EPJ B - Towards high-temperature superconductors
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- Published on 10 August 2012
Scientists produce a new type of superconductor by manipulating graphene, the study of which led to a Nobel Prize
Chinese scientists have manipulated the charge and the degree of freedom, known as spin, of electrons and their associated magnetic properties in a single-layer carbon material called graphene, making it suitable for applications involving superconductivity, a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which electrons travel in a material with no electrical resistance. These findings have recently been published in an article in EPJB by Chunxu Bai from Anyang Normal University and colleagues from the Henan Institute of Science and Technology in Xinxiang.
EPJ B - Random noise helps make signals clearer
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- Published on 10 August 2012
Model shows that signal clarity only improves if specific energy conditions are met
Scientists have shown the energy conditions, under which a weak signal supplied to a physical system emerges as a stronger signal at the output thanks to the presence of random noise (a process known as stochastic resonance), in a paper that has just been published in EPJB.
EPJ B - No extraordinary effects from microwave and mobile phone heating
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- Published on 10 August 2012
Study quantifies effects of electric field-induced versus conventional heating
The effect of microwave heating and cell phone radiation on sample material is no different than a temperature increase, according to scientists from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Arizona State University, in Tempe, as published in a recent issue of EPJ B.
EPJ B - Can metals remember their shape at nanoscale, too?
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- Published on 10 August 2012
How nickel-titanium nanometric-size particles change back to their memorised shape
University of Constance physicists Daniel Mutter and Peter Nielaba have visualised changes in shape memory materials down to the nanometric scale in an article published in EPJB.EPJ B – Online activity grows in a similar pattern to those of real-life networks
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- Published on 24 August 2011
The activity of online communities does not grow in line with the number of users, according to a model recently published in the European Physical Journal B.
The Internet has given rise to its own sorting devices. Among these, tagging consists in assigning user-chosen keywords to a piece of information (such as a digital image) to facilitate searches. Lingfei Wu, a researcher at the City University of Hong Kong’s Department of Media and Communication, used the tagging behaviour of social media application users to study the growth of online communities’ activity.EPJ B - Atomistic details over longer time scales
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- Published on 22 August 2011
The conventional method for atomistic simulation, namely molecular dynamics (MD), is not well suited to resolve slow dynamical processes, that is processes associated with a system that gets trapped from time to time in deep local energy minima.
In a Colloquium paper in the European Physical Journal B, A. Kushima, J. Eapen, Ju Li, S. Yip and T. Zhu review the capabilities of biased molecular simulation methods such as metadynamics, autonomous basin climbing (ABC), strain-boost and adaptive boost simulations – methods designed to probe at the atomic level mechanisms that drive system-level behavior observable on macroscopic time scales.
EPJ B - Disordered networks synchronise faster than small world networks
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- Published on 22 August 2011
A study recently published in European Physical Journal B presents observations of how complex systems synchronise over time.
Synchronisation occurs when individual elements in a complex network behave in line with each other. This applies to real-life examples such as the way neurons fire during an epileptic seizure or the phenomenon of crickets falling into step with one another.
EPJ B welcomes a new Editor-in-Chief for its complex systems section
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- Published on 06 July 2011
The publishers of The European Physical Journal B - Condensed Matter and Complex Systems are pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Peter Hänggi as a new Editor-in-Chief, who will specifically contribute to the further development of the physics of complex systems section of the journal.
EPJ B - Deciphering complex games
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- Published on 15 June 2011
Game theory has changed our way of thinking about socio-economic interaction, shedding light on the consequences of leaving individuals take their choices for the sake of their self-interest. As exemplified by the prisoner's dilemma, the prediction of this approach can be quite far from what welfare optimization would predict.
EPJ B – Round-up on the conductivity of carbon nanomaterials
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- Published on 11 May 2011
A new Colloquium article by I. Deretzis and A. La Magna published in EPJB reviews the possibilities offered by all-carbon electronics as well as elucidating drawbacks in view of future applications.
