through the densest part of the plane, gravitational forces from the surrounding giant gas and dust clouds dislodge comets from their paths. The comets plunge into the solar system, some of them colliding with the earth.