An experiment proposed by Stanford theorists finds evidence for the Majorana fermion, a particle that’s its own antiparticle.
Research Highlights
The newly found 'protoplanet' is 450 light years away, but observing how it collects matter and grows could answer some of the biggest questions concerning how our solar system formed.
A new interdisciplinary research program from NASA brings together a team of scientists, including Stanford's Bruce Macintosh, to devise new technologies and techniques for detecting life on exoplanets.
Stanford Report, January 14, 2015 Though scientists do not completely understand what triggers solar flares, Stanford solar physicists Monica Bobra and Sebastien Couvidat have automated the analysis of those gigantic explosions. The method could someday provide advance warning to protect power grids and communication satellites.
“Our simulations indicate that this approach – using natural vibrations in one material to boost superconductivity in another – could be used to raise the operating temperature of iron-based superconductors by at least 50 percent,” said Zhi-Xun Shen, a professor at SLAC and Stanford University and senior author of the study.
The detection of gravitational waves by the BICEP2 experiment at the South Pole supports the cosmic inflation theory of how the universe came to be. The discovery, made in part by Assistant Professor Chao-Lin Kuo, supports the theoretical work of Stanford's Andrei Linde.
Stanford physicists played a key role in monitoring and analyzing the brightest gamma ray burst ever measured, and suggest that its never-before-seen features could call for a rewrite of current theories.
Physics Today article (June 2012) features new results building on earlier work by Xiao‐Liang Qi and Shou‐Cheng Zhang (January 2010).
The first EXO 200 results on two - neutrino double - beta decay were featured in this Synopsis in Physical Review Letters."This represents the slowest Standard Model process ever measured," said Giorgio Gratta, Stanford University physicist and member of the joint SLAC-Stanford Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, who leads the team.Since then, the experiment also published their first limit on neutrinoless double-beta decay, the ultimate target of the experiment; this result was also featured in a Synopsis in Physical Review Letters.
Benjamin Lev's research group is the first to produce a Fermi sea of interacting dipolar atoms, featured in the APS Viewpoint editorial as having achieved a long-pursued goal.
Stanford Report news story: Physics faculty member Hari Manoharan's research group created the first-ever system of "designer electrons" – exotic variants of ordinary electrons with tunable properties that may ultimately lead to new types of materials and devices.
