Through optomechanical experiments, scientists aim to delve into the boundaries of the quantum realm and lay the groundwork for the creation of highly sensitive quantum sensors. In these experiments, everyday visible objects are coupled to superconducting circuits through electromagnetic fields.
To produce functional superconductors, these experiments are conducted inside cryostats at a temperature of around 100 millikelvins. However, this is still far from low enough to truly enter the quantum world. In order to observe quantum effects on large-scale objects, they must be cooled to nearly absolute zero.
Absolute zero is the theoretical lowest temperature on the thermodynamic temperature scale. At this temperature, all atoms of an object are at rest and the object does not emit or absorb energy. The internationally agreed-upon value for this temperature is −273.15 °C (−459.67 °F; 0.00 K).
The only things that travel at the speed of light are photons. Nothing with any mass at all can travel at the speed of light because as it gets closer and closer to the speed of light, its mass increases. And if it were actually traveling at the speed of light, it would have an infinite mass. Light does not experience space or time. It’s not just a speed going through something. All of the universe shifts around this constant, the speed of light. Time and space itself stop when you go that speed.
MICHELLE THALLER: Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit. NASA.
TRANSCRIPT: MICHELLE THALLER: So, Tom, you asked the question, “How does mass increase as you go faster?” And this is really a wonderful part of Einstein’s theories. It actually is also relatively slippery and kind of complicated because to even answer this question at all, we have to ask the rather strange question: “What do you mean by mass? What is your definition of mass?” You may have heard that nothing with mass can possibly go at the speed of light. The only things that travel at the speed of light are photons pure energy, light, the speed of light. Nothing with any mass at all can travel at the speed of light because as it gets closer and closer to the speed of light, its mass increases. And if it were actually traveling at the speed of light, it would have an infinite mass. So think about that. Even if you had a tiny little particle that was, say, billions of times less massive than an electron just a tiny, tiny little piece of mass if for some reason, that tiny thing accelerated to the speed of light, it would have an infinite mass. And that’s a bit of a problem. So let’s talk about this. One of the things that you really have to realize is the speed of light is very, very special. It’s not just simply a speed of something moving through space. As you go faster and faster and closer to the speed of light, time itself begins to slow down. And space begins to contract. As you go close to the speed of light, the entire universe becomes smaller and smaller until it basically just becomes a single point when you’re going at the speed of light. And time, as you go closer to the speed of light, gets slower and slower until basically time is a single point at the speed of light. Light does not experience space or time. It’s not just a speed going through something. All of the universe shifts around this constant, the speed of light. Time and space itself stop when you go that speed. So the reason you can’t accelerate to the speed of light, and the reason we say you have an infinite mass is a little complicated because the idea that mass actually is a measurement of energy. You may remember Einstein’s famous equation, E equals MC squared. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Energy and mass are equivalent. Mass is basically a measurement of how much energy there is in an object. When you’re moving, you have the energy of your motion, too. That’s called kinetic energy, energy of motion. So E equals MC squared, now your mass has not just the stuff that’s in you but also the energy of your motion. And that’s why mass seems to increase as you go faster, and faster, and closer to the speed of light. It’s not that you are actually getting any heavier. The increase in mass is something that’s only observed by people that are watching you go by. If you were on a spaceship going very fast at the speed of light, you don’t notice anything getting heavier. You are on your spaceship. You could jump up and down. You can skip rope. You can do whatever you want. You don’t notice any change at all. But if people try to measure your mass as you go by, they not only are measuring your rest mass — your mass when you were still — but this added energy of this h…For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/speed-of-light
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There’s more than one way to make a black hole, says NASA’s Michelle Thaller. They’re not always formed from dead stars. For example, there are teeny tiny black holes all around us, the result of high-energy cosmic rays slamming into our atmosphere with enough force to cram matter together so densely that no light can escape.
CERN is trying to create artificial black holes right now, but don’t worry, it’s not dangerous. Scientists there are attempting to smash two particles together with such intensity that it creates a black hole that would live for just a millionth of a second.
