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A team of researchers from the University of Warsaw in Poland, the Institute Pascal CNRS in France, the Military University of Technology in Poland and the British University of Southampton has shown that it is possible to control the so-called exceptional points. For the first time, physicists also observed the annihilation of exceptional points from different degeneracy points. You can read about the discovery that may contribute to the creation of modern optical devices in the latest Nature Communications.

The universe around us is made of elementary particles, most of which have their antiparticles. When a particle and an antiparticle, that is, matter and antimatter, meet each other, annihilation occurs. Physicists have long been able to produce quasiparticles and quasiantiparticles—elementary excitations: charge, vibration, energy—trapped in matter, most often in crystals or liquids.

“The world of quasiparticles can be very complicated, although paradoxically, the quasiparticles themselves help simplify the description of quantum phenomena,” explains Jacek Szczytko from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw.

Information variations in a chain-like system are associated to energy transactions with the environment, which can take place reversibly or irreversibly, with a lower theoretical energy limit^22,23. Fluctuations as a consequence of pure computations are on the order of the thermal level (i.e., similar to kT, being k the Boltzmann constant and T the absolute temperature), according to Landauer’s principle. Such energies are negligible at routine human scales but become significant when the size of the system is nanoscopic or smaller, because the work and heat it generates also compare with the thermal level. Small systems are based on nanostructures, including individual molecules and arrangements of atoms, such as biological and quantum systems.

Fluctuation theorems have appeared in recent years explaining quantitatively energy imbalances between forward and reverse pathways or between equilibrium and non-equilibrium processes^24,25. They have been tested experimentally^26,27,28, mostly in biomolecular systems analyzed on a one-by-one basis²⁹. Most of these theorems establish relations among thermodynamic potentials for general systems, often with no specific insight into information theory. This theory, in turn, deals with spatially-indexed, 1-dimensional arrangements of symbols, which may not be necessarily associated to a time order. Recent generalizations separate the role of information and feedback control^30,31, but still the interpretation of non-Markovianity, irreversibility and reversibility in terms of purely informational operations such as reading, writing and error correction^32,33 remains obscured.

Here, we analyze energy exchanges associated to the symbolic management of a sequence of characters, without reference to the physical construction of the chain. Just by considering reversibility at the single sequence level and conservation laws, we next present two pairs of fluctuations equalities in the creation of information sequences, which use depends on energy exchange constraints. Our analysis integrates key information concepts, namely, reading, writing, proof reading and editing in the thermodynamic description of a string of symbols with information.

Results from two leading dark matter experiments—XENONnT and PandaX-4T—rule out an enigmatic signal detected in 2020 and set new constraints on dark matter particle candidates consisting of light fermions, respectively.

Over the past decade, physicists have repeatedly scrutinized tanks containing tons of liquid xenon, hoping to spot the flashes of light that might indicate a collision between a dark matter particle and a xenon atom (see Viewpoint: Dark Matter Still at Large). Most of these studies were dedicated to detecting so-called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), a leading dark matter candidate with a mass greater than 10 GeV. Now researchers have sifted through a new set of data for a much lighter prize: fermionic dark matter with a mass of a few tens of MeV [1]. Although the team found no signal beyond the expected background level, they have set the strongest constraints yet on models of sub-GeV fermionic dark matter.

The dataset is the first obtained by the PandaX-4T experiment at the China Jinping Underground Laboratory. The PandaX team searched this data for evidence of a beyond-the-standard-model interaction in which a fermionic dark matter particle is absorbed by the nucleus of a xenon atom. After the absorption, the xenon nucleus should recoil while emitting either a neutrino or an antineutrino. The interaction should also cause an energy deposition in the form of photons and electrons, which would register on photodetectors at the ends of the tank. Unlike the scattering of WIMPs, which is predicted to produce a broad-spectrum energy deposition, the absorption by nuclei of fermionic dark matter particles should deposit energy only in a narrow range.

The data collected so far represent the equivalent of exposing 0.6 tons of liquid xenon to hypothetical fermionic dark matter for one year. When PandaX-4T concludes in 2025, it will have achieved a cumulative exposure 10 times greater, generating even stronger constraints on theory.

Simple microparticles can beat rhythmically together, generating an oscillating electrical current that could be used to power micro-robotic devices.

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances. Their stated goal is to make a better world through education, research, and innovation.

All its mechanical components are now together for the first time.

Good news! The largest digital camera in the world is nearly ready to be mounted on its telescope. At the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, technicians are finishing up the largest digital camera in the world. The camera will be shipped to Chile and mounted on a telescope located in the Andes. The project was started a couple of years ago.

Even though the camera isn’t finished yet, all of its mechanical parts have now, for the first time, been assembled into a visually appealing framework.

Continue reading “The world’s largest digital camera will capture a dust particle on the Moon” »

Long-Lived Coherent Quantum States in a Superconducting Device for Quantum Information Technology

Scientists have been able to demonstrate for the first time that large numbers of quantum bits, or qubits, can be tuned to interact with each other while maintaining coherence for an unprecedentedly long time, in a programmable, solid-state superconducting processor. This breakthrough was made by researchers from Arizona State University and Zhejiang University in China, along with two theorists from the United Kingdom.

Previously, this was only possible in Rydberg atom.

A series of buzzing, bee-like “loop-currents” could explain a recently discovered, never-before-seen phenomenon in a type of quantum material. The findings from researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder may one day help engineers to develop new kinds of devices, such as quantum sensors or the quantum equivalent of computer memory storage devices.

The quantum material in question is known by the chemical formula Mn₃Si₂Te₆. But you could also call it “honeycomb” because its manganese and tellurium atoms form a network of interlocking octahedra that look like the cells in a beehive.

Physicist Gang Cao and his colleagues at CU Boulder synthesized this molecular beehive in their lab in 2020, and they were in for a surprise: Under most circumstances, the material behaved a lot like an insulator. In other words, it didn’t allow electric currents to pass through it easily. When they exposed the honeycomb to magnetic fields in a certain way, however, it suddenly became millions of times less resistant to currents. It was almost as if the material had morphed from rubber into metal.

Researchers demonstrate room-temperature spin transfer across an interface between an iron-based ferromagnet and a semiconductor, opening a route to creating novel spintronic devices.