Tag Archives: Ultrafast

Science

Ultra-fast electron rain is pouring out of Earth’s magnetic shield, and scientists think they know why

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Tomorrow’s weather may be cloudy with a chance of electrons, thanks to a newly detected phenomenon in Earth’s magnetic shield.

Described as unexpected, ultra-fast “electron precipitation,” the phenomenon occurs when waves of electromagnetic energy pulse through Earth‘s magnetosphere – the magnetic field generated by the churning of Earth’s core, which surrounds our planet and shields it from deadly solar radiation. These electrons then overflow from the magnetosphere and plummet toward Earth. 

The torrential electron rains are more likely to occur during solar storms, and they may contribute to the aurora borealis, according to research published March 25 in the journal Nature Communications. However, the researchers added, electron rains may also pose a threat to astronauts and spacecraft in ways that space radiation models don’t currently account for.

“Although space is commonly thought to be separate from our upper atmosphere, the two are inextricably linked,” study co-author Vassilis Angelopoulos, a professor of space physics at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) said in a statement. “Understanding how they’re linked can benefit satellites and astronauts passing through the region.” 

Scientists have known for decades that energetic particles periodically rain down on our planet in small quantities. These particles originate in the sun and sail across the 93 million-mile-wide (150 million kilometers) gap to Earth on the back of solar wind. Our planet’s magnetosphere traps many of these particles in one of two giant, donut-shaped belts of radiation known as the Van Allen belts. Occasionally, waves generated within these belts cause electrons to speed up and tumble into Earth’s atmosphere.

The new study shows that electron downpours can occur far more often than previous research thought possible.

In their new research, the study authors analyzed electron showers in the Van Allen belts using data from two satellites: the Electron Losses and Fields Investigation (ELFIN) spacecraft, a satellite about the size of a bread loaf that orbits low in Earth’s atmosphere; and the Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) spacecraft, which orbits Earth beyond the Van Allen belts.

Monitoring electron fluxes in the Van Allen belts from above and below, the team was able to detect electron rain events in great detail. The THEMIS data showed that these electron downpours were caused by whistler waves — a type of low-frequency radio wave that originates during lightning strikes and then surges through Earth’s magnetosphere.

These energetic waves can accelerate electrons in the Van Allen belts, causing them to spill over and rain down on the lower atmosphere, the researchers found. Additionally, the ELFIN satellite data showed that these rains can occur far more often than previous research suggested, and they can become especially prevalent during solar storms.

Current space weather models account for some sources of electron precipitation into Earth’s atmosphere (such as impacts from solar wind, for example) — however, they do not account for whistler-wave-induced electron showers, according to the researchers. High-energy charged particles can damage satellites and pose hazards to astronauts caught in their path. By further understanding this source of electron rain, scientists can update their models to better protect the people and machines that spend their time high above our planet, the new study authors said.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Business

Boom Supersonic picks North Carolina to build, test ultra-fast planes

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A rendering of Boom Supersonic’s Overture jet.

Boom Supersonic

Boom Supersonic, which is developing ultra-fast airplanes it believes will lead to the return of commercial supersonic flights, has picked Greensboro, N.C., to build and test those planes.

The Greensboro-based plant, which is expected to employ 1,250 workers by the end of the decade, is the latest example of a new aviation manufacturing facility being built in the region. In the last 11 years, Boeing and Airbus have established new final assembly plants in North Charleston, S.C., and Mobile, Ala., respectively.

“This is the right choice for us and we couldn’t be more excited,” Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic told CNBC. “Greensboro brings a significant, local skilled labor population and there are more than two hundred aerospace suppliers in the state. Many will be key suppliers for The Overture.”

The Overture is Boom’s first commercial supersonic plane. The company plans to start building the plane in 2024, with the first one rolling off the line in 2025 and the initial test flight set for 2026. If all goes as planned, Boom’s inaugural supersonic jet would enter commercial service by 2029.

One of North Carolina’s state slogans, “First in Flight,” pays tribute to the Wright Brothers making the first successful flight at Kitty Hawk. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper acknowledged the state’s heritage in a release announcing the Boom plant. “It is both poetic and logical that Boom Supersonic would choose the state that’s first in flight for its first manufacturing plant,” he said.

While Boom is based in Denver and will continue designing aircraft at its headquarters, it chose Greensboro, in part, because of its short distance from the Atlantic coast.  “The proximity to the ocean is an important factor,” Scholl said. “The vast majority of our flight tests will be over the water, where the plane can speed up so there is not a sonic boom over populated areas.”

