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Tuesday, October 29, 2019

A Potential Wormhole Detection Method

 
Credit: Shutterstock

Wormholes have been ubiquitous in science fiction for a long time. The prospect of a portal which transports you across the universe is too good to pass up. Surprisingly, wormholes are now a physical possibility. Wormholes agree with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which means their existence is permitted by the laws of physics. However, just because they can exist, doesn’t mean they do exist, since a positive detection of wormholes has never been made. Recently, physicists De-Chang Dai and Dejan Stojkovic published a paper outlining what a possible wormhole detection could look like, and how to look for them.

An important thing to note is that wormholes are two-directional. Theoretically, if objects can travel from point A to point B using the wormhole, then they can also travel from point B back to point A. This paper rests on the fact that if matter can be exchanged in this manner across a wormhole, then forces must also behave in the same way. For example, if a negative charge is on side A of a wormhole, and a positive charge is on side B of a wormhole, then the two charges experience an attraction to one another, due to the electromagnetic force transmitted across the wormhole. To an observer unaware of the wormhole on side A, this behaviour would look very strange, as it would appear that the negatively charged particle is experiencing a force from nowhere.

The authors propose that a similar method could be used to detect wormholes candidates. Rather than charged particles, however, the paper suggests using stars as wormhole detectors. One popular idea is that black holes themselves may harbour wormholes. Suppose we want to determine whether the black hole in the centre of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, contains a wormhole. The paper suggests observing the orbits of stars around Sagittarius A* and looking for any unexplained deviations. Such deviations may suggest that the stars are experiencing gravitational attraction to massive objects, like other stars, on the other side of the wormhole.

Unfortunately, there is a catch. Unexpected deviations in the stars’ orbits may be caused be the black hole containing a wormhole, but this is not the only potential cause. There exist many other explanations that do not include wormholes which can explain the perturbation of a star’s orbit around a black hole, such as other stars which may be obscured from view. Consequently, although this paper proposes an exciting prospect, it is by no means a definitive detection method.

Read the original research paper here: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.100.083513

Sunday, October 27, 2019

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics

 
Credit: Nobel Institute

On October 8, the 2019 Nobel Prizes in Physics were announced. This year, there were three recipients: Swiss astrophysicists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, and Canadian physicist James Peebles. Peebles will receive one half of the associated monetary prize, and Mayor and Queloz will split the other half.

Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz are being recognized for one of the most revolutionary discoveries in modern astronomy: the detection of the first exoplanet orbiting a main sequence star. The planet 51 Pegasi b, also known as Dimidium, was discovered in 1995 around the star 51 Pegasi 47.9 lightyears from Earth using the radial velocity method. It had a mass of around 146 Earth masses and orbited its host star in 4.23 days. This discovery proved to the scientific community and the world at large that planets exist beyond the solar system. Since then, exoplanetary astronomy has experienced a massive boom in research, resulting in over 4,000 known exoplanets.

51 Pegasi b is a significant discovery not just because it demonstrated that exoplanets exist, but because it showed astronomers that exoplanetary systems will vary greatly from our own. 51 Pegasi b is the only planet in its system, and it is a Jupiter-sized planet that orbits its star very closely. Comparing this to our own eight-planet system, where the closest gas giant to the Sun takes 12 years to orbit the Sun, this system is in stark contrast to our own. 51 Pegasi b is the original “hot Jupiter”, a class of planet that further research has shown is one of the most common types of exoplanet. This discovery paved the way for the exoplanetary astronomy of today, which will hopefully culminate in the discovery of truly habitable worlds, and perhaps extraterrestrial life, sometime in the future.

James Peebles is being recognized for his ground-breaking contributions to theoretical studies in physical cosmology. Once, physical cosmology was not considered a serious or rigorous branch of physics. However, thanks to the work of physicists such as Peebles, it is now our best tool for understanding how the origins and eventual fate of the universe. He has been previously recognized by the Shaw Prize, whose citation for Peebles stated that he transformed “a highly speculative field into a precision science."

