This week, researchers reported on two-dimensional gold sheets, a tidy little meson made of four quarks (and its buddy!) and a big and almost unimaginably dense exoplanet with an exciting backstory.
researchers reported on two-dimensional gold sheets, a tidy little meson made of four quarks (and its buddy!) and a big and almost unimaginably dense exoplanet with an exciting backstory.
Gold malleable: Goldbeating, the ancient practice of pounding gold into delicate leaves, has applications in art, fancy, gilded desserts and disgusting cinnamon schnapps from Switzerland. None of these are « inexpensive » or « practical, » but when you have a precious metal as malleable as gold, you look around for a hammer and make up reasons later. Scientists at the University of Southern Florida have now pounded gold at the nanoscale—so thin that it can no longer reasonably contain all three dimensions. Specifically, their process entails transforming 0D and 1D gold nanoparticles into anisotropic 2D leaves of gold, and they say their achievement could advance the understanding of nanoscale metallic deformation and is applicable to other, perhaps less fancy, materials.
Tetraquark looked at: The Large Hadron Collider is a big hoop below the France-Switzerland border that smashes beams of protons or heavy ions together, scattering their subatomic constituents inside detectors, basically in order to reduce theoretical uncertainties related to understanding the strong force and develop new physics beyond the standard model. The good old LHCb experiment has produced the first observations of a charged tetraquark and its straight-faced, neutral partner.
