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Hot gases composed of metal ions and electrons, called plasmas, are widely used in many manufacturing processes, chemical synthesis, and metal extraction from ores and welding. A collaborative research group from Tohoku University and the Toyohashi University of Technology has invented a new and efficient method to create metallic plasmas from solid metals under a strong magnetic field in a microwave resonator. They report their innovation in the journal AIP Advances.

In the most conventional methods for making plasmas, a strong electric field is applied to gases or liquids. This can require enormous amounts of energy. More recently, microwave radiation has also been harnessed to generate plasmas as it converts atoms into a form that can more effectively drive desired chemical processes, among other advantages. The plasmas generated by microwaves are now being used in commercial processes, including semiconductor manufacture, diamond deposition and to release metals from their ores.

Until now, however, this has involved multi-mode microwave generators, which generate a chaotic distribution of microwaves. One key advance achieved by the team is to apply a single-mode microwave generator to produce their metal plasmas. This creates more controlled and highly focused microwaves.

Physicists report new evidence that production of an exotic state of matter in collisions of gold nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—an atom-smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory—can be “turned off” by lowering the collision energy. The “off” signal shows up as a sign change—from negative to positive—in data that describe “higher order” characteristics of the distribution of protons produced in these collisions.

The findings, just published by RHIC’s STAR Collaboration in Physical Review Letters, will help physicists map out the conditions of temperature and density under which the exotic matter, known as a quark-gluon plasma (QGP), can exist and identify key features of the phases of nuclear matter.

Generating and studying QGP has been a central goal of research at RHIC. Since the collider began operating in 2000, a wide range of measurements have shown that the most energetic smashups of atomic nuclei—at 200 billion electron volts (GeV)— melt the boundaries of protons and neutrons to set free, for a fleeting instant, the quarks and gluons that make up ordinary nuclear particles.

The physicists at the University of Bonn have experimentally demonstrated that a crucial theorem in statistical physics is applicable to Bose-Einstein condensates. This discovery enables the measurement of specific properties of these quantum “superparticles,” providing a means of deducing system characteristics that would otherwise be challenging to observe. The findings of this study have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Suppose in front of you there is a container filled with an unknown liquid. Your goal is to find out by how much the particles in it (atoms or molecules) move back and forth randomly due to their thermal energy. However, you do not have a microscope with which you could visualize these position fluctuations known as “Brownian motion”.

It turns out you do not need that at all: You can also simply tie an object to a string and pull it through the liquid. The more force you have to apply, the more viscous your liquid. And the more viscous it is, the lesser the particles in the liquid change their position on average. The viscosity at a given temperature can therefore be used to predict the extent of the fluctuations.

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In this paper, we demonstrate, in the context of Loop Quantum Gravity, the Quantum Holographic Principle, according to which the area of the boundary surface enclosing a region of space encodes a qubit per Planck unit. To this aim, we introduce fermion fields in the bulk, whose boundary surface is the two-dimensional sphere. The doubling of the fermionic degrees of freedom and the use of the Bogolyubov transformations lead to pairs of the spin network’s edges piercing the boundary surface with double punctures, giving rise to pixels of area encoding a qubit. The proof is also valid in the case of a fuzzy sphere.

A team of physicists claims to have pulled energy out of a vacuum, Quanta reports — a trick that required them to teleport it from a different location using quantum tech.

The work builds on previous research by Tohoku University theoretical physicist Masahiro Hotta, who back in 2008 claimed to have found a way to produce negative energy, a seemingly counterintuitive aspect of quantum theory, inside a quantum vacuum.

In simple terms, instead of extracting something from nothing, the energy was “borrowed” from somewhere else, taking advantage of the idea of quantum entanglement, the fact that two subatomic particles can change their state in line with the other, even when the two are separated by a distance.

“Enceladus is giving us free samples of what’s hidden deep below.”

Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus shoots particles of frozen silica into space, and scientists might finally know why. Scientists have long known that Enceladus spewed out icy silica that eventually made its way into Saturn’s E ring, but they didn’t have a good explanation as to why this was happening.

Now, a new study by a team at the University of California Los Angeles might provide the answer. Their research shows that tidal heating in Encealadus’ rocky core creates currents that push the silica to the surface. Once there, it’s likely released into space by deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

Continue reading “We finally know why Saturn moon shoots silica into space” »

Quantum mechanics deals with the behavior of the Universe at the super-small scale: atoms and subatomic particles that operate in ways that classical physics can’t explain.

In order to explore this tension between the quantum and the classical, scientists are constantly attempting to get larger and larger objects to behave in a quantum-like way.

Back in 2021, a team succeeded with a tiny glass nanosphere that was 100 nanometers in diameter – about a thousand times smaller than the thickness of a human hair.

Researchers predict that the “scattering matrix” of a collection of particles could be used to slow the particles down, potentially allowing for the cooling of significantly more particles than is possible with current techniques.

When light travels through an environment containing many particles, information about the collective motion of the particles gets added to the light. This information leaves a measurable signature on a quantity known as the scattering matrix. Now researchers from the Vienna University of Technology predict that the information in this matrix could be used to alter the speeds of the particles [1, 2]. The team says that, if experimentally realized, the technique could allow scientists to study the collective quantum behavior of more particles than is possible with current techniques.

Researchers have long been fascinated with using light to slow down or even freeze the motion of a collection of particles. One motivation is that cooled particles can be isolated from outside influences in order to study quantum behaviors such as entanglement. To date, researchers have simultaneously cooled one or two particles, but they have struggled to scale techniques to cool additional particles.

Quantum entanglement refers to a phenomenon in quantum mechanics in which two or more particles become linked such that the state of each particle cannot be described independently of the others, even when they are separated by a large distance. The principle, referred to by Albert Einstein as “spooky action at a distance,” is now utilized in quantum networks to transfer information. The building blocks of these networks—quantum nodes—can generate and measure quantum states.

Among the candidates that can function as quantum nodes, the Sn-V center in diamond (a defect where a tin (Sn) atom replaces a carbon atom, resulting in an interstitial Sn atom between two carbon vacancies) has been shown to have suitable properties for quantum network applications.

The Sn-V center is expected to exhibit a long spin coherence time in the millisecond range at Kelvin temperatures, allowing it to maintain its quantum state for a relatively long period of time. However, these centers have yet to produce photons with similar characteristics, which is a necessary criterion for creating remote entangled quantum states between quantum network nodes.