Peebles made significant contributions to the Big Bang model, our current theory which describes the origin of the universe. He also predicted several ways in which the Big Bang model could be experimentally supported, such as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). He made further significant contributions to big bang nucleosynthesis, models of the formation of large-scale structure in the universe, and the ever-mysterious dark matter and dark energy. The significance of Peebles’ career cannot be understated, as thanks to his work, we have an exceptional understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe. Studies in physical cosmology will ideally lead to, sometime in the future, a complete understanding of dark matter and dark energy; this would be a grand triumph in our quest to understand reality.

Monday, September 16, 2019

Physicists Discover a New Phase of Matter

 

The three most common states of matter (solid, liquid, and gas) have been known to humans for as long as we have been able to observe them. Then, as science began to progress, we began discovering new states of matter that are infrequently, or even never, observed in nature. These include common states such as plasma, and much more exotic states such as Bose-Einstein condensates and superconductors. This list of exotic states continues to grow, with its most recent addition being topological superconductivity.

Although the quest for new, more exotic states of matter may seem like nothing more than an investigation into how strange nature can be, topological superconductivity has important implications for our future. In their paper, Mayer et al. report that this new state could increase storage in electronic devices, and more importantly, improve quantum computing.

Quantum computers are of such interest because they can perform calculations far faster than the computers of today. Currently, computers operate fundamentally on digital bits, which consist of binary inputs 0 or 1, to execute commands, complete tasks, and run calculations. However, quantum computers operate instead on qubits, quantum systems which are capable of taking on any value between 0 and 1, significantly decreasing calculation time.

The study focused on what are known as Majorana fermions, which are of particular interest to quantum information researchers because they can store quantum information in such a way that it is shielded from any environmental interference. However, there was no known substance that could successfully contain these particles for actual use, until the recent discovery of topological superconductivity.

Due to its ability to host Majorana fermions, topological superconductivity shows promise for fault-tolerant quantum computing. This would allow qubits to store information while providing that state the ability to be manipulated without causing error. The information encoded by each qubit can now be protected from errors that arise either from interactions with the surrounding environment, or from interactions within the computer. This discovery will have important implications for our future, as the age of quantum computing will soon be upon us.

Read the research paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.01179.pdf

Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Physicists Detect the Decay of a Xenon-124 Nucleus

 

When it comes to cosmic timescales, the human mind is often incapable of grasping their sheer enormity. So when a group of scientists announce they have observed an event which on should take on average over one trillion times the current age of the universe to occur, there are serious implications for physics.

The team of physicists working on the XENON collaboration have detected the decay of an atomic nucleus of Xenon-124. This detection is significant because the isotope in question has a half-life of 1.8x1022 years, which is 1.3x1012 times longer than the current age of the universe, making it the longest process to be directly observed. For perspective, if the present age of the universe was scaled down to one second, the half-life of Xenon-124 would be 41,360 years.

Interestingly, the XENON collaboration is not a team searching for rare radioactive decay processes. The primary goal of XENON is the detection of the most common substance in the universe: dark matter. The observation made used the XENON1T dark matter detector, a tank of 3,200 kilograms of super-cooled xenon located 1,400 metres below the Gran Sasso massif in Italy.

Hidden deep underground, this tank of xenon is effectively shielded from cosmic rays, so the only thing capable of disrupting the xenon atoms is a chance collision with dark matter particles, which can then be detected from the resulting shower of particles. Based on these results, however, the XENON1T detector is also capable of detecting the radioactive decay of Xenon-124, which has a different particle signature than a dark matter collision.

From technology designed to detect something seemingly common, science has instead found something unimaginably rare.


