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Category: particle physics – Page 576

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Some 42 years ago, renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking proposed that not everything that comes in contact with a black hole succumbs to its unfathomable nothingness.

Tiny particles of light (photons) are sometimes ejected back out, robbing the black hole of an infinitesimal amount of energy, and this gradual loss of mass over time means every black hole eventually evaporates out of existence.

Known as Hawking radiation, these escaping particles help us make sense of one of the greatest enigmas in the known Universe, but after more than four decades, no one’s been able to actually prove they exist, and Hawking’s proposal remained firmly in hypothesis territory.

Continue reading “Physicists might soon be able to prove one of Stephen Hawking’s theories on black holes” | >

Many recent big technological advances in computing, communications, energy, and biology have relied on nanoparticles. It can be hard to determine the best nanomaterials for these applications, however, because observing nanoparticles in action requires high spatial resolution in “messy,” dynamic environments.

In a recent step in this direction, a team of engineers has obtained a first look inside phase-changing nanoparticles, showing how their shape and crystallinity—the arrangement of atoms within the crystal—can have dramatic effects on their performance.

The work, which appears in Nature Materials, has immediate applications in the design of energy storage materials, but could eventually find its way into data storage, electronic switches, and any device in which the phase transformation of a material regulates its performance.

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HANOVER, N.H., April 26 (UPI) — Proteins are the contractors of the nanoscale natural world, assembling and building at the atomic, molecular and cellular levels. Increasingly, materials scientists are working to harness that power.

Recently, researchers at Dartmouth College created protein capable of crafting buckyball molecules. “Buckyball” is a nickname for buckminsterfullerene molecules, a soccer ball-shaped molecule of 60 carbon atoms.

The newly synthesized protein organizes buckyballs into a periodic lattice — a wall of buckyballs.

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A new method to create light while retaining the energy using Q-Dot technology.

All light sources work by absorbing energy – for example, from an electric current – and emit energy as light. But the energy can also be lost as heat and it is therefore important that the light sources emit the light as quickly as possible, before the energy is lost as heat. Superfast light sources can be used, for example, in laser lights, LED lights and in single-photon light sources for quantum technology. New research results from the Niels Bohr Institute show that light sources can be made much faster by using a principle that was predicted theoretically in 1954. The results are published in the scientific journal, Physical Review Letters.

Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute are working with quantum dots, which are a kind of artificial atom that can be incorporated into optical chips. In a quantum dot, an electron can be excited (i.e. jump up), for example, by shining a light on it with a laser and the electron leaves a ‘hole’. The stronger the interaction between light and matter, the faster the electron decays back into the hole and the faster the light is emitted.

But the interaction between light and matter is naturally very weak and it makes the light sources very slow to emit light and this can reduce energy efficiency. Already in 1954, the physicist Robert Dicke predicted that the interaction between light and matter could be increased by having a number of atoms that ‘share’ the excited state in a quantum superposition.

Continue reading “Superfast light source made from artificial atom” | >

Turning on Quantum properties onto a cup of coffee. First step; should be interesting in what researchers discover especially around teleporting. Imaging you’re Dominos pizza with a teleport hub and customer orders a pizza. No longer need a self driving car, or drone; with this technology Dominos can teleport your hot fresh pizza to your house immediately after it is out of the oven.

Small objects like electrons and atoms behave according to quantum mechanics, with quantum effects like superposition, entanglement and teleportation. One of the most intriguing questions in modern science is if large objects – like a coffee cup — could also show this behavior. Scientists at the TU Delft have taken the next step towards observing quantum effects at everyday temperatures in large objects. They created a highly reflective membrane, visible to the naked eye, that can vibrate with hardly any energy loss at room temperature. The membrane is a promising candidate to research quantum mechanics in large objects.

The team has reported their results in Physical Review Letters.

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Neutron scattering and computational modeling have revealed unique and unexpected behavior of water molecules under extreme confinement that is unmatched by any known gas, liquid or solid states.

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory describe a new tunneling state of water molecules confined in hexagonal ultra-small channels — 5 angstrom across — of the mineral beryl. An angstrom is 1/10-billionth of a meter, and individual atoms are typically about 1 angstrom in diameter.

The discovery, made possible with experiments at ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom, demonstrates features of water under ultra confinement in rocks, soil and cell walls, which scientists predict will be of interest across many disciplines.

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Interesting — data compression algorithm can be applied to detect Quantum Entanglement.

The next time you archive some files and compress them, you might think about the process a little differently. Researchers at the National University of Singapore have discovered a common compression algorithm can be used to detect quantum entanglement. What makes this discovery so interesting is that it does not rely on heavily on an assumption that the measured particles are independent and identically distributed.

If you measure the property of a particle and then measure the same property of another particle, in classical mechanics there is no reason for them to match but pure chance. In quantum mechanics though, the two particles can be entangled, such that the results will match each other. This follows from Bell’s theorem, which is applied to test if particles are in fact entangled. The catch is that the theorem is derived for testing pairs of particles, but many pairs have to be measured and the probabilities they are entangled calculated. This is where the researchers’ discovery comes into play because instead of calculating probabilities, the measurements can be fed into the open-source Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) to get their normalized compression difference. Compression algorithms work by finding patterns in data and encoding them more efficiently, and in this case they also find correlations from quantum entanglement.

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Using a weird phenomenon in which particles of light seem to travel at faster-than-light speeds, scientists have shown that waves of light can seem to travel backward in time.

The new experiment also shows other bizarre effects of light, such as pairs of images forming and annihilating each other.

Taken together, the results finally prove a century-old prediction made by British scientist and polymath Lord Rayleigh. The phenomenon, called time reversal, could allow researchers to develop ultra-high-speed cameras that can peer around corners and see through walls. [In Images: The World’s 11 Most Beautiful Equations].

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Welcome to our imaginary existential nightmare…

Stephen Hawking recently discussed black holes and the often contradictory properties associated with them during a lecture at Harvard. The Harvard Gazette said recently that Hawking specifically explained that, if information is really lost in black holes, then we will have been misunderstanding not only black holes, but the science of determinism, for the last 200 years.

Hawking said that particles that fall into a black hole “can’t just emerge when the black hole disappears.” Instead, “the particles that come out of a black hole seem to be completely random and bear no relation to what fell in. It appears that the information about what fell in is lost, apart from the total amount of mass and the amount of rotation.”

To put that more simply, it’s like someone shooting a basketball into a hoop and, instead of the ball coming out of the basket, something totally different comes out. But that’s not what Hawking is concerned about – he’s more concerned with the fact that the basketball – or information – seems to vanish altogether.

Continue reading “Stephen Hawking: “History and memories could be illusions” because of black holes” | >