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Skip to main content brought to you by the American Physical Society Subscribe Subscribe to this blog Subscribe Search Search This Blog Posts Two Eruptions, Both Alike in Dignity April 16, 2021 By Allison Kubo Hutchison Left: Glowing basaltic eruption in Iceland taken at night (image: Áslaug Arna Sigurbjörnsdóttir / twitter). Right: Grey ash clouds rise into the atmosphere over St. Vincent (image: University of West Indies Seismic Research Center / twitter). In Iceland, where we lay our scene, lava spills orange and black tendrils from three fissures in Geldingadalir. Meanwhile across the globe in St. Vincent ash rises into the sky in a large plume from the La Soufrière volcano. Both eruptions were preceded by numerous earthquakes which warned volcanologists that magma was coming toward the surface. However, these two eruptions have very different behaviors and thus very different hazards (though both do have hazards). On St. Vincent 16,000 people have been evacuated from their homes meanwhile hundreds gather to watch the fissures in Iceland. The eruption at St. Vincent is what volcanologists call explosive behavior. The ash plume rising 20,000 feet high is produced Share Get link Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Other Apps Post a Comment Read more Recent posts Physicists Announce First Results of Fermilab Muon g-2 Experiment April 15, 2021 By Hannah Pell On 7 April 2021, physicists at Fermi National Laboratory announced the first results of their Muon g-2 (“g minus 2”) experiment, which have hinted that muons may behave in a way not predicted by the Standard Model, a self-consistent yet incomplete theory of fundamental particles and their interactions. You can picture a muon like a tiny, spinning top; they act as if they have an internal magnet, twirling around in response to an applied magnetic field. The strength of a muon's internal magnet is known as the “ g-factor ,” a dimensionless quantity characterizing the magnetic moment and angular momentum of a particle. The experiment is named “g minus 2” because both the theoretical value and new experimental average of the muon magnetic moment are slightly greater than 2. However, they are not equivalent; although the difference between them is incredibly small, it has been observed to be anomalous . Image Credit: Reidar Hahn/Fermilab. The Muon g-2 experiment Share Get link Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Other Apps Post a Comment Read more A Brief History of LaTeX April 14, 2021 \documentclass[10pt]{article} \usepackage{geometry} \usepackage{hyperref} \usepackage{braket} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{esint} \usepackage{tikz-feynman} \geometry{a4paper} \title{A Brief History of \LaTeX} \author{By: Hannah Pell} \date{} \begin{document} \maketitle {\it{START HERE: This post was written according to \LaTeX -style typesetting. I encourage you to copy and paste this text exactly as it appears into \href{www.overleaf.com}{Overleaf} and click `Recompile' or by downloading TeXShop to see what the document printout looks like.}}\\ Have you ever browsed physics preprints on the \href{www.arXiv.org}{arXiv}, and noticed that many of the documents have a similar appearance? Obviously the {\it{content}} differs, but the font, style, and general formatting of many preprints seem nearly uniform when you take a closer look. Why is this? The answer can be found with a document preparation program called LaTeX (usually pronounced ``lay-tekh"). L Share Get link Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Other Apps Post a Comment Read more What a Cold War Mission Reveals about Climate Change Today April 09, 2021 By Allison Kubo New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that in the last 1.1 Ma the Greenland Ice sheet melted at least once and reformed. The team found fossilized plants buried under 1 million years of snow based on the Camp Century Ice Core. The long core samples the layers of snow in the Greenland Ice Sheet. Silvan Leinss , Radar reflector installation Greenland , CC BY-SA 4.0 The deeper the core the older the ice is and at its deepest point the Greenland Ice Sheet measures approximately 1.9 miles. Finding dirt and plant material in the core under layers of ice indicates it was once covered with plants and maybe even trees. The researchers used cosmogenic isotopes , atoms that are only formed when radiation from space and the sun interact with dirt, to show that it melted at least once within the last 1 million years. Although it may seem like a long time, 1 million years is an eyeblink to geologists. This research indicates that Share Get link Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Other Apps Post a Comment Read more The Winding Road to Net Zero Leads Offshore April 07, 2021 By: Hannah Pell On 29 March 2021, the Biden administration announced another ambitious clean energy goal: deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. According to the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the U.S. offshore wind capacity was 28,521 megawatts (or 28.5 gigawatts) in 2019. Deploying an additional 30 gigawatts over a decade would more than double the current U.S. offshore wind energy generation capability. How much power is 30 GW? It could be enough to power 10 million homes for a full year, offsetting 78 million metric tons of CO2 emissions ( equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions from 16,851,398 cars driven over a year and CO2 emissions from more than 8.7 billion gallons of gasoline consumed or 20 coal-fired power plants over the course of a year). So how does energy generation from offshore wind work, and how is it different from land-based wind? What role does offshore wind play in our national energy portfolio? And what are the particular Share Get link Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Other Apps Post a Comment Read more Women Supporting Women in Science April 03, 2021 By Jill Kathleen Wenderott Women Supporting Women in the Sciences (WS2) , an international organization unifying and supporting graduate and professional-level women and allies in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), has recently been awarded an American Physical Society (APS) Innovation Fund to form international teams that will design and distribute low-cost physics and materials science lab kits to 5000 elementary and secondary school students, predominantly in eastern Africa. These teams will work with WS2 Partners in eastern Africa who wish to participate in outreach delivering and teaching these science lab kits to their local communities. The origin of WS2 can be traced to an intensive two-week-long live-in program of the Joint Undertaking for an African Materials Institute (JUAMI) held in Arusha, Tanzania (TZ), in 2016. JUAMI was co-founded by Sossina Haile, African Academy of Sciences Fellow and the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science Share Get link Facebook Twitter Pinterest Email Other Apps Post a Comment Read more Are Diamonds Really Forever? Quantum Mechanics says yes April 02, 2021 By Allison Kubo Hutchison Synthetic diamond created using vapour deposition process. Steve Jurvetson , Apollo synthetic diamond , CC BY 2.0 In late 1940, the Debeers Diamond company started using the slogan “Diamonds are forever” to popularize diamond engagement rings. What they didn’t know is that in terms of quantum mechanics that might be true. Diamonds are formed of pure carbon with the atoms arranged tetrahedrally in a strong, rigid crystal structure. They are the hardest known material meaning that they have a hardness of 70-150 GPa in the Vickers Hardness test . This hardness is inherited from its strong crystal structure and is exactly what makes diamond forever. Green indicates carbon atoms within a diamond crystal structure. When a nitrogen a vacancy can form, basically an empty hole in the crystal. NIST, Nitrogen-vacancy center , marked as public domain. All materials have specific quantum states which are extremely fragile. They must be isolated from everything to be m S...