Thaller uses a brilliant analogy involving a rubber sheet, a marble, and an elephant to explain why different black holes have varying densities. Watch and learn!
As fantastic as this may seem this is not an impossible occurrence.
Before Einstein, time travel was just a story, but his calculations led us into the quantum world and gave us a more complicated picture of time. Kurt Godel found that Einstein’s equations made it possible to go back in time. What’s up? None of the ideas about how to go back in time were ever physically possible.
Before sending a particle back in time, scientists from ETH Zurich, Argonne National Laboratory, and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology asked, Why stick to physical grounds?
Many laws of physics treat the future and the past as if they are one thing. The second rule of thermodynamics says that in a closed system, order gives way to chaos (or entropy). When you scramble an egg to make an omelet, you add a lot of chaos to the egg, which was a closed system before.
Adhering to Moore’s Law, the number of transistors on a microchip has doubled annually since the 1960s, but this growth is expected to reach its limit as silicon, the foundation of modern transistors, loses its electrical properties when devices made from it dip below a certain size.
Enter 2D materials — delicate, two-dimensional sheets of perfect crystals that are as thin as a single atom.
An atom is the smallest component of an element. It is made up of protons and neutrons within the nucleus, and electrons circling the nucleus.
For all of the unparalleled, parallel-processing, still-indistinguishable-from-magic wizardry packed into the three pounds of an adult human brain, it obeys the same rule as the other living tissue it controls: Oxygen is a must.
So it was with a touch of irony that Evgeny Tsymbal offered his explanation for a technological wonder—movable, data-covered walls mere atoms wide—that may eventually help computers behave more like a brain.
“There was unambiguous evidence that oxygen vacancies are responsible for this,” said Tsymbal, George Holmes University Professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Researchers have learned much about neutrinos over the past few decades, but some mysteries remain unsolved. For example, the standard model predicts that neutrinos are massless, but experiments say otherwise. One possible solution to this mass mystery involves another group of neutrinos that does not interact directly via the weak nuclear force and is therefore extremely difficult to detect. David Moore of Yale University and his colleagues have proposed a way to search for these so-called sterile neutrinos using a radioactive nanoparticle suspended in a laser beam [1].
Moore and his colleagues suggest levitating a 100-nm-diameter silica sphere in an optical trap and cooling it to its motional ground state. If the nanoparticle is filled with nuclei that decay by emitting neutrinos—such as certain argon or phosphorous isotopes—then electrons and neutrinos zipping from decaying nuclei should give it a momentum kick. By measuring the magnitude of this kick, the team hopes to determine the neutrinos’ momenta. Although most of these neutrinos will be the familiar three neutrino flavors, sterile neutrinos—if they exist—should also occasionally be emitted, producing unexpectedly small momentum kicks. Moore says that monitoring a single nanoparticle for one month would equate to a sterile-neutrino sensitivity 10 times better than that of any experiment tried so far.
Moore and his team are currently working on a proof-of-principle experiment using alpha-emitting by-products of radon, which result in a larger momentum kick. Once the techniques are optimized, they expect that switching to beta-decaying isotopes will let them see heavy sterile neutrinos in the 0.1–1 MeV mass range. Introducing more quantum tricks to manipulate the nanoparticle’s quantum state will make future experiments sensitive to even lighter sterile neutrinos.
Scientists said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than light – a finding that could overturn one of Einstein’s fundamental laws of the universe. Antonio Ereditato, spokesman for the international group of researchers, saidthat measurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done.
“We have high confidence in our results. We have checked and rechecked for anything that could have distorted our measurements but we found nothing,” he said. “We now want colleagues to check them independently.”
If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a “cosmic constant” and that nothing in the universe can travel faster. That assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, which attempts to describe the way the universe and everything in it works. The totally unexpected finding emerged from research by a physicists working on an experiment dubbed OPERA run jointly by the CERN particle research center near Geneva and the Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy.