Read the official press release and research paper here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1124-4#ref-CR1
http://www.xenon1t.org/

Friday, September 21, 2018

New Uncertainy Relation Discovered For Temperature at the Quantum Scale

 

 According to a new study released by the University of Exeter, a new uncertainty relation linking the precision at which temperatures can be measured has been discovered.
  Uncertainty states are most famously known by the thought experiment called Schrödinger's Cat. The idea concerns a cat in a box that, according to quantum mechanics, could be both dead and alive at the same time.
 By developing a new theoretical framework, the team was able to characterize small-scale thermometers and establish an achievable accuracy. Under certain circumstances, it was found that the uncertainty in temperature readings were prone to additional fluctuations, arising because of quantum effects.
 These tiny thermometers could be in a superposition between different temperatures, such as 90.5°C and 89.5°C , similarly to how Schrödinger's cat could be in a superposition between dead and alive.
  Harry Miller, first author of the paper and from Exeter's Physics and Astronomy department explained: "In addition to thermal noise that is present when making a temperature measurement, the possibility of being in a superposition means that quantum fluctuations influence of how we observe temperature at the nanoscale."

Read the full story at: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180814101441.htm

Or read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04536-7

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Physicists Witness Decay of Higgs Boson

 
   Physicists working at CERN's Large Hadron Collider have observed the decaying of the Higgs boson into a particle called a bottom quark and its antimatter counterpart, an antibottom quark. This elusive interaction is predicted to comprise of 57% of the particle's decays, yet has remained elusive until now.
   A single Higgs boson particle weights about 130 protons and it only lasts for about 10-trillionths of a nanosecond before it decays into less massive particles. When it was first discovered almost six years, it was through the decaying into two photons, which is predicted to occur only 9% of the time.
   To observe this interaction, the teams working on this project combined data from two separate runs using the Large Hadron Collider. Applying complex analysis methods to the data, they discovered the decay with a significance exceeding 5 standard deviations.
   The observation of this process is crucial as its results could either lend support to the Standard Model of physics or question its foundations and point to new physics. “The experiments continue to home in on the Higgs particle, which is often considered a portal to new physics,” said Dr. Eckhard Elsen, Director for Research and Computing at CERN.
   “The analysis methods have now been shown to reach the precision required for exploration of the full physics landscape, including hopefully new physics that so far hides so subtly.”

Or read the full study papers here:

Image: The Higgs boson decaying to two bottom quarks (blue cones), in association with a W boson decaying to a muon (red) and a neutrino. The neutrino leaves the detector unseen, and is reconstructed through the missing transverse energy (dashed line). Image extracted via ATLAS Collaboaration/CERN

Friday, July 13, 2018

Neutrino Detection Suggests Blazar as Cosmic Ray Source

 
 According to new papers released by researchers using the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Icecube detector at the South Pole, evidence suggests that a blazar is the source of high-energy neutrinos. This blazar, a giant elliptical galaxy with a massive spinning black hole at its core, was first singled out by a neutrino alert on September 22, 2017.
 Cosmic neutrinos are ghostly subatomic particles that are capable of travelling unhindered for billions of lights years from the most extreme environments in the universe to Earth. On the other hand, cosmic rays are highly energetic charged particles. Their paths are difficult to trace back to their source because the powerful magnetic fields that fill space warp their trajectories. Yet the source of these rays also produce neutrinos.
  “The evidence for the observation of the first known source of high-energy neutrinos and cosmic rays is compelling,” said Francis Halzen, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor of physics and the lead scientist for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory.
 When the neutrino alert was sent out on September 22, telescopes worldwide were on high alert for follow-u observatories. From telescopes such as NASA"s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to the Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenknov Telescope in the Canary Islands, a flare of high0energy gamma rays was detected originating from the blazar, implicating the galaxy as the most likely source.
"Fermi was the first telescope to identify enhanced gamma-ray activity from TXS 0506+056 within 0.06 degrees of the IceCube neutrino direction," stated the press released from IceCube. "In a decade of Fermi observations of this source, this was the strongest flare in gamma rays, the highest-energy photons. A later follow-up by MAGIC detected gamma rays of even higher energies."
“Fermi has been monitoring some 2,000 blazars for a decade, which is how we were able to identify this blazar as the neutrino source,” said Regina Caputo, the analysis coordinator for the Fermi Large Area Telescope collaboration. “High-energy gamma rays can be produced either by accelerated electrons or protons. The observation of a neutrino, which is a hallmark of proton interactions, is the first definitive evidence of proton acceleration by black holes.”

