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Category: particle physics – Page 22

Students learning quantum mechanics are taught the Schrodinger equation and how to solve it to obtain a wave function. But a crucial step is skipped because it has puzzled scientists since the earliest days—how does the real, classical world emerge from, often, a large number of solutions for the wave functions?

Each of these wave functions has its individual shape and associated , but how does the “collapse” into what we see as the classical world—atoms, cats and the pool noodles floating in the tepid swimming pool of a seedy hotel in Las Vegas hosting a convention of hungover businessmen trying to sell the world a better mousetrap?

At a high level, this is handled by the “Born rule”—the postulate that the probability density for finding an object at a particular location is proportional to the square of the wave function at that position.

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An international team of scientists, led by Dr. Lukas Bruder, a junior research group leader at the University of Freiburg’s Institute of Physics, has successfully created and controlled hybrid electron-photon quantum states in helium atoms.

The team accomplished this by generating specially designed, highly intense extreme ultraviolet light pulses using the FERMI free electron laser in Trieste, Italy. By employing an innovative laser pulse-shaping technique, they were able to precisely control these hybrid quantum states. The groundbreaking findings have been published in Nature.

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Long gone are the days where all our data could fit on a two-megabyte floppy disk. In today’s information-based society, the increasing volume of information being handled demands that we switch to memory options with the lowest power consumption and highest capacity possible.

Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM) is part of the next generation of storage devices expected to meet these needs. Researchers at the Advanced Institute for Materials Research (WPI-AIMR) investigated a cobalt-manganese-iron alloy thin film that demonstrates a high perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA)—key aspects for fabricating MRAM devices using spintronics.

The findings were published in Science and Technology of Advanced Materials on November 13, 2024.

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A team of researchers at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom has made a significant breakthrough in physics by visualizing the shape of a single photon for the first time. This achievement was facilitated by an innovative computer model that simplifies the complex interaction between light and matter, a major challenge in the fields of physics and quantum mechanics.

Photons, the particles of light, have long captivated scientists. Since their discovery, it has been proven that light behaves both as a wave and a particle, a phenomenon known as wave-particle duality. This concept, which took centuries to be accepted, has been pivotal for the advancement of quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that studies subatomic interactions.

Photons are central to many phenomena, including lighting, telecommunications, and even touchscreen technology. However, despite their significance, the precise nature of their shape remained unknown until this team of researchers discovered a new way to visualize them.

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The mystery of dark matter could be solved in as little as 10 seconds.

When the next nearby supernova goes off, any gamma-ray telescope pointing in the right direction might be treated to more than a light show – it could quickly confirm the existence of one of the most promising dark matter candidates.

Astrophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley predict that within the first 10 seconds of a supernova, enough hypothetical particles called axions could be emitted to prove they exist in a relative blink.

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Researchers found that the fungus Parengyodontium album degrades UV-exposed polyethylene in the ocean, suggesting that similar fungi might also break down plastics in deeper waters.

Researchers, including those from NIOZ, have discovered that a marine fungus can decompose the plastic polyethylene after it has been exposed to UV radiation from sunlight. Their findings, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, suggest that numerous other fungi capable of degrading plastic likely reside in the deeper regions of the ocean.

The fungus Parengyodontium album lives together with other marine microbes in thin layers on plastic litter in the ocean. Marine microbiologists from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) discovered that the fungus is capable of breaking down particles of the plastic polyethylene (PE), the most abundant of all plastics that have ended up in the ocean. The NIOZ researchers cooperated with colleagues from Utrecht University, the Ocean Cleanup Foundation and research institutes in Paris, Copenhagen, and St Gallen, Switzerland. The finding allows the fungus to join a very short list of plastic-degrading marine fungi: only four species have been found to date. A larger number of bacteria were already known to be able to degrade plastic.

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As fringe as the idea of solar radiation modification once was and as generally controversial as it remains, it is gaining some traction. Last spring, the University of Chicago hired David Keith, one of the most visible proponents of solar geoengineering, to lead a new Climate Systems Engineering initiative, committing to at least 10 new faculty hires for the program. The group will study solar geoengineering, as well as other kinds of Earth system modifications aimed at addressing the climate crisis.

With this initiative, the University of Chicago is attempting to position itself as the place for serious scientific consideration of the logistics and implications of Earth system interventions aimed at reversing or counteracting climate change. It is part of a broader university effort to become a global leader in the climate and energy space.

Previously, Keith was at Harvard University, where he helped launch the Solar Geoengineering Research Program. After repeated delays and years of controversy, Harvard recently canceled a small-scale outdoor geoengineering experiment that Keith helped plan. That experiment would have involved launching a high-altitude balloon, releasing fine particles of calcium carbonate into the stratosphere, and then sending the balloon back through the cloud to monitor how those particles disperse and interact within the atmosphere, and with solar radiation.

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