News
EPJ E - What makes tires grip the road on a rainy day?
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- Published on 10 August 2012
Scientists examine the flow of liquid at the contact between randomly rough surfaces
A team of scientists from Italy and Germany has recently developed a model to predict the friction occurring when a rough surface in wet conditions (such as a road on a rainy day) is in sliding contact with a rubber material (such as a car tire tread block) in an article that has just been published in EPJE.EPJ A - The Similarity Renormalization Group for Three-Body Interactions in One Dimension
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- Published on 10 August 2012
One important message that has emerged from developments of effective field theories and effective Hamiltonians for nuclear physics is that many-body forces are inevitable whenever degrees of freedom are eliminated. At the same time, first-principles calculations have shown that two-body forces alone are not able to give an accurate account of the energies of light nuclei and the saturation of nuclear matter. Three- (and possibly more-) body forces are thus essential in low-energy nuclear physics.
EPJ C - No sign of supersymmetry
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- Published on 10 August 2012
Most stringent limits ever set by ATLAS
"Supersymmetry - to be or not to be?" remains a still unanswered question - it is a traditionally difficult business to demonstrate a zero result in experimental physics - yet the ATLAS collaboration has just set new and very stringent limitations on the "viability space" of a class of new physics models incorporating gauge-mediated supersymmetry breaking.
EPJ D - Quantum teleportation analysed by mathematical separation tool
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- Published on 15 September 2011
Scientists from the University of Vienna’s Faculty of Physics in Austria recently gave a theoretical description of teleportation phenomena in sub-atomic scale physical systems, in a publication in the European Physical Journal D.
For the first time, the Austrian team proved that mathematical tools give us the freedom to choose how to separate out the constituting matter of a complex physical system by selectively analysing its so-called quantum state. That is the state in which the system is found when performing measurement, which can either be entangled or not.
EPJ E - New complex offers potentially safer alternative for gene therapy delivery
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- Published on 02 September 2011
Spontaneous ordering of DNA fragments in a special matrix holds the key to creating non-toxic gene therapy delivery vectors, according to a study recently published in the European Physical Journal E.
Scientists from the CNRS Paul Pascal Research Centre, an institute of the University of Bordeaux, France, and colleagues from the Institute of Physics at the University of Sao Paolo, have created a complex system designed to hold DNA fragments in solution between the hydrophilic layers of a matrix of fatty substances (also known as lipids) combined with a surfactant (used to soften the layers’ rigidity). One possible application that has yet to be tested is gene therapy.EPJ Plus - The twin paradox in a cosmological context
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- Published on 26 August 2011
The twin paradox has been a source of debate since it was discovered by Einstein. It can be analytically verified assuming the existence of global nonrotating inertial frames.
The natural nonrotating frame and its identification with "fixed stars" is an aspect of Mach's Principle, which holds that the totality of matter in the universe determines the inertial frames.EPJ Plus - Discovering Technicolor
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- Published on 24 August 2011
At present there are no known elementary scalar fields. A possible candidate is the as yet undiscovered Higgs particle; however it could well be that this elusive particle is instead composite. This possibility is exhaustively examined in this article, which is both tutorial and extensive review, classifying the diverse technicolor models as extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics.
EPJ B – Online activity grows in a similar pattern to those of real-life networks
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- Published on 24 August 2011
The activity of online communities does not grow in line with the number of users, according to a model recently published in the European Physical Journal B.
The Internet has given rise to its own sorting devices. Among these, tagging consists in assigning user-chosen keywords to a piece of information (such as a digital image) to facilitate searches. Lingfei Wu, a researcher at the City University of Hong Kong’s Department of Media and Communication, used the tagging behaviour of social media application users to study the growth of online communities’ activity.EPJ E - Embryo development obeys the laws of hydrodynamics
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- Published on 22 August 2011
The law of hydrodynamics can contribute to our understanding of how a cluster of embryonic cells can transform into an animal within the first 36 hours of development, according to research recently published in European Physical Journal E.
Vincent Fleury, a researcher at the Paris Diderot University, studied the early stage of development when embryonic cells first form a flat sheet of cells before folding into a U-shape, resembling a folded pancake. He demonstrated that the formation of a chicken’s head is a consequence of the collision between both sides of the embryo flowing at constant speed towards each other.
EPJ B - Atomistic details over longer time scales
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- Published on 22 August 2011
The conventional method for atomistic simulation, namely molecular dynamics (MD), is not well suited to resolve slow dynamical processes, that is processes associated with a system that gets trapped from time to time in deep local energy minima.
In a Colloquium paper in the European Physical Journal B, A. Kushima, J. Eapen, Ju Li, S. Yip and T. Zhu review the capabilities of biased molecular simulation methods such as metadynamics, autonomous basin climbing (ABC), strain-boost and adaptive boost simulations – methods designed to probe at the atomic level mechanisms that drive system-level behavior observable on macroscopic time scales.
