Physics news

Turning drawbacks into new superpowers

Shiyu Wei is working on tiny pillars made from indium phosphide. With diameters less than one hundredth the diameter of human hair, these nanowires, as they are called, have remarkable...

3 March 2023

Building an artificial brain from rare vanadium oxide

A rare form of vanadium oxide could be the basis for a new generation of computers that mimic the human brain, researchers from the Electronic Materials Engineering (EME) department...

27 February 2023

Metasurface switching could create cheaper, thinner screens

A new generation of TVs could be built around pixels made of metasurfaces that can switch their transparency on and off thousands of times a second. As well as offering a fast refresh...

22 February 2023

Lift-off: new thruster system in orbit

At 2 am on the 2nd of January, technology developed at the Research School of Physics lifted off aboard a Spacex rocket and was placed in orbit. The Bogong naphthalene-based thruster...

31 January 2023

How robot eyes will surpass human ones

Robots and autonomous cars will have eyes that see much more than the human eye is capable of, a review of the growing field of meta-optics has found. Meta-optics is a new form of optical...

23 January 2023

Fictional issues tackling the real problems

Fiona McTavish found that no one was taking her scientific discovery seriously, so she decided to fix that by dressing as a man. Many frustrated female scientists must have considered...

18 January 2023

3D XRay vision reveals prehistoric predator's brunch

It's the chance of lifetime for Joshua White to study Eric the plesiosaur during his PhD in the Materials Physics Department. It's not just that Eric is nearly 100 million years old,...

3 January 2023

Self-powered nanosensors set to revolutionise healthcare and environmental monitoring

A new miniscule nitrogen dioxide sensor could help protect the environment from vehicle pollutants that cause lung disease and acid rain. The sensor is an array of nanowires, in a square...

23 December 2022

How a thousand tiny lasers could launch a dynamic hologram

Physicists have developed a new tiny laser that could be used by the thousand to make future dynamic 3D holograms. Unlike a 2D screen made up of coloured dots, each pixel in a hologram...

20 December 2022

ANU Physics sweeps AIP Annual Awards

Staff and students from the Research School of Physics have won four awards in the 2022 Australian Institute of Physics (AIP) annual awards, more than half of the seven awarded this...

14 December 2022

New measurements of nuclei throw a neutron amongst the pigeons

New measurements of the surface of atomic nuclei have thrown up a puzzle about how they behave. A set of reactions used to measure properties of neutrons in similar forms of carbon...

7 December 2022

ANU physicist shows Einstein the easy way to solve equation

It’s one of Einstein’s defining moments, when his new theory of general relativity solved a longstanding puzzle, a discrepancy in Mercury’s orbit compared with Newtonian...

2 December 2022

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