Related papers: Frontier at your fingertips
When magnets are fashioned into nanoscale elements, they exhibit a wide variety of phenomena replete with rich physics and the lure of tantalizing applications. In this topical review, we discuss some of these phenomena, especially those…
The current understanding of dark matter comes largely from measurements of the total matter content in the universe, from the distribution of gravitating matter on very large scales, and from rotation curves and velocity dispersions on…
It is argued that human consciousness is likely to have emerged during the self-consistent evolution of the physical universe, through the gradual accumulation of biological entities' ability to tap into the intrinsic non-deterministic…
Even the elusive neutrinos are trapped in matter, albeit transiently, in several astrophysical circumstances. Their interactions with the ambient matter not only reveal the properties of such exotic matter itself, but also shed light on the…
Newly discovered carbon nanotubes provide an environment in which small atoms move relatively freely. An assembly of such atoms provides a realization of a quasi-one dimensional system which is an ideal testing ground for concepts and…
We propose a general theoretical scheme for the investigation of light emitted from nano- and micrometric structures of arbitrary shape and composition. More specifically, the proposed fully three-dimensional approach allows to derive the…
Nanomagnets form the building blocks for a gamut of miniaturized energy-efficient devices including data storage, memory, wave-based computing, sensors and biomedical devices. They also offer a span of exotic phenomena and stern challenges.…
Dark matter in the universe seems to be one of the most important puzzles science has to face in this moment. In this essay we point out that dark matter could be a spin-0 fundamental interaction of Nature rather than a simple particle.…
Living systems are made of active materials with microscopic components that work together to perform macroscopic biological tasks. The breakdown of these collective functionalities leads to diseases, which, conversely, could be treated by…
A brief review is made of some of the experimental signatures that may be associated to a certain class of extensions of the standard model. The material of these lectures is divided into two sections. After briefly sketching the present…
We examine the ability of future facilities to discover and interpret non-supersymmetric new phenomena. We first explore explicit manifestations of new physics, including extended gauge sectors, leptoquarks, exotic fermions, and technicolor…
Quantum theory is incredibly successful, explaining the microscopic world with great accuracy, from the behaviour of subatomic particles to chemical reactions to solid-state electronics. There is not a single experimental finding…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
Hypothetical existence of other universes gives an opportunity not only to extend the scope of physics, but the scope of biology, SETI, and METI as well. Some steps of the development of alien life concept shall be briefly summarized, then…
Mutual Coulomb interactions between electrons lead to a plethora of interesting physical and chemical effects, especially if those interactions involve many fluctuating electrons over large spatial scales. Here, we identify and study in…
Flocks of animals represent a fascinating archetype of collective behavior in the macroscopic classical world, where the constituents, such as birds, concertedly perform motions and actions as if being one single entity. Here, we address…
Emergence (macro-level effects from micro-level causes) is at the heart of the conflict between reductionism and functionalism. How can there be autonomous higher level laws of nature (the functionalist claim) if everything can be reduced…
Life is a discrete, stochastic phenomena : for a biological organism, the time of the two most important events of its life (reproduction and death) is random and these events change the number of individuals of the species by single units.…
Precise manipulation of matter at the atomic or molecular level has provided the path for the nanotechnological revolution impacting diverse fields such as biology, medicine, material science, quantum technologies, and electronics. At the…
Coherence is a familiar concept in physics: It is the driving force behind wavelike phenomena such as the diffraction of light. Moreover, wave-particle duality implies that all quantum objects can exhibit coherence, and this quantum…