Read the full press releases at:
https://icecube.wisc.edu/news/view/586
https://nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=295955

Or read the full studies at:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6398/eaat1378
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6398/147

Or watch the press conference here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iChBhHpFtMI

Image: Artist's impression of neutrino interacting in the NSF's IceCube detector via Nicolle R. Fuller/NSF/IceCube





Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Fourth Ever Room-Temperature Ferromagnetic Element Discovered - Ruthenium

 
 An international group of researchers has discovered the fourth single element to have unique ferromagnetic properties at room temperature - ruthenium (Ru). Ferromagnetism is the ability for a substance to form permanent magnets or to be attracted to magnets.
 Until this discovery, only three single elements were know to be ferromagnetic at room temperature: iron (Fe), cobalt (Co), and nickel (Ni). The rare earth element gadolinium (Gd) only gains ferromagnetic properties 8 degrees Celsius below room temperature.
 Using seed layer engineering, the scientists forced the ruthenium particles into a tetragonal phase when the element favoured a hexagonal configuration. This culminated in a magnetization of 148 and 160 emu/cm3 at room temperature and 10 K (minus 263.15 degrees Celsius), respectively.
 “It took us about two years to find a right way to grow this material and validate it,” said  Professor Jian-Ping Wang, from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota.. “Our work will trigger magnetic research community to look into fundamental aspects of magnetism for many well-known elements.”
 “The ability to manipulate and characterize matter at the atomic scale is the cornerstone of modern information technology,” added co-author Professor Paul Voyles, chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.


Read more about this fascinating story at: http://www.sci-news.com/physics/ruthenium-room-temperature-ferromagnetic-element-06046.html

Or read the full study at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04512-1

Thursday, May 10, 2018

Weak Nuclear Force Measured by Physicists For The First Time

 
 In an international effort between scientists called the Jefferson Lab Q-weak Collaboration, scientists have for the first time provided a precise measurement of the nuclear weak force. This the force between protons and electrons, capable of transforming neutrons into protons through nuclear decay.
 Through this experiment, the value of 0.0719 (plus or minus 0.0045) was measured from the asymmetry in the scattering of polarized electrons on protons. However, this task has been always been difficult considering how the weak force is so much more sparing than the electromagnetic force.
 To get an accurate measurement, the scientists took advantage of a discovery in the 1950s. Most aspects in physics follow a resemblance of symmetry or balance, where changing certain features of the Universe would not make a significant difference. However, the weak force demonstrates an inherent left and right bias in the breakdown of particles involved in this force.
 Spinning electrons in one of two directions and launching them at protons causes them to ricochet off in a precise fashion, depending on the direction or helicity of their spin. This difference between the two possible helicity configurations made it possible to get accurate measurement of the weak force.

Read more about this fascinating story at: https://www.sciencealert.com/proton-weak-force-measurement-experiment-uses-parity-violation
Or read the full study at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0096-0


Wednesday, March 7, 2018

Misaligned Sheets of Graphene Could be the Next Ultra Superconductor

 
 Physicists working with graphene have discovered that by twisting two sheets of the atom-thick carbon material by an angle of 1.1º, the material is capable of conducting electrons without resistance. This discovery could be a significant step in the decades-long search for room-temperature superconductors.
 Although the system needed to be cooled to 1.7 degrees above absolute zero, the results as published in two Nature papers details that electricity may be conducted through this material much like known high-temperature superconductors.
 Superconducotrs come in two types: conventional, which are easily explained by normal theories of superconductivity, and unconventional, such as the graphene material recently discovered. This material has shown parallels to another unconventional superconductors known as cuprates. These complex copper oxides are capable of conducting electricity up to 133 degrees above absolute zero, but unlike graphene, the material is complex and poorly-understood.
“We can expect a frenzy of experimental activity over the next few months to fill in the missing parts of the picture,” says Robert Laughlin, a physicist and Nobel laureate at Stanford University in California.

