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Atomic nuclei are made of nucleons (like protons and neutrons), which themselves are made of quarks. When crushed at high densities, nuclei dissolve into a liquid of nucleons and, at even higher densities, the nucleons themselves dissolve into a quark liquid.

In a new study, published in the journal Physical Review B, researchers addressed the question of whether the liquids of nucleons and quarks are fundamentally different.

Their theoretical calculations suggest that these liquids are different. Both types of liquids produce vortices when they rotate, but in quark liquids, the vortices carry a “color-magnetic field,” similar to an ordinary magnetic field. There is no such effect in nucleon liquids. Thus, these vortices sharply distinguish quark liquids from nuclear liquids.

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) ongoing Run 3 experiment has presented its initial findings about the elusive dark photons.

The Large Hadron Collider, located at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) near Geneva, Switzerland, is the world’s most powerful and biggest particle accelerator.

It is made up of a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets and accelerating structures that accelerate protons and other heavy particles to near-light speeds. The LHC is meant to smash these particles, allowing scientists to investigate the fundamental features of matter as well as the forces that govern the universe.

Continue reading “Physicists upgrade world’s biggest atom smasher to probe dark photons” »

Researchers at Peking University in China have successfully observed the elusive 0₂⁺ state of ⁸ He, revealing a novel cluster structure with two strongly correlated neutron pairs. This finding provides insights into exotic nuclear structures and their potential implications for understanding neutron stars. The findings are published in Physical Review Letters.

The conventional nuclear model in physics posits a single-particle picture where nucleons, protons, and neutrons move independently within a nucleus, forming a well-defined shell structure. Governed by a mean potential created by nuclear forces, nucleons fill distinct energy levels or shells, leading to increased stability associated with magic numbers.

This model, rooted in quantum mechanics, successfully explains nuclear structure and stability but encounters limitations when addressing exotic nuclei, particularly those that are neutron-rich and unstable.

In 2015, the LIGO/Virgo experiment, a large-scale research effort based at two observatories in the United States, led to the first direct observation of gravitational waves. This important milestone has since prompted physicists worldwide to devise new theoretical descriptions for the dynamics of blackholes, building on the data collected by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration.

Researchers at Uppsala University, University of Oxford, and Université de Mons recently set out to explain the dynamics of Kerr black holes, theoretically predicted black holes that rotate at a constant rate, using theory of massive high-spin particles. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, specifically proposes that the dynamics of these rotating black holes is constrained by the principle of gauge symmetry, which suggests that some changes of parameters of a physical system would have no measurable effect.

“We pursued a connection between rotating Kerr black holes and massive higher-spin particles,” Henrik Johansson, co-author of the paper, told Phys.org. “In other words, we modeled the black hole as a spinning fundamental particle, similar to how the electron is treated in quantum electrodynamics.”

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Continue reading “How Does The Nucleus Hold Together?” »

Neutron-star cores contain matter at the highest densities reached in our present-day universe, with as much as two solar masses of matter compressed inside a sphere of 25 km in diameter. These astrophysical objects can indeed be thought of as giant atomic nuclei, with gravity compressing their cores to densities exceeding those of individual protons and neutrons many-fold.

These densities make neutron stars interesting astrophysical objects from the point of view of particle and nuclear physics. A longstanding open problem is whether the immense central pressure of neutron stars can compress protons and neutrons into a new phase of matter, known as cold quark matter. In this exotic state of matter, individual protons and neutrons no longer exist.

“Their constituent quarks and gluons are instead liberated from their typical color confinement and are allowed to move almost freely,” explains Aleksi Vuorinen, professor of theoretical particle physics at the University of Helsinki.

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5:40 — The EPR Paradox.
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7:51 — Bell’s Inequality.
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10:03 — Is spooky action at a distance true?
10:40 — What is quantum entanglement really?
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15:49 — How to learn quantum computing.

Continue reading “Quantum Entanglement Explained — How does it really work?” »

The CMS experiment has presented its first search for new physics using data from Run 3 of the Large Hadron Collider. The new study looks at the possibility of “dark photon” production in the decay of Higgs bosons in the detector.

Dark photons are exotic long-lived particles: “Long-lived” because they have an average lifetime of more than a tenth of a billionth of a second—a very long lifetime in terms of particles produced in the LHC—and “exotic” because they are not part of the standard model of particle physics.

The standard model is the leading theory of the fundamental building blocks of the universe, but many physics questions remain unanswered, and so searches for phenomena beyond the standard model continue. CMS’s new result defines more constrained limits on the parameters of the decay of Higgs bosons to dark photons, further narrowing down the area in which physicists can search for them.