Boom says the Overture will fly at a top speed of Mach 1.7, or about 1,300 mph, allowing it to shave hours off of some of the longest international flights. For example, the company says the new plane will fly from Tokyo to Seattle in four and a half hours, instead of the typical flight time of eight and a half hours.

United Airlines has ordered 15 Overture supersonic planes.

CNBC’s Meghan Reeder contributed to the report

 

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Technology

Google’s Pixel Watch Might Get an Ultra-Fast Google Assistant

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Photo: Victoria Song/Gizmodo

Google’s Pixel smartwatch is one of the most anticipated devices on the horizon despite not being a confirmed product, and a new report makes us even more eager to see what’s coming.

The rumored Pixel Watch will apparently be powered by a Samsung Exynos chip and support Google Assistant, according to a report from 9to5Google that claims to have found a “PIXEL_EXPERIENCE_WATCH” feature tag within a Google app.

As the site notes, previous Pixel phones contained similar feature tags that told apps when to provide Pixel-exclusive features. If the forthcoming smartwatch does indeed have its own feature tag, it would suggest that it will receive features you can’t find on other watches.

Hold on, though, because it only gets better from here. The folks at 9to5Google also found references to “Rohan,” the codename linked to the Pixel Watch, and tied them to the next-generation Assistant, or the most recent version of the Google Assistant that debuted in the Pixel 4. The advantage of using the next-gen assistant is that speech can be processed directly on your device in real time, allowing you to quickly open apps, translate speech into text, or perform various functions offline.

As it stands, the latest version of Google’s watch OS, Wear OS 3, is still missing an assistant altogether (the poor Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 relies on Bixby).

Between finding a feature tag containing “PIXEL” and spotting what has been, to this point, a Pixel-exclusive feature, 9to5Google seems pretty convinced that Google’s next watch will indeed be called the Pixel Watch (as has been rumored). This comes just a few weeks after a Business Insider report said it was “unclear” what brand Google would use if it even decides to release the watch.

And while there remains a sliver of doubt as to whether this thing will ever arrive, we have a pretty good idea of how it’ll look if it does. Again, 9to5Google did some digging, but this time, it looked through the Wear OS 3 emulator and found a watch face that seems to give us a glimpse at the Pixel Watch’s design.

One graphic it found shows a round watch face with a prominent crown. On the display is a curved light bar in Google colors (red, yellow, green, blue). While we don’t know for sure, this very much looks like the sort of icon that would appear when you summon the Google Assistant.

It’s worth pointing out that the image found in the emulator looks like the generic watch icon Google used in its Wear OS 3 announcement, and the addition of a pusher button deviates from the leaks we’ve seen thus far.

If those weren’t enough juicy Pixel Watch leaks, we get one more courtesy of 9to5Google, which claims to have “seen evidence suggesting” the Pixel Watch will be powered by a Samsung Exynos processor instead of Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon Wear 4100 Plus chip. Google and Samsung worked together on Wear OS 3 so it’d make sense for them to share hardware.

It’s possible Google’s upcoming watch will be powered by the same Samsung Exynos W920 found in the Galaxy Watch 4, but like everything else in this latest rumor batch, we can’t say for sure until Google confirms this thing is real.

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Science

Ultrahot, ultrafast explosion called ‘the Camel’ has astronomers puzzled

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In October 2020, astronomers detected an enormous, ancient explosion tearing through a galaxy several billion light-years from Earth. The blast appeared out of nowhere, reached peak brightness within a few days and then rapidly vanished again within a month — indicating that an extreme cosmic event, like the formation of a black hole or neutron star, had just occurred.

Astronomers call sudden, bright blasts like these fast blue optical transients (FBOTs),  named for their extreme “blue” heat and incredibly rapid evolution.

But, if you prefer, you can call this one “the Camel.”

That nickname (a play on the object’s technical name, ZTF20acigmel) may seem unbefitting a blast so fast and powerful, but such is the way of FBOTs. A similar explosion, detected in 2018 roughly 200 million light-years from Earth, earned the unlikely name “the Cow” (the result of a procedurally generated scientific name), while another 2020 FBOT was dubbed “the Koala” (also a play on its technical name).

These three cuddly-wuddly FBOTs are in a class of their own when it comes to stellar explosions. Unlike typical supernovas — the epic blasts that occur when stars run out of fuel and collapse in on themselves — FBOTs seem to appear and disappear in a matter of weeks, rather than years.

But even after their visible light fades, FBOTs continue to be radiation powerhouses. In a paper published Oct. 13 to the preprint database arXiv, astronomers studied the Camel in wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum, to get a glimpse of some of the invisible carnage playing out after the initial blast.