Read more about this fascinating discovery at: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02773-w
Or read the two studies concerning discovery here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature26160
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature26154

Thursday, February 15, 2018

Single Trapped Atom Made Visible In Science Photography Competition Winner

 
David Nadlinger - University of Oxford
David Nadlinger - University of Oxford
 The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has released the overall first prize in their national science photography competition. This year's winner is 'Single Atom in an Ion Trap' by David Nadlinger from the University of Oxford.
 The photo shows a single positively-charged strontium atom held in between two metal electrodes surrounding it (zoom in to see the atom, a pinpoint of light). The photograph was made possible by utilizing a laser of blue-violet colour - this forced the atom to absorb and re-emit the light particles sufficiently quickly enough for an ordinary camera to capture the scene in a long exposure.
 This photo demonstrates the pristine platform for exploring and taking advantage of the unique properties of quantum physics. Laser-cooled atomic ions can serve as extremely accurate clocks and sensors, or even as building blocks for future quantum computers.

Read more about this fascinating study at: https://www.epsrc.ac.uk/newsevents/news/single-trapped-atom-captures-science-photography-competitions-top-prize/

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Cosmic Neutrinos Can be Absorbed by Planet Earth

 
Image Credit: Martin Wolf/IceCube/NSF
 Scientists using the IceCube Observatory located near the South Pole have discovered that neutrinos can be absorbed by our Planet Earth. With almost no mass and no charge, these particles rarely interact with matter. Yet tens of trillions of neutrinos pass through our bodies every second.
 Previous theories predicted that at high energies, neutrinos can be expected to interact with matter and be absorbed by the Earth instead of passing through the planet.
 “We knew that lower-energy neutrinos pass through just about anything, but although we had expected higher-energy neutrinos to be different, no previous experiments had been able to demonstrate convincingly that higher-energy neutrinos could be stopped by anything,” said Penn State Professor Doug Cowen. “However, the neutrino does have a tiny probability to interact, and this probability increases with energy. That probability is what scientists call the neutrino cross section.”
 The new measurements recorded by IceCube determined the neutrino cross section energies to be about 6.3 TeV and 980 TeV, energy levels significantly higher than previously measured.
“We looked mostly at neutrinos created when high-energy cosmic rays crash into the nuclei of nitrogen or oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere. Those collisions produce a cascade of subatomic particles that can generate neutrinos,” the team of physicists said.
“The sample also included a smaller number of neutrinos probably created in yet-to-be identified cosmic accelerators such as black holes.”
“We found that fewer of the most energetic neutrinos were making it to the detector from the northern hemisphere, where the particles would have to transit the entire Earth, including the dense core of our planet, before reaching the IceCube sensors. From less obstructed, near horizontal trajectories, more neutrinos were detected.”
 In the end, these neutrino observations conformed to the Standard Model of Physics, leading to some disappointment amongst the team members.

Read more about this fascinating story at: http://www.sci-news.com/physics/earth-high-energy-neutrinos-5462.html
Or read the full study at: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24459

Sunday, November 26, 2017

Explosive Discovery in Subatomic Physics

 



  Physicist Marek Karliner of University of Chicago has made a recent discovery in Subatomic physics. It was found that when two tiny particles called bottom quarks fused together, they created another subatomic particle called a nucleon, alongside a large amount of energy. This energetic event clocked in at 138 MeV, which is 8 times more powerful than the 17.6 MeV individual fusion that occurs inside a hydrogen bomb.
  However, this explosion will have no military application due to the short period of time that the bottom quarks exists: 1 picosecond, the same amount of time it takes light to travel half a single grain of salt. After that picosecond, it was found that the bottom quarks decayed into less energetic up-quarks.
  As of yet, these reactions are still theoretical as they have yet to be tested in a lab, but the implications they hold could prove to be potentially fruitful in future works.

