news 2021

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have succeeded for the first time in looking inside materials using the method of transient grating spectroscopy with ultrafast X-rays at SwissFEL. The experiment at PSI is a milestone in observing processes in the world of atoms. The researchers are publishing their research results today .

Scientists have developed ultralow-loss silicon nitride integrated circuits that are central for many photonic devices, such as chip-scale frequency combs, narrow-linewidth lasers, coherent LiDAR, and neuromorphic computing. Encoding information into light, and transmitting it through optical fibers lies at the core of optical communications.

Water can freeze from liquid to solid ice or boil into a gas. In the kitchen these "phase transitions" aren't smooth, but their discontinuous nature is smoothed out at high pressure. An international team of physicists led by EPFL has now discovered the same behavior in certain quantum magnets, which may have consequences for the technology of qubits.

The US research laboratory "Fermilab" has published the eagerly awaited results of the experimental measurement of the so-called anomalous magnetic dipole moment of the muon. As members of the "Muon g-2 Theory Initiative", researchers from the University of Bern have calculated the same physical quantity theoretically in parallel, based on the Standard Model.

Scientists have developed AI-powered nanosensors that let researchers track various kinds of biological molecules without disturbing them. The tiny world of biomolecules is rich in fascinating interactions between a plethora of different agents such as intricate nanomachines (proteins), shape-shifting vessels (lipid complexes), chains of vital information (DNA) and energy fuel (carbohydrates).

Uranus and Neptune both have a completely skewed magnetic field, perhaps due to the planets- special inner structures. But new experiments by ETH researchers now show that the mystery remains unsolved. The two large gas planets Uranus and Neptune have strange magnetic fields. These are each strongly tilted relative to the planet's rotation axes and are significantly offset from the physical centre of the planet.

Geneva, 31 March 2021. The ALPHA collaboration at CERN has succeeded in cooling down antihydrogen atoms - the simplest form of atomic antimatter - using laser light. The technique, known as laser cooling, was first demonstrated 40 years ago on normal matter and is a mainstay of many research fields.

Power converters play an essential role in electric vehicles and solar panels, for example, but tend to lose a lot of power in the form of heat in the electricity conversion process. Thanks to a new type of transistor developed at EPFL, these converters can perform at substantially improved efficiencies, especially in high-power applications.

Researchers at CERN have just released new intriguing results. According to the international research collaboration that runs the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment, the latest measurements strengthen hints for a deviation with respect to the theoretical expectations. If confirmed, the findings point towards physics beyond the Standard Model such as a new fundamental force.

EPFL will soon be home to a European hub for high-performance computing focused on fusion power - a potential source of clean, risk-free energy. As part of this effort, EPFL's Swiss Plasma Center will lead a campus-wide, cross-disciplinary research team. EUROfusion - or the European Consortium for the Development of Fusion Energy, which consists of organizations from 28 European countries - has just selected EPFL as the site for its Advanced Computing Hub.

Scientists at EPFL and the University of Geneva have combined two powerful, cutting-edge techniques to uncover the physics behind an exotic phase transition that turns a metal into an insulator. The materials they looked at are rare-earth nickelates, which are of great interest for innovating new approaches in electronics.

Research teams from UNIGE have discovered that the cytoskeleton of the malaria parasite comprises a vestigial form of an organelle called conoid, initially thought to be absent from this species and which could play a role in host invasion. Plasmodium is the parasite causing malaria, one of the deadliest parasitic diseases.

Scientists at EPFL and the University of Geneva have combined two powerful, cutting-edge techniques to uncover the physics behind an exotic phase transition that turns a metal into an insulator. The materials they looked at are rare-earth nickelates, which are of great interest for innovating new approaches in electronics.

Hyaluronic acid, also known as hyaluronan, is a polysaccharide that helps establish the viscosity of bodily fluids. According to a new study by EPFL scientists, it also influences the behavior of far more water molecules than previously thought. Their findings - just published in Science Advances - open new avenues of research on the role water plays in the human body.

By using 3D aerosol jet-printing to put perovskites on graphene, scientists at EPFL have made X-ray detectors with record sensitivity that can greatly improve the efficiency and reduce the cost and health hazard of medical imaging devices. Since Wilhelm Röntgen discovered them in 1895, X-rays have become a staple of medical imaging.

Physicists from Switzerland, Germany and Ukraine have proposed an innovative new data storage medium. The technique is based on specific properties of antiferromagnetic materials that had previously resisted experimental examination. Using nanoscale quantum sensors, an international research team has succeeded in exploring certain previously uncharted physical properties of an antiferromagnetic material.

Phobos and Deimos are the remains of a larger Martian moon that was disrupted between 1 and 2.7 billion years ago, say researchers from the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich and the Physics Institute at the University of Zurich. They reached this conclusion using computer simulations and seismic recordings from the InSight Mars mission.

Researchers are among the first scientists to have succeeded in propelling microvehicles against a fluid flow using ultrasound. In future, these tiny vehicles are set to be introduced into the human bloodstream, thereby revolutionising the field of medicine. At some point, microvehicles that are small enough to navigate our blood vessels will enable physicians to take biopsies, insert stents and deliver drugs with precision to sites that are difficult to reach, all from inside the body.

Using the IBM Q computer, physicists at EPFL have verified for the first time the tight relationship between quantum entanglement and wave-particle duality, showing that the former controls the latter in a quantum system. "It is possible to do experiments in fundamental physics on the remotely accessible IBM Q quantum computer ," says Marc-André Dupertuis, a physicist at EPFL's School of Basic Sciences.

The core of a fusion reactor is incredibly hot. Hydrogen that inevitably escapes from it must be cooled on its way to the wall, as otherwise, the reactor wall would be damaged. Researchers from the Dutch institute DIFFER and EPFL's Swiss Plasma Center have developed a strict measurement and control method for the cooling of very hot particles escaping from fusion plasmas.