Article by Emily Conover

The largest particle detector of its kind has failed to turn up any hints of dark matter, despite searching for about a year.

Known as XENON1T, the experiment is designed to detect elusive dark matter particles, which are thought to make up most of the matter in the cosmos. Physicists don’t know what dark matter is. One of the most popular explanations is a particle called a WIMP, short for weakly interacting massive particle. XENON1T searches for WIMPs crashing into atomic nuclei in 1,300 kilograms of chilled liquid xenon. But XENON1T saw no such collisions. The particles’ absence further winnowed down their possible hiding places by placing new limits on how frequently WIMPs can interact with nuclei depending on their mass.

Researchers describe the results May 28 in two talks, one at Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, where XENON1T is located, and the other at the European particle physics lab CERN in Geneva. XENON1T...

Article by Dr. Amira Val Baker, Resonance Science Foundation Astrophysicist

Cosmic dawn, the epoch given to the point in time when the first ever stars formed, may now just be in sight.

To look back in time to when the first ever stars formed in the Universe, we need ever more powerful telescopes to be able to detect the faintest of light. This electromagnetic radiation, that has travelled billions of light years across the universe, is stretched towards the red end of the spectrum – its wavelength is said to be red-shifted. A measurement of this redshift can tell us how far this light has travelled and thus what epoch in time it came from.

A team of scientists led by Takuya Hashimoto, from Osaka Sangyo University in Japan, have just observed the gravitationally lensed galaxy, MACS149-JDI, and confirmed it to be one of the farthest objects from Earth. Utilizing the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large...

Article by Edwin Cartlidge, science writer based in the UK

The first detection of gravitational waves in 2015 created huge excitement because it confirmed a long-standing prediction of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity and opened up a completely new way of observing the universe. Physicists have also been scrutinizing data from the growing number of gravitational-wave detections for “echoes” – the existence of which could mean that our understanding of relativity is incomplete. Physicists in Canada and Iran have found tentative evidence for such echoes gravitational waves from colliding black holes, and now say a stronger signal exists in data from colliding neutron stars.

“So far everyone who has looked for echoes has found them, including the LIGO group.”

—Niayesh Afshordi of the University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Many physicists believe that general relativity is incomplete...

Article by Dr. Amira Val Baker, Astrophysicist, Resonance Science Foundation Research Scientist

Charge – that is the degree to which an entity is affected by an external force – comes in all shapes in sizes. Now for the first-time scientists have been able to determine the weak charge of the proton.

The weak force is one of the four fundamental forces of nature and is significant in radioactivity – the spontaneous emission of energy and/or subatomic particles i.e. an unstable nucleus will decompose spontaneously (decay) into a more stable configuration. Note, this is done by emitting specific particles and/or specific amounts/forms of energy. For example, radioactive beta decay transforms a neutron into a proton, an electron, and an electron anti-neutrino.

The standard model describes these forces in terms of the exchange of virtual force carriers. In this model the weak force is thought to interact thorough the exchange of the massive (~ 100 x mass of a proton)...

By Dr. Amira Val Baker, Resonance Science Foundation Astrophysicist

The biggest map of our galaxy just got revealed and it confirms the intriguing discrepancy in the value of the Hubble constant, further questioning our understanding of the expanding Universe.

Hubble’s constant – which is essentially a measure of the speed of the expanding universe – is determined by two different methods. One method looks at the early universe through the observation of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and the other method looks at the local universe through the light emitted by Cepheid variables.

In a recent news post, we described how Nobel laureate Adam Reiss and his team at the Space Telescope Science Institute determined a value for the Hubble constant 9% higher than that found by the CMB method. This value was found to an improved accuracy compared to previous studies and thus brings into question the reason for such a discrepancy.

Now with the help of Gaia, the...

As Reported by Syl Kacapyr at Cornell University:

While defects in a diamond are mostly undesirable, certain defects are a quantum physicist’s best friend, having the potential to store bits of information that could one day be used in a quantum computing system.

Applied physicists at Cornell have demonstrated a technique for engineering some of the key optical properties of those defects, providing a new tool for exploring quantum mechanics.

A group of researchers led by Greg Fuchs, professor of applied and engineering physics, have become the first to use vibrations produced by a resonator to help stabilize those optical properties, forcing the diamond’s electrons into an excited orbital state. The research is detailed in the paper “Orbital State Manipulation of a Diamond Nitrogen-Vacancy Center Using a Mechanical Resonator,” published April 17 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Much like a computer’s transistors record binary information by...

Article by Ken Kingery, Duke University

Metamaterials researchers at Duke University have demonstrated the design and construction of a thin material that can control the redirection and reflection of sound waves with almost perfect efficiency.

While many theoretical approaches to engineer such a device have been proposed, they have struggled to simultaneously control both the transmission and reflection of sound in exactly the desired manner, and none have been experimentally demonstrated.

The new design is the first to demonstrate complete, near-perfect control of sound waves and is quickly and easily fabricated using 3-D printers. The results appear online April 9 in Nature Communications.

"Controlling the transmission and reflection of sound waves this way was a theoretical concept that did not have a path to implementation—nobody knew how to design a practical structure using these ideas," said Steve Cummer, professor of electrical and computer...

By Resonance Science Foundation

Birds Can See Earth's Magnetic Fields, And We Finally Know How That's Possible

By: Michelle Starr

The mystery behind how birds navigate might finally be solved: it's not the iron in their beaks providing a magnetic compass, but a newly discovered protein in their eyes that lets them "see" Earth's magnetic fields.

These findings come courtesy of two new papers - one studying robins, the other zebra finches.

The fancy eye protein is called Cry4, and it's part of a class of proteins called cryptochromes - photoreceptors sensitive to blue light, found in both plants and animals. These proteins play a role in regulating circadian rhythms.

There's also been evidence in recent years that, in birds, the cryptochromes in their eyes are responsible for their ability to orient themselves by detecting magnetic fields, a sense called magnetoreception.

We know that birds can only sense magnetic fields if certain wavelengths of light are available - specifically, studies have...

As reported in phys.org by Gemini Observatory, March 2018

Galaxies and dark matter go hand in hand; you typically don't find one without the other. So when researchers uncovered a galaxy, known as NGC1052-DF2, that is almost completely devoid of the stuff, they were shocked.

"Finding a galaxy without dark matter is unexpected because this invisible, mysterious substance is the most dominant aspect of any galaxy," said lead author Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University. "For decades, we thought that galaxies start their lives as blobs of dark matter. After that everything else happens: gas falls into the dark matter halos, the gas turns into stars, they slowly build up, then you end up with galaxies like the Milky Way. NGC1052-DF2 challenges the standard ideas of how we think galaxies form."

The research, published in the March 29th issue of the journal Nature, amassed data from the Gemini North and W. M. Keck Observatories, both on Maunakea, Hawai'i, the Hubble...