News
EPJ Plus Focus Point on New Technologies for Detection, Protection, Decontamination and Developments of the Decision Support Systems in Case of CBRNe Events
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- Published on 07 November 2022
Guest Editors: Andrea Malizia, Parag Chatterjee, Marco D’Arienzo
The global crisis related to the reduction of energy fossil resources, the reduction of potable water resources and the war for the control of energy sources are part of the causes which can lead to an intentional CBRNe (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and explosive) event. These kinds of events could also be the consequence of an intentional or unintentional release of substances (i.e., an accident of a truck containing a toxic industrial chemical), or of natural events like a tsunami or an earthquake. Especially in today’s global scenario, a sharp rise in the potential risks puts seminal importance on the development of new solutions to prevent such events, handle the emergency situations and restore normalcy.
This special issue highlights some innovative and novel solutions to several CBRNe emergencies scenarios. All articles are available here and are freely accessible until 7 January 2023. For further information, read the Editorial
EPJ H Highlight - Legacy of a molecular dynamics trailblazer
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- Published on 04 November 2022
Computer simulations meet biochemistry
Life is motion. And so, to understand how living organisms function, one must understand the movement and reorganisation of the atoms and molecules that compose them. The approach called “molecular dynamics simulation” enables scientists to use computer programmes to simulate the dynamic motion of all the atoms in a molecular system as a function of time.
In a new paper in EPJ H: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Physics, Daniele Macuglia from Peking University in Beijing, China, Benoît Roux from the University of Chicago, USA, and Giovanni Ciccotti from the University of Rome, Italy, explain how the theoretical chemist Martin Karplus and his team carried out the first molecular dynamics simulation of a large biological molecule, a protein, deeply impacting biology and the physical sciences in the 20th and 21st centuries. Currently, machine learning researchers are using biomolecular simulations to better understand their time-dependent motions and the function that governs the forces between them.
EPJ C Highlight: Exploring the duality of gravity and gauge theory
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- Published on 03 November 2022
This EPJ C Topical Collection presents a series of reviews showcasing the latest developments and applications of gauge/gravity duality, and aims at dissemination to a wider physics community in a way that enables building upon these concepts.
The gauge/gravity duality states that gravity and quantum spacetime emerges, i.e. can be reconstructed from a quantum gauge theory living at the boundary. Over the past 25 years, this duality, with concrete instances uncovered by string theory, has revolutionised our understanding of systems ranging from black holes, to matter made up of strongly interacting quantum particles featuring intricate webs of entanglement. In this Topical Collection, the journal EPJ C presents a collection of articles reviewing the latest advances in the fundamental understanding of this duality and its groundbreaking applications.
EPJA Topical Collection: The QCD Phase Diagram in Strong Magnetic Fields
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- Published on 03 November 2022
Guest Editors: Pedro Costa, Débora Peres Menezes, Vladimir Skokov and Carsten Urbach
Read all articles of this topical collection for free until 2nd January 2023!
In recent years, the impact of strong magnetic fields on the strongly interacting matter phase diagram has been a very active field of research with important developments. The presence of these strong magnetic fields modifies the dynamics of quarks, gluons and hadrons and is expected to have an enormous influence over all regions of the phase diagram: from the first stages of the Universe to the physics of neutron stars and the quark gluon plasma.
EPJ Web of Conferences Highlight – 10th EPS-QEOD Europhoton Conference on Solid-State, Fibre, and Waveguide Coherent Light Sources
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- Published on 26 October 2022
The 10th EPS-QEOD Europhoton conference took place in Hannover, from August 28th to September 2nd, 2022. Host was the Leibniz University and the Cluster of Excellence PhoenixD. The Volkswagen Foundation generously sponsored the event.
With great pleasure, the European laser and optics community came together again in one place after the long pandemic downtime and enjoyed the interaction in the beautiful Herrenhausen Palace. The meeting was intentionally not planned as a hybrid conference, and in fact, all 80 presentations took place on-site.
EPJ Web of Conferences Highlight – Multi-line Diagnostics of the Interstellar Medium
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- Published on 26 October 2022
The IRAM conference “Multi-line Diagnostics of the Interstellar Medium” took place in Nice (France), from April 4-6, 2022.
Different aspects of the millimeter and submillimeter astronomy were tackled, from the chemical complexity of the interstellar medium in the local and early Universe, to the environment of stars in the earliest stages of formation but also the physical and chemical evolution of galaxies over cosmic time.
EPJ D Topical Issue on Quantum Aspects of Attoscience
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- Published on 24 October 2022
This collection of articles contains contributions arising from the virtual conference Quantum Battles in Attoscience. The conference attracted more than 300 attendees from 34 different countries, and has spawned a successful series of bimonthly, online seminars – the so called 'AttoFridays'.
The aim of this novel workshop format was to support constructive debate about areas of controversy in attosecond science, and the centrepiece of the conference program were the Quantum Battles - an interactive, structured debate between early career researchers from competing groups in each field. These three battles – on tunnelling, interference and imaging in intense laser fields, and analytical vs ab initio theoretical approaches – have been written up as articles for this collection and each serves as an in-depth review of the topics, and the controversies therein. Alongside these are several articles on the quantum aspects of attosecond science including decoherence and entanglement in strong or tailored fields and ultrafast dynamics in novel materials. The collection is thus unusual in that it spans fundamental atomic and quantum physics all the way up to quantum technologies.
EPJ Web of Conferences Highlight – EOSAM 2022: EOS Annual Meeting
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- Published on 20 October 2022
EOS Annual Meeting EOSAM brought together photonics experts. The European Optical Society Annual Meeting, EOSAM, took place onsite in Porto from 12th to 16th September 2022.
EOSAM is a major international scientific conference covering all aspects of optics and photonics. It is attended by top researchers, key leaders, students, and industry experts.
As an integral conference in the field in Europe, EOSAM has always provided a valuable opportunity for presenting and discussing work, stimulating contact between colleagues, from young researchers to seasoned experts. EOSAM is where research meets industry and education.
EPJ Plus Highlight - Assessing the environmental impact of future ‘Higgs factories’
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- Published on 20 October 2022
New research looks at planned particle accelerators that will follow the retirement of the Large Hadron Collider— the world’s most powerful particle accelerator
In 2012 CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) revolutionised particle physics when it was announced that the Higgs boson had been created and detected by the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
Yet, the work of the LHC isn’t done. It is currently in its third run and being prepared for a high luminosity upgrade that will lead to more collisions and thus the creation of more Higgs particles. But eventually the accelerator will need to be retired and replaced.
The comparisons of power consumptions or luminosity delivered for a given power for future Higgs-producing colliders have been widely considered, but a new paper in EPJ Plus by CERN researcher Patrick Janot and the University of Geneva’s Alain Blondel considers the environmental impact of future ‘Higgs factories’ that could replace the LHC.
EPJ C Topical Issue on New frontiers in holographic duality: From quantum complexity and black holes to hydrodynamics and neutron stars
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- Published on 20 October 2022
Guest Editor: Ayan Mukhopadhyay
Over the last 25 years, holographic duality has revolutionised our understanding of gauge theories, quantum many-body systems and also quantum black holes. This topical issue is a collection of review articles on recent advances in fundamentals of holographic duality and its applications with special focus on a few areas where it is inter-disciplinary to a large measure. The aim is to provide a sufficient background on relevant phenomenology and other theoretical areas such as quantum information theory to researchers whose primary expertise is in quantum fields, strings and gravity, and also the necessary concepts and methods of holography to researchers in other fields, so that these recent developments could be grasped and hopefully further developed by a wider community.