The team found that the initial Camel explosion also shone brightly in radio frequencies, suggesting that the blast was tearing through its cosmic neighborhood extremely quickly — probably a few tenths of the speed of light (more than 100 million mph or 160 million kmh), the researchers wrote. Such bright radio emissions usually come from synchrotron radiation, which occurs when charged particles rocket through a magnetic field at a fraction of light speed.

Behind the blast, a powerful engine seethed for months. The team found that the blast glowed with X-ray emissions long after its visible light faded. As with the Cow, this stream of X-rays suggests that something powerful, like a black hole or a neutron star, was driving the Camel’s intense emissions, the team suggested.

It could be that FBOTs represent a rarely seen moment of cosmic creation — blasts that occur the instant an old star implodes, collapsing into a massive black hole or fast-spinning neutron star before our very eyes.

Astronomers have never seen these processes actually take place (as far as they know), so it’s hard to know for sure what the resulting flood of radiation would look like. But one thing is clear: The Cow, the Koala and the Camel are not your average mammals. There’s nothing average about them.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Science

Ultrafast electron microscopy leads to pivotal discovery

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Ultrafast electron microscope in Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory.

Everyone who has ever been to the Grand Canyon can relate to having strong feelings from being close to one of nature’s edges. Similarly, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have discovered that nanoparticles of gold act unusually when close to the edge of a one-atom thick sheet of carbon, called graphene. This could have big implications for the development of new sensors and quantum devices.

This discovery was made possible with a newly established ultrafast electron microscope (UEM) at Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM), a DOE Office of Science User Facility. The UEM enables the visualization and investigation of phenomena at the nanoscale and on time frames of less than a trillionth of a second. This discovery could make a splash in the growing field of plasmonics, which involves light striking a material surface and triggering waves of electrons, known as plasmonic fields.

For years, scientists have been pursuing development of plasmonic devices with a wide range of applications—from quantum information processing to optoelectronics (which combine light-based and electronic components) to sensors for biological and medical purposes. To do so, they couple two-dimensional materials with atomic-level thickness, such as graphene, with nanosized metal particles. Understanding the combined plasmonic behavior of these two different types of materials requires understanding exactly how they are coupled.

In a recent study from Argonne, researchers used ultrafast electron microscopy to look directly at the coupling between gold nanoparticles and graphene.

“Surface plasmons are light-induced electron oscillations on the surface of a nanoparticle or at an interface of a nanoparticle and another material,” said Argonne nanoscientist Haihua Liu. “When we shine a light on the nanoparticle, it creates a short-lived plasmonic field. The pulsed electrons in our UEM interact with this short-lived field when the two overlap, and the electrons either gain or lose energy. Then, we collect those electrons that gain energy using an energy filter to map the plasmonic field distributions around the nanoparticle.”

In studying the gold nanoparticles, Liu and his colleagues discovered an unusual phenomenon. When the nanoparticle sat on a flat sheet of graphene, the plasmonic field was symmetric. But when the nanoparticle was positioned close to a graphene edge, the plasmonic field concentrated much more strongly near the edge region.

“It’s a remarkable new way of thinking about how we can manipulate charge in the form of a plasmonic field and other phenomena using light at the nanoscale,” Liu said. “With ultrafast capabilities, there’s no telling what we might see as we tweak different materials and their properties.”

This whole experimental process, from the stimulation of the nanoparticle to the detection of the plasmonic field, occurs in less than a few hundred quadrillionths of a second.

“The CNM is unique in housing a UEM that is open for user access and capable of taking measurements with nanometer spatial resolution and sub-picosecond time resolution,” said CNM Director Ilke Arslan. “Having the ability to take measurements like this in such a short time window opens up the examination of a vast array of new phenomena in non-equilibrium states that we haven’t had the ability to probe before. We are excited to provide this capability to the international user community.”

The understanding gained with regard to the coupling mechanism of this nanoparticle-graphene system should be key to the future development of exciting new plasmonic devices.

A paper based on the study, “Visualization of plasmonic couplings using ultrafast electron microscopy,” appeared in the June 21 edition of Nano Letters. In addition to Liu and Arslan, additional authors include Argonne’s Thomas Gage, Richard Schaller and Stephen Gray. Prem Singh and Amit Jaiswal of the Indian Institute of Technology also contributed, as did Jau Tang of Wuhan University and Sang Tae Park of IDES, Inc.

