Lifeboat Foundation

A long-term antimatter storage device that may be energized by a low power magnetron and can function autonomously for hundreds of hours on the energy provided by batteries. An evacuated, cryogenic container is arranged with a source of positrons and a source of electrons positioned in capture relation to one another within the container so as to allow for the formation of a plurality of positronium atoms. A microwave resonator is located within the container forming a circularly polarized standing wave within which the plurality of positronium atoms rotate. Radioactive sources for small stores and low energy positron accelerators for large stores are used to efficiently fill the device with positronium in seconds to minutes. The device may also be arranged to provide for the extraction of positrons. A method for storing antimatter is also provided.

The present set of complementary inventions refer to a system for the practical and inexpensive procurement of huge amounts of energy derived from the principles of matter-antimatter generation and annihilation. The generator will comprise the functions of generation, amplification, concentration and collision of photons within a specially designed self-reflective chamber; the generation of particles of matter and antimatter derived from the collision of photons; the ionization of atoms and the production of avalanches of electrons and positrons within a specialized collecting chamber; the separation of electrons and positrons by the action of powerful rotational electromagnetic fields; and, the conversion of said avalanches of electrons and positrons into electrical power.

JILA and NIST Fellow James K. Thompson’s team of researchers have for the first time successfully combined two of the “spookiest” features of quantum mechanics to make a better quantum sensor: entanglement between atoms and delocalization of atoms.

Einstein originally referred to entanglement as creating spooky action at a distance—the strange effect of quantum mechanics in which what happens to one atom somehow influences another atom somewhere else. Entanglement is at the heart of hoped-for quantum computers, quantum simulators and quantum sensors.

A second rather spooky aspect of quantum mechanics is delocalization, the fact that a single atom can be in more than one place at the same time. As described in their paper recently published in Nature, the Thompson group has combined the spookiness of both entanglement and delocalization to realize a matter-wave interferometer that can sense accelerations with a precision that surpasses the standard quantum limit (a limit on the accuracy of an experimental measurement at a quantum level) for the first time.

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Resistive switching random-access memories (RRAMs) integrate information storage and processing into the same device, enabling faster and more energy-efficient computing. However, RRAMs are challenging to fabricate and suffer from inconsistent on-off switching. Now Zheng Jie Tan, Vrindaa Somjit, and collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered that adding dopants to the RRAMs dramatically improves their performance and the yield of their fabrication [1]. The researchers say their results provide an additional “knob” to optimize RRAMs, helping position them as one of the leading technologies for so-called in-memory computation.

An RRAM comprises an insulating material sandwiched between two metallic layers. The bits are defined by the amount of current that passes through the device via conduction paths in the insulator under a voltage. If the voltage is strong enough, it can induce the formation or destruction of conduction paths, thus controlling information processing.

While fabricating their device, the researchers added electronegative dopants, such as gold atoms, to the insulating material. The electron redistribution induced by the dopants facilitated the formation of conduction paths, which became more stable and showed increased on-off switching consistency compared with their undoped counterparts. Moreover, doped RRAMs were consistently fabricated with conducting paths already established before the device was used. Undoped RRAMs are often fabricated without such paths, and the postfabrication process required to create them—“electroforming,” involving the application of a very strong voltage—can result in irreparable device damage.

Researchers can now predict exactly how soap molecules spread across a body of water, an everyday but surprisingly complex process.

When a tiny drop of soapy water falls onto a pool of liquid, its contents spread out over the pool’s surface. The dynamics of this spreading depend on the local concentration of soap—which varies in time and is difficult to predict—at each point across the entire pool’s surface. Now Thomas Bickel of the University of Bordeaux in Talence, France, and Francois Detcheverry of the University of Lyon, France, have derived an exact time-dependent solution for these distributions [1]. The solution reveals surprisingly rich behaviors in this everyday phenomenon.

The duo considered a surfactant-laden drop spreading over the surface of a deep pool of fluid. Researchers have previously shown that the equations governing the transport of the surfactant particles can be mapped to a partial differential equation known as the Burgers’ equation, which was initially developed to describe flows in turbulent fluids.

Discovery of intriguing material behavior at small scales could reduce energy demands for computing.

As electronic devices become smaller and smaller, the materials that power them need to become thinner and thinner. Because of this, one of the key challenges scientists face in developing next-generation energy-efficient electronics is discovering materials that can maintain special electronic properties at an ultrathin size.

Advanced materials known as ferroelectrics present a promising solution to help lower the power consumed by the ultrasmall electronic devices found in cell phones and computers. Ferroelectrics—the electrical analog to ferromagnets—are a class of materials in which some of the atoms are arranged off-center, leading to a spontaneous internal electric charge or polarization. This internal polarization can reverse its direction when scientists expose the material to an external voltage. This offers great promise for ultralow-power microelectronics.

Gravitational waves are invisible to the naked eye, but can be detected with instruments such as the Large Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Pasadena, California. So, after LIGO detected the first blast of waves from the colliding stars in 2017, astronomers around the world trained their telescopes on the merger to learn whatever they could about it. Before long, astronomers saw visible evidence of a high-speed jet of particles, blazing out of the collision site and lighting up globs of matter that had been ejected by the stars.

In their new paper, astronomers analyzed that jet with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory and several additional radio telescopes on Earth. With these observations, the team calculated both the actual speed of the jet, and the perceived physics-defying speed.

The beyond-light-speed illusion arises from the difference in speed between the particles in the jet, and the light particles (or photons) that they emit. Because the jet’s particles move nearly as fast as the light they emit, it can appear as though particles in the early part of the jet are arriving at Earth at nearly the same time as photons in the later stages of the jet — making it appear as though the jet is actually moving faster than the speed of light.

In quantum physics, Fermi’s golden rule, also known as the golden rule of time-dependent perturbation theory, is a formula that can be used to calculate the rate at which an initial quantum state transitions into a final state, which is composed of a continuum of states (a so-called “bath”). This valuable equation has been applied to numerous physics problems, particularly those for which it is important to consider how systems respond to imposed perturbations and settle into stationary states over time.

Fermi’s golden rule specifically applies to instances in which an initial quantum state is weakly coupled to a continuum of other final states, which overlap its energy. Researchers at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas, Princeton University, and Universität zu Köln have recently set out to investigate what happens when a quantum state is instead coupled to a set of discrete final states with a nonzero mean level spacing, as observed in recent many-body physics studies.

“The decay of a quantum state into some continuum of final states (i.e., a ‘bath’) is commonly associated with incoherent decay processes, as described by Fermi’s golden rule,” Tobias Micklitz, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “A standard example for this is an excited atom emitting a photon into an infinite vacuum. Current date experimentations, on the other hand, routinely realize composite systems involving quantum states coupled to effectively finite size reservoirs that are composed of discrete sets of final states, rather than a continuum.”