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Category: particle physics – Page 259

Riding the Cosmic Wave: How Plasma Instability Is Changing Our View of the Universe

Scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) have discovered a new plasma instability that promises to revolutionize our understanding of the origin of cosmic rays and their dynamic impact on galaxies.

At the beginning of the last century, Victor Hess discovered a new phenomenon called cosmic rays that later on earned him the Nobel prize. He conducted high-altitude balloon flights to find that the Earth’s atmosphere is not ionized by the radioactivity of the ground. Instead, he confirmed that the origin of ionization was extra-terrestrial. Subsequently, it was determined that cosmic “rays” consist of charged particles from outer space flying close to the speed of light rather than radiation. However, the name “cosmic rays” outlasted these findings.

Recent advances in cosmic ray research.

Extending the uncertainty principle by using an unbounded operator

A study published in the journal Physical Review Letters by researchers in Japan solves a long-standing problem in quantum physics by redefining the uncertainty principle.

Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a key and surprising feature of , and he can thank his hay fever for it. Miserable in Berlin in the summer of 1925, the young German physicist vacationed on the remote, rocky island of Helgoland, in the North Sea off the northern German coast. His allergies improved, and he was able to continue his work trying to understand the intricacies of Bohr’s model of the atom, developing tables of internal atomic properties, such as energy, position and momentum.

When he returned to Göttingen, his advisor, Max Born, recognized these tables could each be formed into a matrix—essentially a two-dimensional table of values. Together with the 22-year-old Pasqual Jordan, they refined their work into matrix mechanics—the first successful theory of quantum mechanics—the physical laws that describe tiny objects like atoms and electrons.

Embedding nanodiamonds in polymer can advance quantum computing and biological studies

A nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center is a defect in the crystal structure of diamond, where a nitrogen atom replaces a carbon atom in the diamond lattice and a neighboring site in the lattice is vacant. This and other fluorescent defects in diamond, known as color centers, have attracted researchers’ attention owing to their quantum properties, such as single-photon emission at room temperature and with long coherence time. Their many applications include quantum information encoding and processing, and cell marking in biological studies.

Microfabrication in diamond is technically difficult, and nanodiamonds with color centers have been embedded in custom-designed structures as a way of integrating these quantum emitters into photonic devices. A study conducted at the University of São Paulo’s São Carlos Institute of Physics (IFSC-USP) in Brazil has established a method for this, as described in an article published in the journal Nanomaterials.

“We demonstrated a method of embedding fluorescent nanodiamonds in designed for this purpose, using two-photon polymerization [2PP],” Cleber Mendonça, a professor at IFSC-USP and last author of the article, told Agência FAPESP. “We studied the ideal concentration of nanodiamond in the photoresist to achieve structures with at least one fluorescent NV center and good structural and optical quality.” The photoresist is a light-sensitive material used in the fabrication process to transfer nanoscale patterns to the substrate.

Researchers develop spintronic probabilistic computers compatible with current AI

Moore’s Law predicts that computers get faster every two years because of the evolution of semiconductor chips.

Researchers at Tohoku University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, have shown a proof-of-concept of energy-efficient computer compatible with current AI. It utilizes a stochastic behavior of nanoscale spintronics devices and is particularly suitable for probabilistic computation problems such as inference and sampling.

The team presented the results at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM 2023) on December 12, 2023.

With the slowing down of Moore’s Law, there has been an increasing demand for domain-specific hardware. A probabilistic computer with naturally stochastic building blocks (probabilistic bits, or p-bits) is a representative example due to its potential capability to efficiently address various computationally hard tasks in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).

The Great Solar Wind Disappearance: Groundbreaking Discovery by NASA’s MAVEN Mission

In December 2022, NASA’s MAVEN mission observed a rare solar event causing the solar wind to “disappear.” This led to significant changes in Mars’ atmosphere and magnetosphere, including their expansion. Scientists, astounded by the data, formed a working group to study this phenomenon. Credit: SciTechDaily.com.

NASA ’s MAVEN detected a unique solar event that drastically affected Mars ’ atmosphere, offering vital insights into the planet’s interaction with solar phenomena.

In December 2022, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) mission observed the dramatic and unexpected “disappearance” of a stream of charged particles constantly emanating off the Sun, known as the solar wind. This was caused by a special type of solar event that was so powerful, it created a void in its wake as it traveled through the solar system.

Physicists Hope to Finally Resolve Whether Gravity is Quantum by Levitating Micro Diamonds

If successful, the experiments would not only affirm some of the theories proposing the quantum nature of gravity but could also finally unify general relativity with theories of quantum mechanics.

Unifying General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics Has Proven Elusive

“General relativity and quantum mechanics are the two most fundamental descriptions of nature we have,” explains the press release announcing the new experiments. “General relativity explains gravity on large scales while quantum mechanics explains the behaviour of atoms and molecules.”

Scientists Warn That SpaceX Launches Are Tearing Small Holes in the Sky

SpaceX rockets are tearing holes in the Earth’s atmosphere as they make their return to the surface, triggering what scientists are calling “SpaceX auroras,” a newly coined term that refers to red, spherical spots in the night sky that can easily be seen with the naked eye.

As Spaceweather.com reports, the name isn’t entirely accurate as they’re technically not auroras. They’re the result of SpaceX rockets burning their engines in the Earth’s ionosphere, a part of the upper atmosphere where solar radiation ionizes atoms and molecules to create a protective layer of electrons.

That means that as the rocketmaker ratchets up its launch schedule, that could be a problem, because the ionosphere serves an important technical function by ensuring the stability of shortwave radio communication and GPS signals.

New plasma instability sheds light on the nature of cosmic rays

Scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) have discovered a new plasma instability that promises to revolutionize our understanding of the origin of cosmic rays and their dynamic impact on galaxies.

At the beginning of the last century, Victor Hess discovered a new phenomenon called that later on earned him the Nobel prize. He conducted high-altitude balloon flights to find that the Earth’s atmosphere is not ionized by the radioactivity of the ground. Instead, he confirmed that the origin of ionization was extra-terrestrial. Subsequently, it was determined that cosmic “rays” consist of charged from flying close to the speed of light rather than radiation. However, the name “cosmic rays” outlasted these findings.

In the new study, Dr. Mohamad Shalaby, scientists at AIP and the main author of this study, and his collaborators have performed to follow the trajectories of many cosmic ray particles and study how these interact with the surrounding plasma consisting of electrons and protons. The paper appears on the pre-print server arXiv.

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