Science

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Lucy Finds Its Place in the Solar System: Navigating NASA’s First Mission to the Trojan Asteroids

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This diagram illustrates Lucy's orbital path. The spacecraft’s path (green) is shown in a frame of reference where Jupiter remains stationary, giving the trajectory its pretzel-like shape. After launch in October 2021, Lucy has two close Earth flybys before encountering its Trojan targets. In the L4 cloud Lucy will fly by (3548) Eurybates (white), (15094) Polymele (pink), (11351) Leucus (red), and (21900) Orus (red) from 2027-2028. After diving past Earth again Lucy will visit the L5 cloud and encounter the (617) Patroclus-Menoetius binary (pink) in 2033. As a bonus, in 2025 on the way to the L4, Lucy flies by a small Main Belt asteroid, (52246) Donaldjohanson (white), named for the discoverer of the Lucy fossil. After flying by the Patroclus-Menoetius binary in 2033, Lucy will continue cycling between the two Trojan clouds every six years.

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Scientists use magnetic defects to achieve electromagnetic wave breakthrough

Surfers spend much of their time watching long waves come onto the shoreline as they attempt to catch one right as it begins to curve and break.

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This shows how a plane electron wave and a magnetic charge interact, forming an electron vortex state that carries orbital angular momentum.

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Mars InSight Lander Seen in First Images from Space

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NASA's InSight spacecraft, its heat shield and its parachute were imaged on Dec. 6 and 11 by the HiRISE camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

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The feature size and functional range of molecular electronic devices: Monitoring the transition from tunneling leakage current to molecular tunneling

Advances of miniaturization in electronics have created dramatic impacts on the industrial innovations and our lives. Nowadays, the semiconductor industry has been devoted to scaling down the feature size of electronic devices to the scale of sub-5 nm. Moore's Law, however, has not been the only priority in semiconductor industry because of some inevitable quantum obstacles which hinder the further miniaturization and integration, such as the tunneling leakage current and the thermal dissipation. As a candidate of the supplementary support and even replacement for future electronic device, the bottom-up strategy to use single molecules as charge transport component can be promising, as the primary molecular elements for building single-molecule electronic components in electronic circuitry possess the intrinsic charge transport properties to overcome the tunneling leakage between the same scale of nanogap distance. Nevertheless, knowing the feature size of the domination of tunneling leakage in molecular electronics is of fundamental significance, which enhances the understanding of the technical limitations and boundaries for using single-molecule components as electronic devices.

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The tunneling leakage is a major quantum obstacle which hinders further miniaturization of electronic devices. To explore the miniaturization limits of molecular electronics, the oligo(aryleneethynylene) (OAE) molecules were employed to investigate the transition between through-space tunneling and molecular tunneling. For the shortest OAE molecule, the intrinsic single-molecule charge transport can be outstripped from tunneling leakage at 0.66 nm, suggesting the potential to push the miniaturization limit of molecular electronic devices to the angstrom scale.

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Quantum chemical calculations on quantum computers: A quantum algorithm capable of performing quantum circuits parallelism and full configuration interactions calculations in any open shell molecules without exponential/combinatorial explosion

Quantum computing and quantum information processing technology have attracted attention in recently emerging fields. Among many important and fundamental issues in nowadays science, solving Schroedinger Equation (SE) of atoms and molecules is one of the ultimate goals in chemistry, physics and their related fields. SE is "First Principle" of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, whose solutions termed wave-functions can afford any information of electrons within atoms and molecules, predicting their physicochemical properties and chemical reactions. Researchers from Osaka City University (OCU) in Japan, Dr. K. Sugisaki, Profs. K. Sato and T. Takui and coworkers have found a quantum algorithm enabling us to perform full configuration interaction (Full-CI) calculations for any open shell molecules without exponential/combinatorial explosion. Full-CI gives the exact numerical solutions of SE, which are one of the intractable problems with any supercomputers. The implementation of such a quantum algorithm contributes to the acceleration of implementing practical quantum computers.

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(a) (left) Previously proposed quantum circuit. (b) (right) New parallelized quantum circuit. In (b), the complexity of the circuit is reduced drastically.

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Harnessing the power of 'spin orbit' coupling in silicon: Scaling up quantum computation

Australian scientists have investigated new directions to scale up qubits - utilising the spin-orbit coupling of atom qubits - adding a new suite of tools to the armory.

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This is an artists impression of spin-orbit coupling of atom qubits.

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Milestone for bERLinPro: Photocathodes with high quantum efficiency

Teams from the accelerator physics and the SRF groups at HZB are developing a superconducting linear accelerator featuring energy recovery (Energy Recovery Linac) as part of the bERLinPro project. It accelerates an intense electron beam that can then be used for various applications - such as generating brilliant synchrotron radiation. After use, the electron bunches are directed back to the superconducting linear accelerator, where they release almost all their remaining energy. This energy is then available for accelerating new electron bunches.

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Photocathode after its production in the preparatory system.

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A Universe Aglow

MUSE spectrograph reveals that nearly the entire sky in the early Universe is glowing with Lyman-alpha emission

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Deep observations made with the MUSE spectrograph on ESO’s Very Large Telescope have uncovered vast cosmic reservoirs of atomic hydrogen surrounding distant galaxies. The exquisite sensitivity of MUSE allowed for direct observations of dim clouds of hydrogen glowing with Lyman-alpha emission in the early Universe — revealing that almost the whole night sky is invisibly aglow.

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A Galactic Gem

ESO’s FORS2 instrument captures stunning details of spiral galaxy NGC 3981

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FORS2, an instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, has observed the spiral galaxy NGC 3981 in all its glory. The image was captured as part of the ESO Cosmic Gems Programme, which makes use of the rare occasions when observing conditions are not suitable for gathering scientific data. Instead of sitting idle, the ESO Cosmic Gems Programme allows ESO’s telescopes to be used to capture visually stunning images of the southern skies.

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Stars v. Dust in the Carina Nebula

VISTA gazes into one of the largest nebulae in the Milky Way in infrared

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The Carina Nebula, one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the night sky, has been beautifully imaged by ESO’s VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. By observing in infrared light, VISTA has peered through the hot gas and dark dust enshrouding the nebula to show us myriad stars, both newborn and in their death throes.