Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: particle physics – Page 16

One of the key takeaways from the experiment is that quantum mechanics does not conform to classical expectations. By creating a GHZ-type paradox in 37 dimensions, the researchers demonstrated a breakdown of local realism in ways previously unexplored.

In classical terms, the paradox suggests that an event could occur without a causative link—like a letter appearing in your mailbox without a postal worker delivering it. In quantum terms, the experiment showed that the relationship between entangled particles was so deeply nonlocal that their correlations could not be explained by any hidden variables.

The research team mathematically confirmed that their experiment achieved the strongest recorded manifestation of quantum nonlocality. By showing that the paradox holds true even under extreme conditions, they provided new evidence that classical models fail to explain the quantum world.

Read more | >

In late 2023, Wojciech Brylinski was analyzing data from the NA61/SHINE collaboration at CERN for his thesis when he noticed an unexpected anomaly—a strikingly large imbalance between charged and neutral kaons in argon–scandium collisions. He found that, instead of being produced in roughly equal numbers, charged kaons were produced 18.4% more often than neutral kaons.

This suggested that the so-called “isospin ” between up and down quarks might be broken by more than expected due to the differences in their electric charges and masses—a discrepancy that existing would struggle to explain. Known sources of isospin asymmetry only predict deviations of a few percent.

“When Wojciech got started, we thought it would be a trivial verification of the symmetry,” says Marek Gaździcki, who was spokesperson of NA61/SHINE at the time of the discovery. “We expected the symmetry to be closely obeyed—although we had previously measured these types of discrepancies at the NA49 experiment, they had large uncertainties and were not significant.”

Read more | >

Conventional curved lenses, which direct light by refraction in glass or plastic, are often bulky and heavy, offering only limited control of light waves. Metasurfaces, in contrast, are flat and consist of an array of tiny structures known as meta-atoms. Meta-atoms influence light at a subwavelength scale and thus allow for highly precise control of the phase, amplitude, and polarization of light.

“Using metasurfaces, we can influence the temporal shift, intensity, and direction of oscillation of light waves in a targeted way,” says Dr. Maryna Leonidivna Meretska, Group Leader at KIT’s Institute of Nanotechnology.

“Thanks to its multiplex control capabilities, i.e., the simultaneous and targeted influencing of various parameters, a single metasurface can replace multiple . Thus, the size of the optical system can be reduced without affecting its performance.”

Read more | >

A revolutionary new spintronic device developed in China enables powerful, precise control of terahertz (THz) wave polarization, without the need for bulky external components. Using a clever microscale stripe design, the compact emitter manipulates the chirality of THz waves at the source, allow

Read more | >

After 25 years of smashing gold nuclei together at light speeds, Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is hanging up its boots—erm, superconducting magnets.

The collider’s final run—its 25th—kicked off this week on Long Island, in a swan song for the venerable collider that will be succeeded—in fact, transformed into—Brookhaven Lab’s Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Over the course of 2025, RHIC physicists will complete data collection on quark-gluon plasma, the soup of particles that existed in the earliest days of the universe.

“The original idea behind RHIC was to create, for the first time on Earth, a state of matter that existed in the universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang: the quark-gluon plasma, and we did,” said James Dunlop, the associate department chair for nuclear physics at Brookhaven Lab, in a call with Gizmodo. “That’s one of the big legacies—that we actually created it—but the more interesting thing is that its properties were quite different from what we’d expected them to be.”

Read more | >

This Quantum Computer Simulates the Hidden Forces That Shape Our Universe

The study of elementary particles and forces is of central importance to our understanding of the universe. Now a team of physicists from the University of Innsbruck and the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo show how an unconventional type of quantum computer opens a new door to the world of elementary particles.

Credit: Kindea Labs

Read more | >

Studies that explore how the denser sections of atoms, known as atomic nuclei, interact with neutrons (i.e., particles with no electric charge) can have valuable implications both for the understanding of these atoms’ underlying physics and for the development of nuclear energy solutions. A process that is central to these interactions is neutron capture, which entails the absorption of a neutron by a nucleus, followed by the emission of gamma-rays.

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the origin of the exceptional neutron capture capabilities of the zirconium-88 (88 Zr), using a new experimental methodology. Their findings, published in Physical Review Letters, offer valuable insight that could help to improve existing nuclear and astrophysical models.

“The probability (per unit area) of a nucleus capturing a neutron at a given kinetic energy is called neutron-capture cross section,” Thanos Stamatopoulos, first author of the paper, told Phys.org. “The probability across several kinetic energies from 0.5 eV up to infinity is called resonance integral. Typically, in nature, when the cross section for neutrons with a kinetic energy of 25 meV (thermal cross section) is very large, the resonance integral is small.”

Read more | >

Photovoltaic (PV) solutions, which are designed to convert sunlight into electrical energy, are becoming increasingly widespread worldwide. Over the past decades, engineers specialized in energy solutions have been trying to identify new solar cell designs and PV materials that could achieve even better power conversion efficiencies, while also retaining their stability and reliably operating for long periods of time.

The many emerging PV solutions that have proven to be particularly promising include tandem based on both perovskites (a class of materials with a characteristic crystal structure) and organic materials. Perovskite/organic tandem solar cells could be more affordable than existing silicon-based solar cells, while also yielding higher power conversion efficiencies.

These solar cells are manufactured using wide-bandgap perovskites, which have an electronic bandgap greater than 1.6 electronvolts (eV) and can thus absorb higher-energy photons. Despite their enhanced ability to absorb high-energy light particles, these materials have significant limitations, which typically adversely impact the stability of solar cells.

Read more | >