Read more about this fascinating story at:
https://www.livescience.com/60847-charm-quark-fusion-subatomic-hydrogen-bomb.html
Or read the full study at: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24289

Article Written by T. Correia

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Harvard Scientists Discover Unexpected New States of Light

 
Image Credit: Capasso Lab/Harvard SEAS
 Researchers at Harvard University have developed a material that can generate and maintain newly discovered complex states of light. This tool utilizes polarization to generate unseen structures such as swirling vortices, spirals and corkscrewn that help scientists better understand light's properties and its potential practical applications.
 The new tool - a type of metasurface - takes advantage of something called angular momentum along with a second type, known as spin angular momentum (or also known as circular polarization).
 "Think about orbital angular momentum and circular polarization like the motion of a planet," wrote Harvard's Leah Burrows in a statement. "Circular polarization is the direction in which a planet rotates on its axis while orbital momentum describes how the planet orbits the sun."
 Using this new tool, scientists have circumvented past restrictions which allowed only certain polarizations of light to connect with certain angular momentums. This material allows any polarization to be converted to any orbital angular momentum, creating forms of light that could be useful in high-speed data transfer and encoded communications.
 It has only been 25 years since light was discovered to have orbital angular momentum. In this time, significant milestone have been made into the research of light, such as the first-ever photograph of light behaving as both a particle and a wave back in 2015.

Read the official press release at: https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2017/11/strange-new-world-of-light
Or read the full study at: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2017/11/01/science.aao5392

Thursday, September 14, 2017

NEW EQUATION REVEALS THE NATURE OF QUANTUM CHAOS

 
 Researchers from Lund University in Sweden have derived an equation that reveals the nature of chaos theory on the quantum scale. And in many ways, quantum chaos is even more strange that it is on the macroscopic world.
 Chaos theory is a branch of mathematics that focuses on the behaviour of certain system that are very sensitive. Very small changes during the initial conditions can create big differences later on - this is essentially the butterfly effect.
 Quantum chaos follows the same principle, but it focuses more on explaining the strangeness that occurs within atoms, such as how protons and neutrons behave like waves rather than particles.
 Quantum chaos also has another level of complexity. "In chaotic quantum systems, the energy levels repel each other, and they affect each other even if they are far apart," said Vladimir Osipov, from Lund University.
 Scientists have longed tried to make predictions on how quantum chaos behaves, but it's rather challenging due to chaotic systems being so sensitive. To come up with this unifying rule, the researchers used the fact that atoms give off energy levels that can be measured when they are in excited states to create this equation.
Read more about this fascinating story at: http://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-have-managed-to-fit-quantum-chaos-into-a-maths-equation
Image Credits: Robert Couse-Baked/Flickr

Thursday, September 7, 2017

WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL X-RAY LASER OPENS WITH A FLASH

 

"WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL X-RAY LASER OPENS WITH A FLASH"

 The X-Ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL) which stretches 3.4 km (2.1 miles) beneath the German city of Hamburg has officially began operations.
XFEL is capable of flashing 27,000 laser beams per second with each one a billion times brighter than that of a normal x-ray source. In fact, the X-rays are so powerful that it could be utilized to capture images of individual atoms.
 The new facility will be utilized by scientists from eleven countries to research the molecular composition of viruses and cells while also taking three-dimensional images of the universe on a nano-molecular scale.  Furthermore, it will help uncover the processes occurring deep within the interiors of planets and in elusive chemical reactions.
 The X-ray laser is generated from an electron beam directed through a unique superconducting linear accelerator. Within a specific 2.1km-long section of the tunnel, electron pulses are accelerated to near-light speed before entering a tunnel containing 17,290 permanents magnets with alternating poles where the X-rays are created.
Read more about this fascinating story at: http://news.sky.com/story/giant-x-ray-camera-takes-photos-of-atoms-11015423

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

NEW RESEARCH IN ‘SUPER-PHOTONS'

 
When thousands of photons are carefully concentrated and cooled, they can combine to become a ‘super-photon’. It is called a photonic Bose-Einstein condensate. In 2010, the team from the University of Bonn in Germany created a method for producing a Bose-Einstein condensate from photons. Their latest studies involve experimentation with the ‘super-photon’.

“In the experimental setup, a laser beam was rapidly bounced back and forth between two mirrors,” said Professor Weitz. “In between was a pigment that cooled the laser light to such an extent that a super-photon was created from the individual light portions.” “The special thing is that we have built a kind of optical well in various forms, into which the Bose-Einstein condensate was able to flow.”

