Most atoms are made from positively charged protons, neutral neutrons and negatively charged electrons. Positronium is an exotic atom composed of a single negative electron and a positively charged antimatter positron. It is naturally very short-lived, but researchers including those from the University of Tokyo successfully cooled and slowed down samples of positronium using carefully tuned lasers.
In an exciting development for quantum computing, researchers from the University of Chicago’s Department of Computer Science, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, and Argonne National Laboratory have introduced a classical algorithm that simulates Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) experiments.
Scientists working on the Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND) at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have identified the detector’s first neutrino interactions.
In conjunction with research staff from the Charles University of Prague and the CFM (CSIC-UPV/EHU) center in San Sebastian, CIC nanoGUNE’s Nanodevices group has designed a new complex material with emerging properties in the field of spintronics. This discovery, published in the journal Nature Materials, opens up a range of fresh possibilities for the development of novel, more efficient and more advanced electronic devices, such as those that integrate magnetic memories into processors.
Although systems consisting of many interacting small particles can be highly complex and chaotic, some can nonetheless be described using simple theories. Does this also pertain to the world of quantum physics?
“In recent years scientists have found that Mars has an annual cycle that is much more dynamic than people expected 10 or 15 years ago,” said Dr. John Clarke.
What happened to all the liquid water on Mars and what can this teach us about Earth-like exoplanets? This is what a recent study published in Science Advances hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the atmospheric and atomic processes responsible for Mars losing its water over time. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the evolution of Mars, specifically regarding the loss of water, and what implications this holds for Earth-like exoplanets.
For the study, the researchers used a combination of data from NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) spacecraft to measure the ratio of hydrogen and deuterium that escapes from Mars over three Martian years, with each Martian year comprising 687 Earth days. Deuterium is also called “heavy hydrogen” since it is a hydrogen atom with a neutron in its nucleus, making its mass greater than hydrogen.
Since deuterium is heavier, this means hydrogen is lost to space faster, and measuring this present-day loss can help scientists determine how much was lost in Mars’s ancient past. Additionally, Mars’ orbit is more elliptical than Earth, meaning it orbits farther away from the Sun at certain times of the year, and this could also contribute to hydrogen loss, as well. In the end, the team found that this ratio changes as Mars is closer to the Sun and farther away, which challenges longstanding hypotheses regarding Mars’s atmospheric evolution.
A central aim of the ATLAS Higgs physics program is to measure, with increasing precision, the strength of interactions of the Higgs boson with elementary fermions and bosons.
Posted in particle physics, quantum physics
Typically, electrons are free agents that can move through most metals in any direction. When they encounter an obstacle, the charged particles experience friction and scatter randomly like colliding billiard balls.
But in certain exotic materials, electrons can appear to flow with single-minded purpose. In these materials, electrons may become locked to the material’s edge and flow in one direction, like ants marching single-file along a blanket’s boundary. In this rare “edge state,” electrons can flow without friction, gliding effortlessly around obstacles as they stick to their perimeter-focused flow. Unlike in a superconductor, where all electrons in a material flow without resistance, the current carried by edge modes occurs only at a material’s boundary.
Now MIT physicists have directly observed edge states in a cloud of ultracold atoms. For the first time, the team has captured images of atoms flowing along a boundary without resistance, even as obstacles are placed in their path. The results, which appear in Nature Physics (“Observation of chiral edge transport in a rapidly rotating quantum gas”), could help physicists manipulate electrons to flow without friction in materials that could enable super-efficient, lossless transmission of energy and data.
Discovering Earth’s third global energy Field. 🌀
A NASA-led rocket team has finally discovered the long-sought electric field driving particles from Earth’s atmosphere into space ‼️
First hypothesized over 60 years ago, it is “an agent of chaos” whose impacts are still not fully known: go.nasa.gov/3XcDDLD
The graviton – a hypothetical particle that carries the force of gravity – has eluded detection for over a century. But now physicists have designed an experimental setup that could in theory detect these tiny quantum objects.
In the same way individual particles called photons are force carriers for the electromagnetic field, gravitational fields could theoretically have its own force-carrying particles called gravitons.
The problem is, they interact so weakly that they’ve never been detected, and some physicists believe they never will.
