Latest Leptons Stories

Advanced Electron Beams (AEB), which enables the green factory of the future by making sustainability possible and profitable for manufacturers, and the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne today announced a collaboration in which the University will use AEB's electron beam technology for fundamental research on electron beam-induced chemistry and materials transformation. This research has a wide range of potential applications, including creating more environmentally friendly and...

Physicists working to disprove "Lorentz invariance" -- Einstein's prediction that matter and massless particles will behave the same no matter how they're turned or how fast they go -- won't get that satisfaction from muon neutrinos, at least for the time being, says a consortium of scientists.The test of Lorentz invariance, conducted by MINOS Experiment scientists and reported in the Oct. 10 issue of Physical Review Letters, started with a stream of muon neutrinos produced at...

Michigan Technological University physicist Ranjit Pati and his team have developed a model to explain the mechanism behind computing's elusive Holy Grail, the single molecular switch.If born out experimentally, his work could help explode Moore's Law and could revolutionize computing technology.Moore's Law predicts that the number of transistors that can be economically placed on an integrated circuit will double about every two years. But by 2020, Moore's Law is expected to hit a brick...

High-energy physicists devoted to recreating the conditions at the beginning of the universe have for the first time observed a new way to produce those basic particles of atoms, protons and neutrons.Confirming a decades-old prediction, the physicists with the CLEO collaboration say they observed a rare and extremely short-lived subatomic particle with the unusual name of "charmed-strange meson" decay into a proton and anti-neutron.Detection of the event, which the collaboration made public...

Now it is possible to see a movie of an electron. The movie shows how an electron rides on a light wave after just having been pulled away from an atom. This is the first time an electron has ever been filmed, and the results are presented in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters.Previously it has been impossible to photograph electrons since their extremely high velocities have produced blurry pictures. In order to capture these rapid events, extremely short flashes of light are...

Max Planck -- Dark matter could light up the first stars in the universe if the dark matter is made up of sterile neutrinos. According to a paper by Peter Biermann, (Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, Bonn) and Alexander Kusenko (University of California at Los Angeles), recently published in "Physical Review Letters", sterile neutrino decays speed up the formation of molecular hydrogen and light up the first stars as early as 20-100 million years after the Big Bang. The...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla.-- If subatomic particles had personalities, neutrinos would be the ultimate wallflowers. One of the most basic particles of matter in the universe, they've been around for 14 billion years and permeate every inch of space, but they're so inconceivably tiny that they've been called "almost nothing" and pass straight through things -- for example, the Earth -- without a bump. So it's easy to see why no one thought they existed until the 1930s, and why it wasn't until...

ATHENS, Ohio "” Molecular electronics is the ultimate miniaturization of electronics. In this area of research, scientists have been studying the movement of electrons through individual molecules in an effort to understand how they might control and use the process in new technologies. Computers and thousands of other devices could become vastly faster, smaller and more reliable than conventional transistor-based (wire-based) electronics.A team of Ohio University and Brazilian physicists...

BERKELEY, CA "“ Results from KamLAND, an underground neutrino detector in central Japan, show that anti-electron neutrinos emanating from the earth, so-called geoneutrinos, can be used as a unique window into the interior of our planet, revealing information that is hidden from other probes. "This is a significant scientific result," said Stuart Freedman, a nuclear physicist with a joint appointment at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California...

The journal Nature publishes this week a study of electronic dynamics ("Direct observation of electron dynamics in the attosecond domain"). The participants of this study, together with other researchers, have been professors Daniel Sánchez-Portal and Pedro Miguel Etxenike from the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC).A researcher group of various German laboratories has done the experimental part of the study, and the theoretical explanation based on quantum physics of what has...