Star Storm, an explosive performance inspired by stellar processes in the Universe, will be premiered at the 2017 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, on 10 September.
The Eagle Nebula and the Swan Nebula span this broad starscape, a telescopic view toward the Sagittarius spiral arm and the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The Eagle, also known as M16, is at top and M17, the Swan, at bottom of the frame showing the cosmic clouds as brighter regions of active star-formation. They lie along the spiral arm suffused with reddish emission charactistic of atomic hydrogen gas, and dusty dark nebulae. M17, also called the Omega Nebula, is about 5500 light-years away, while M16 is some 6500 light-years distant. The center of both nebulae are locations of well-known close-up images of star formation from the Hubble Space Telescope. In this mosaic image that extends about 3 degrees across the sky, narrowband, high-resultion image data has been used to enhance the central regions of the Eagle and Swan. The extended wings of the Eagle Nebula spread almost 120 light-years. The Swan is over 30 light-years across.
During a total solar eclipse, the Sun's extensive outer atmosphere, or corona, is an inspirational sight. Streamers and shimmering features visible to the eye span a brightness range of over 10,000 to 1, making them notoriously difficult to capture in a single photograph. But this composite of telescopic images covers a wide range of exposure times to reveal the crown of the Sun in all its glory. The aligned and stacked digital frames were taken in clear skies above Stanley, Idaho in the Sawtooth Mountains during the Sun's total eclipse on August 21. A pinkish solar prominence extends just beyond the right edge of the solar disk. Even small details on the dark night side of the New Moon can be made out, illuminated by sunlight reflected from a Full Earth.
Researchers have probed the electron spin g factor in graphene and discovered that, surprisingly, this factor is insensitive to external effects such as charge carrier type, density and mobility. The g factor is an important parameter that defines spin properties of electrons in a material, with fundamental implications in spintronic applications.
Their findings published in Physical Review Letters, the scientific team from the University of Hamburg, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Graphenea used electron spin resonance (ESR) to detect spin flips in monolayer graphene, while operating the device in a field-effect transistor configuration for charge carrier type, density, and mobility tuning. The finding that g is constant at a value of 1.95 regardless of external tuning surprised the researchers, as it indicates that the coupling of spin to the orbital degree of freedom of the electrons in graphene is intrinsic. This finding will have to be taken into account when designing any graphene-based spin-logic device, because the g factor affects all spin behaviour, such as spin lifetime.
Image: The graphene g-factor is constant against changing external factors, such as carrier density. Copyright APS, Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 066802 (2017).
Spintronics is an emerging technology that, as opposed to electronics on which all our devices rely, manipulates electron spin instead of shuttling charged carriers across devices. Electron spin can have two states, “up” and “down”, analogous to the “0” and “1” bit in digital electronics. Manipulation of spin instead of (or in addition to) charge has several advantages over conventional electronics. Less energy is needed to change spin than to generate a current, thus spintronic devices will last longer and generate less heat than electronic devices. Spin states can be set quickly, allowing faster computing, and the state stays fixed, yielding a long-term memory device. In fact, spin-based memory is already being used in modern magnetic hard drives.
Graphene is an ideal material for spintronics. It has small spin-orbit coupling, weak hyperfine coupling and high mobility keeping the electron spins coherent over microns, enough to build spintronic devices and platforms. Earlier this year researchers demonstrated a room-temperature spin transistor from graphene. Other spin-logic devices will include rewritable microchips, transistors, logic gates, magnetic sensors and semiconductor nanoparticles for quantum computing.
While ground-based observers experienced the awe-inspiring view of a total solar eclipse yesterday, astronauts aboard the International Space Station, and our Sun-watching satellites, enjoyed unique perspectives of this spectacular sight from space.
