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Though they are discrete particles, water molecules flow collectively as liquids, producing streams, waves, whirlpools, and other classic fluid phenomena.

Not so with electricity. While an electric current is also a construct of distinct particles—in this case, —the particles are so small that any among them is drowned out by larger influences as electrons pass through ordinary metals. But, in certain materials and under specific conditions, such effects fade away, and electrons can directly influence each other. In these instances, electrons can flow collectively like a fluid.

Now, physicists at MIT and the Weizmann Institute of Science have observed electrons flowing in vortices, or whirlpools—a hallmark of fluid flow that theorists predicted electrons should exhibit, but that has never been seen until now.

A team of physicists at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Physics and Astronomy has used mathematical calculations to show that quantum communications across interstellar space should be possible. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review D, the group describes their calculations and also the possibility of extraterrestrial beings attempting to communicate with us using such signaling.

Over the past several years, scientists have been investigating the possibility of using quantum communications as a highly secure form of message transmission. Prior research has shown that it would be nearly impossible to intercept such messages without detection. In this new effort, the researchers wondered if similar types of communications might be possible across . To find out, they used that describes that movement of X-rays across a medium, such as those that travel between the stars. More specifically, they looked to see if their calculations could show the degree of decoherence that might occur during such a journey.

With quantum communications, engineers are faced with quantum particles that lose some or all of their unique characteristics as they interact with obstructions in their path—they have been found to be quite delicate, in fact. Such events are known as decoherence, and engineers working to build quantum networks have been devising ways to overcome the problem. Prior research has shown that the space between the stars is pretty clean. But is it clean enough for ? The math shows that it is. Space is so clean, in fact, that X-ray photons could travel hundreds of thousands of light years without becoming subject to decoherence—and that includes gravitational interference from astrophysical bodies. They noted in their work that optical and microwave bands would work equally well.

A team of researchers at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) has discovered three new composite particles from observations made through the Large Hadron Collider – the world’s most powerful particle accelerator located in Switzerland and France. The discovery included a pair of tetraquarks and a pentaquark – thereby showcasing an even wider range of ways in which fundamental particles of the universe can interact with each other.

A quark is a fundamental particle, which means that it has no further known subdivisions in particle physics, as of now. Quarks, along with electrons, form the building blocks of all matter in the universe. A combination of multiple quarks is known as a hadron, which include two type – the positively charged proton and the neutral neutron.

While quarks have commonly been observed to come in combinations of twos and threes, the newly discovered hadrons are being referred to as “exotic” by the scientists because they feature four and five quarks in them. These particles are called ‘composite particles’, since they are composed of smaller fundamental building blocks – the quarks themselves.

The two tetraquarks, Tacs0 (2900)++ and Tacs0 (2900)0, are observed in joint analysis of the B0→ D0Ds+π and B+→DDs+ π+ decays. The new tetraquarks are observed with masses around 2.9 GeV in both the Ds+π+ and Ds+π mass spectra. The former corresponds to the first observation of a doubly charged open-charm tetraquark with minimal quark content csud and the latter is a neutral tetraquark composed of csud quarks. The Ds+π+ and Ds+π mass spectra in the top images above indicate that the sum of contributions from conventional resonances (particles) cannot explain experimental distribution around the mass of 2.9 GeV. On the other hand, the experimental distributions are well understood when the contributions of the two new teraquarks are included in the analysis as shown in the two bottom images above. The mass and the width are determined to be 2.908±0.011±0.02 GeV and 0.136±0.023±0.011 GeV, respectively. The quantum numbers are determined to be JP=0+. In the language of particle physics the two tetraquarks are isospin partners.

In the conventional quark model, strongly interacting particles known as hadrons are formed either from quark-antiquark pairs (mesons) or three quarks (baryons). Particles which cannot be classified within this scheme are referred to as exotic hadrons. In their fundamental 1964 papers [1] and [2], in which they proposed the quark model, Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig mentioned the possibility of adding a quark-antiquark pair to a minimal meson or baryon quark configuration. It took 50 years, however, for physicists to obtain unambiguous experimental evidence of the existence of these exotic hadrons. In April 2014 the LHCb collaboration published measurements that demonstrated that the Z(4430) particle, first observed by the Belle collaboration, is composed of four quarks (ccdu).

Physicists observed a strange new type of behaviour in a magnetic material when it’s heated up. The magnetic spins ‘freeze’ into a static pattern when the temperature rises, a phenomenon that normally occurs when the temperature decreases. They publish their findings in Nature Physics on July 4th.

The researchers discovered the phenomenon in the material neodymium, an element that they described several years ago as a ‘self-induced spin glass’. Spin glasses are typically alloys where iron atoms for example are randomly mixed into a grid of copper atoms. Each iron atom behaves like a small magnet, or a spin. These randomly placed spins point in all kinds of directions.

Unlike conventional spin glasses, where there is random mixing of magnetic materials, neodymium is an element and without significant amounts of any other material, shows glassy behavior in its crystalline form. The spins form patterns that whirl like a helix, and this whirling is random and constantly changes.

Now, as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – the monster proton smasher at the European particle laboratory, Cern – gears up to start its third period of data collection on Tuesday, experts are hoping to unpick further secrets of the fundamental building blocks of the universe.

Bortoletto, now head of particle physics at the University of Oxford and part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson, said her main memory of the events a decade ago was the moment two weeks before the announcement when the researchers unblinded their analysis of the data and saw unambiguous signs of the boson.

“I still, thinking [about] that moment, get the butterflies in my stomach,” she said. “It was unbelievable. It’s really a unique moment in the life of the scientist.”

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We continue our discussion of the Boltzmann Brain — a hypothetical randomly assembled mind rather than an evolved one — by looking at the Anthropic Principle and the Fine-Tuned Universe Theory, alternative ways of viewing the probability of our existence than the classic Copernican Principle.
Make sure to catch Part 1 of the discussion at Up an Atom:

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