By mixing a polymer into the pigment in between the mirror, the refractive index changed depending on the temperature. Therefore, the path between the mirror for the light changed and created longer wavelengths when heated. Various temperature patterns created different optical dents. This allowed the researchers to create low-loss patterns that captured the photonic Bose-Einstein condensate.

“This would, in turn, be the prerequisite for a new technique for quantum communication and quantum computers. But that’s still a long way off,” said Professor Weitz.

Saturday, August 5, 2017

FIRST SPECTRAL FINGERPRINTS OF ANTIMATTER MAPPED OUT

 
 Physicists led by Canadian researchers under the ALPHA Collaboration have mapped out the structure of antihydrogen, hydrogen's antimatter equivalent, through spectroscopy. This comes only after nine months since a team at CERN succeeded in measuring the spectrum of light emitted by antihydrogen.
 To manage this feat, the ALPHA Collaboration cranked up CERN's Antiproton Decelerator to produce 90,000 antiprotons. Along with 1.6 million positrons, the researchers managed to make about 25,000 antihydrogen atoms. Out of all these antimatter particles, the team managed to trap only 194 atoms in a special force field to keep them from touching 'normal' matter and instead blast them with microwaves to observe their varying reactions.
 Not too surprising, it was found that antihydrogen's spectral lines are identical to those of hydrogen. Had this been even slightly different, this would have posed a major problem to the Standard Model of physics which predicts that all particles have a twin (e.g. electron & positron, proton & antiproton). This discovery rules out the possibility that the structure of antimatter might have something to do with why the Universe is made out of matter and not antimatter.
Read more about this fascinating story at: http://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-have-captured-the-first-spectral-fingerprints-of-antimatter

Sunday, July 23, 2017

CHECK OUT THIS MINI SATURN PLANET MADE OF ELECTRIFIED FLUID

 

 This Sunday we would like to inform you about a strange achievement attained by researchers at New York University. By electrifying tiny droplets, these scientists have created miniature versions of the ringed planet Saturn.
 Normally when a drop of electrically conductive liquid is exposed to an electrical field, this drop forms two electrically charged poles. Previous research has shown that these poles can get pulled towards the electrical source, creating cone shapes. Should this pulling affect get strong enough, the tips of the cones begin to spray jets of droplets.
 This experiment essentially took it one more step by putting these drops of liquid in even more electrically conductive fluids - such as silicone oil in castor oil. In this even more conductive fluid, these drops took on an electric charge that was the same as the electrode. Since the electric field was so strong, this strange 'Saturn' phenomenon took place - something the researchers were not expecting to happen.
 Other than its aesthetic value, this discovery could also help researchers develop new ways of generating microscopic and uniform particles often used in products such as drugs, inks and cosmetics.
Read more about this fascinating discovery at: https://www.livescience.com/59722-electrified-droplets-create-mini-saturn-planets.html

Friday, July 21, 2017

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER QUANTUM PARTICLES TRAVEL BACKWARDS

 

 

 Mathematicians at the University of York, Munich and Cardiff have discovered a unique property of quantum mechanical particles - they can move in the opposite direction a force is acting upon them. In other words, while these particles are being pushed forwards, they would move backwards instead - a unique property known as 'backflow'.
 Through a combination of analytical and numerical models, the researchers have obtained precise estimates of the power of this phenomenon. These calculations show that backflow is always present but is actually quite a small effect - which may explain why it has never been measured in experiments.
 "This new theoretical analysis into quantum mechanical particles shows that this 'backflow' effect is ubiquitous in quantum physics," said Dr Henning Bostelmann, Researcher in York's Department of Mathematics. "We have shown that backflow can always occur, even if a force is acting on the quantum particle while it travels. The backflow effect is the result of wave-particle duality and the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, and it is already well understood in an idealised case of force-free motion."
Read more about this fascinating story at: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-breakthrough-discoveryevery-quantum-particle.html
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