In a new study, scientists say that a particle that links to a fifth dimension can explain dark matter. (The previous article has been updated.)
New research uses protons to shine a light on the structure and imperfections of this two-dimensional wonder material.
Graphene is a two-dimensional wonder material that has been suggested for a wide range of applications in energy, technology, construction, and more since it was first isolated from graphite in 2004.
This single layer of carbon atoms is tough yet flexible, light but with high resistance, with graphene.
The ATLAS and CMS collaborations at CENR’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have been making ever more precise measurements of the Higgs boson’s mass since the particle’s discovery.
The new ATLAS measurement combines two results: a new Higgs boson mass measurement based on an analysis of the particle’s decay into two high-energy photons (diphoton channel) and an earlier mass measurement based on a study of its decay into four leptons (four-lepton channel).
The new measurement in the diphoton channel, which combines analyses of the full ATLAS data sets from Runs 1 and 2 of the LHC, resulted in a mass of 125.22 billion electronvolts (GeV) with an uncertainty of only 0.14 GeV.
Quantum entanglement is one of the most intriguing and perplexing phenomena in quantum physics. It allows physicists to create connections between particles that seem to violate our understanding of space and time.
This video discusses what quantum entanglement really is, and the experiments that help us understand it. The results of these experiments have applications in new technologies that will forever change our world.
Continue reading “Quantum 101 Episode 5: Quantum Entanglement Explained” »
If there’s one thing the Covid pandemic taught us, it’s that viruses shouldn’t be underestimated.
People are, therefore, taking note after scientists discovered a whole new range of giant virus-like particles (VLP) that have taken on “previously unimaginable shapes and forms.”
The microscopic agents, resembling everything from stars to monsters, were found in just a few handfuls of forest soil.
Atoms trapped in a one-dimensional optical lattice can mimic how—in a basic quantum field theory—massive particles reach, or fail to reach, thermal equilibrium.
Researchers revisit a neglected decay mode with implications for fundamental physics and for dating some of the oldest rocks on Earth and in the Solar System.
With a half-life of 1.25 billion years, potassium-40 does not decay often, but its decays have a big impact. As a relatively common isotope (0.012% of all potassium) of a very common metal (2.4% by mass of Earth’s crust), potassium-40 is one of the primary sources of radioactivity we encounter in daily life. Its decays are the primary source of argon-40, which makes up almost 1% of the atmosphere, and the copious amount of heat released from these decays threw off early estimates of the age of Earth made by Lord Kelvin. Potassium-40 is largely responsible for the meager radioactivity in our food (such as bananas), and it is a significant source of noise in some highly sensitive particle physics detectors. This isotope and its decay products are also useful tools in dating rocks and geological processes that go back to the earliest parts of Earth history. And yet some long-standing uncertainty surrounds these well-studied decays.
Naoko Kurahashi Neilson was on a Zoom call when she saw it for the first time.
She and two PhD students—Mirco Hünnefeld of TU Dortmund University in Germany and Steve Sclafani of Drexel University in the United States—had received permission to review the results of their analysis. Using 10 years of data and 60,000 detections from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, they were trying to map the emission of tiny, ghostly particles called neutrinos from the band of the Milky Way.
Kurahashi Neilson remembers the three of them staring at the image together. Slowly, they realized that they were, indeed, looking at the first-ever neutrino image of our galaxy.
Physical interpretations of the time-symmetric formulation of quantum mechanics, due to Aharonov, Bergmann, and Lebowitz are discussed in terms of weak values. The most direct, yet somewhat naive, interpretation uses the time-symmetric formulation to assign eigenvalues to unmeasured observables of a system, which results in logical paradoxes, and no clear physical picture. A top–down ontological model is introduced that treats the weak values of observables as physically real during the time between pre-and post-selection (PPS), which avoids these paradoxes. The generally delocalized rank-1 projectors of a quantum system describe its fundamental ontological elements, and the highest-rank projectors corresponding to individual localized objects describe an emergent particle model, with unusual particles, whose masses and energies may be negative or imaginary. This retrocausal top–down model leads to an intuitive particle-based ontological picture, wherein weak measurements directly probe the properties of these exotic particles, which exist whether or not they are actually measured.
Separation processes are essential in the purification and concentration of a target molecule during water purification, removal of pollutants, and heat pumping, accounting for 10–15% of global energy consumption. To make the separation processes more energy efficient, improvement in the design of porous materials is necessary. This could drastically reduce energy costs by about 40–70%. The primary approach to improving the separation performance is to precisely control the pore structure.
In this regard, porous carbon materials offer a distinct advantage as they are composed of only one type of atom and have been well-used for separation processes. They have large pore volumes and surface areas, providing high performance in gas separation, water purification, and storage. However, pore structures generally have high heterogeneity with low designability. This poses various challenges, limiting the applicability of carbon materials in separation and storage.
Now, a team of researchers from Japan, led by Associate Professor Tomonori Ohba from Chiba University and including master’s students, Mr. Kai Haraguchi and Mr. Sogo Iwakami, has fabricated fullerene-pillared porous graphene (FPPG)—a carbon composite comprising nanocarbons—using a bottom-up approach with highly designable and controllable pore structures.
