NEWS RELEASES

Writing in Nature, a team led by physicists Cory Dean from Columbia University and Jia Li from the University of Texas at Austin has observed a superfluid, which normally remains in constant motion, come to a standstill. “For the first time, we’ve seen a superfluid undergo a phase transition to become what appears to be a supersolid,” said Dean. It’s like water freezing to ice, but at the quantum level.

After maritime shipping emissions were sharply reduced following a mandated switch in fuels, University of Utah atmospheric scientists sprang into action to see how the change would affect cloud formation over North Atlantic. Review of satellite observations and weather data determined few droplets formed, yet the clouds’ ability to reflect sunlight remained surprisingly stable.

Important everyday products—from plastics to detergents—are made through chemical reactions that mostly use precious metals such as platinum as catalysts. Newly identified methods to harness the properties of tungsten carbide could yield viable substitutes for platinum.

Researchers have reported new experimental results addressing the origin of rare proton-rich isotopes heavier than iron, called p-nuclei. Led by Artemis Tsantiri, then-graduate student at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) and current postdoctoral fellow at the University of Regina in Canada, the study presents the first rare isotope beam measurement of proton capture on arsenic-73 to produce selenium-74, providing new constraints on how the lightest p-nucleus is formed and destroyed in the cosmos. The team published its results in Physical Review Letters (“Constraining the Synthesis of the Lightest 𝑝 Nucleus ⁷⁴Se”).

Auburn University physics PhD student Jessica Eskew has been awarded a prestigious U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research Fellowship to tackle one of the most critical challenges in fusion energy: controlling runaway electrons that can damage future fusion power plants. Through extended on-site research at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, Eskew will study how precisely manipulating magnetic structures in hot plasmas can enable safer, more reliable fusion devices, reinforcing Auburn Physics’ growing national impact in plasma and fusion research.

What if you could create new materials just by shining a light them? To most, this sounds fantastical, but to physicists investigating Floquet engineering, this is the goal. With a periodic drive, like light, it’s possible to ‘dress up’ the electronic structure of any material, altering its fundamental properties – such as turning a simple semiconductor into a superconductor. While experimentally proven, light-driven Floquet requires strong drives that almost vaporize the material while achieving only modest effects. But researchers have now managed to achieve strong Floquet effect with a periodic drive just a fraction of the power required for modest light-driven Floquet – using excitons. This alternative method pavers the way to applied Floquet physics and thereby exciting novel quantum devices and applications.