A catalyst that controls chemical reactions with light

More information:
Haihua Liu et al, Visualization of Plasmonic Couplings Using Ultrafast Electron Microscopy, Nano Letters (2021). DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.1c01824
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Ultrafast electron microscopy leads to pivotal discovery (2021, August 26)
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Science

Snapshots of Ultrafast Switching in Quantum Electronics Could Lead to Faster Computing Devices

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A team of researchers created a new method to capture ultrafast atomic motions inside the tiny switches that control the flow of current in electronic circuits. Pictured here are Aditya Sood (left) and Aaron Lindenberg (right). Credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Scientists Take First Snapshots of Ultrafast Switching in a Quantum Electronic Device

They discover a short-lived state that could lead to faster and more energy-efficient computing devices.

 Electronic circuits that compute and store information contain millions of tiny switches that control the flow of electric current. A deeper understanding of how these tiny switches work could help researchers push the frontiers of modern computing.

Now scientists have made the first snapshots of atoms moving inside one of those switches as it turns on and off. Among other things, they discovered a short-lived state within the switch that might someday be exploited for faster and more energy-efficient computing devices.

The research team from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, Hewlett Packard Labs, Penn State University and Purdue University described their work in a paper published in Science today (July 15, 2021).

“This research is a breakthrough in ultrafast technology and science,” says SLAC scientist and collaborator Xijie Wang. “It marks the first time that researchers used ultrafast electron diffraction, which can detect tiny atomic movements in a material by scattering a powerful beam of electrons off a sample, to observe an electronic device as it operates.”

The team used electrical pulses, shown here in blue, to turn their custom-made switches on and off several times. They timed these electrical pulses to arrive just before the electron pulses produced by SLAC’s ultrafast electron diffraction source MeV-UED, which captured the atomic motions happening inside these switches as they turned on and off. Credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Capturing the cycle

For this experiment, the team custom-designed miniature electronic switches made of vanadium dioxide, a prototypical quantum material whose ability to change back and forth between insulating and electrically conducting states near room temperature could be harnessed as a switch for future computing. The material also has applications in brain-inspired computing because of its ability to create electronic pulses that mimic the neural impulses fired in the human brain.

The researchers used electrical pulses to toggle these switches back and forth between the insulating and conducting states while taking snapshots that showed subtle changes in the arrangement of their atoms over billionths of a second. Those snapshots, taken with SLAC’s ultrafast electron diffraction camera, MeV-UED, were strung together to create a molecular movie of the atomic motions.


Lead researcher Aditya Sood discusses new research which could lead to a better understanding of how the tiny switches inside electronic circuits work. Credit: Olivier Bonin/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

“This ultrafast camera can actually look inside a material and take snapshots of how its atoms move in response to a sharp pulse of electrical excitation,” said collaborator Aaron Lindenberg, an investigator with the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC and a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University. “At the same time, it also measures how the electronic properties of that material change over time.”

With this camera, the team discovered a new, intermediate state within the material. It is created when the material responds to an electric pulse by switching from the insulating to the conducting state.

“The insulating and conducting states have slightly different atomic arrangements, and it usually takes energy to go from one to the other,” said SLAC scientist and collaborator Xiaozhe Shen. “But when the transition takes place through this intermediate state, the switch can take place without any changes to the atomic arrangement.”

Opening a window on atomic motion

Although the intermediate state exists for only a few millionths of a second, it is stabilized by defects in the material.

To follow up on this research, the team is investigating how to engineer these defects in materials to make this new state more stable and longer lasting. This will allow them to make devices in which electronic switching can occur without any atomic motion, which would operate faster and require less energy.

“The results demonstrate the robustness of the electrical switching over millions of cycles and identify possible limits to the switching speeds of such devices,” said collaborator Shriram Ramanathan, a professor at Purdue. “The research provides invaluable data on microscopic phenomena that occur during device operations, which is crucial for designing circuit models in the future.”

The research also offers a new way of synthesizing materials that do not exist under natural conditions, allowing scientists to observe them on ultrafast timescales and then potentially tune their properties.

“This method gives us a new way of watching devices as they function, opening a window to look at how the atoms move,” said lead author and SIMES researcher Aditya Sood. “It is exciting to bring together ideas from the traditionally distinct fields of electrical engineering and ultrafast science. Our approach will enable the creation of next-generation electronic devices that can meet the world’s growing needs for data-intensive, intelligent computing.”

MeV-UED is an instrument of the LCLS user facility, operated by SLAC on behalf of the DOE Office of Science, who funded this research.

SLAC is a vibrant multiprogram laboratory that explores how the universe works at the biggest, smallest and fastest scales and invents powerful tools used by scientists around the globe. With research spanning particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology, materials, chemistry, bio- and energy sciences and scientific computing, we help solve real-world problems and advance the interests of the nation.

SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.



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