Lifeboat Foundation

Florida State University physicists believe they have an answer to unusual incidents of rare decay of a subatomic particle called a Kaon that were reported last year by scientists in the KOTO experiment at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex.

FSU Associate Professor of Physics Takemichi Okui and Assistant Professor of Physics Kohsaku Tobioka published a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters that proposes that this decay is actually a new, short-lived particle that has avoided detection in similar experiments.

“This is such a rare disintegration,” Okui said. “It’s so rare, that they should not have seen any. But if this is correct, how do we explain it? We think this is one possibility.”

Scientists have identified a sub-atomic particle that could have formed the “dark matter” in the Universe during the Big Bang.

Up to 80% of the Universe could be dark matter, but despite many decades of study, its physical origin has remained an enigma. While it cannot be seen directly, scientists know it exists because of its interaction via gravity with visible matter like stars and planets. Dark matter is composed of particles that do not absorb, reflect or emit light.

Now, nuclear physicists at the University of York are putting forward a new candidate for the mysterious matter—a particle they recently discovered called the d-star hexaquark.

That then immediately leads me to ask — given the theoretical properties of the Higgs Boson, are there any proposed ideas for creating a propulsion mechanism from it?

If the Higgs field imparts mass, could it be used to cancel out mass, or lighten it somehow? Could an anti-Higgs field be created?

I’d once read about the possibility of next-generation muon-colliders, and how they could be turned into “Higgs factories”. Could such colliders conceivably be used for a conjectured Higgs propulsion system?

The Deep Space Climate Observatory – a satellite that warns of incoming space storms that could knacker telecommunications on Earth – is up and running again after being shut down for eight months by a technical glitch.

Launched in 2015 aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, the bird, known as DSCOVR for short, was sent into orbit between the Earth and the Sun. Circling at a distance of about a million miles away from terra firma, satellite sports instruments designed to detect approaching geomagnetic storms, and alerts us before highly energetic particles from the solar wind pelt our planet.

A group of scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan has succeeded in taking repeated measurements of the spin of an electron in a silicon quantum dot (QD) without changing its spin in the process. This type of “non-demolition” measurement is important for creating quantum computers that are fault-tolerant. Quantum computers would make it easier to perform certain classes of calculations such as many-body problems, which are extremely difficult and time-consuming for conventional computers. Essentially, the involve measuring a quantum value that is never in a single state like a conventional transistor, but instead exists as a “superimposed state”—in the same way that Schrodinger’s famous cat cannot be said to be alive or dead until it is observed. Using such systems, it is possible to conduct calculations with a qubit that is a superimposition of two values, and then determine statistically what the correct result is. Quantum computers that use single electron spins in silicon QDs are seen as attractive due to their potential scalability and because silicon is already widely used in electronics technology.

The key difficulty with developing quantum computers, however, is that they are very sensitive to external noise, making error correction critical. So far, researchers have succeeded in developing single electron spins in silicon QDs with a long information retention time and high-precision quantum operation, but quantum non-demolition measurement—a key to effective error correction—has proven elusive. The conventional method for reading out single electron spins in silicon is to convert the spins into charges that can be rapidly detected, but unfortunately, the electron spin is affected by the detection process.

Now, in research published in Nature Communications, the RIKEN team has achieved such non-demolition measurement. The key insight that allowed the group to make the advance was to use the Ising type interaction model—a model of ferromagnetism that looks at how the electron spins of neighboring atoms become aligned, leading to the formation of ferromagnetism in the entire lattice. Essentially, they were able to transfer the spin information—up or down—of an electron in a QD to another electron in the neighboring QD using the Ising type interaction in a magnetic field, and then could measure the spin of the neighbor using the conventional method, so that they could leave the original spin unaffected, and could carry out repeated and rapid measurements of the neighbor.

Scientists at the University of Sussex have measured a property of the neutron—a fundamental particle in the universe—more precisely than ever before. Their research is part of an investigation into why there is matter left over in the universe, that is, why all the antimatter created in the Big Bang didn’t just cancel out the matter.

The team—which included the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland, and a number of other institutions—was looking into whether or not the neutron acts like an “electric compass.” Neutrons are believed to be slightly asymmetrical in shape, being slightly positive at one end and slightly negative at the other—a bit like the electrical equivalent of a bar magnet. This is the so-called “electric dipole moment” (EDM), and is what the team was looking for.

This is an important piece of the puzzle in the mystery of why matter remains in the Universe, because scientific theories about why there is matter left over also predict that neutrons have the “electric compass” property, to a greater or lesser extent. Measuring it then it helps scientists to get closer to the truth about why matter remains.

Materials that exhibit topological phases can be classified by their dimensionality, symmetries and topological invariants to form conductive-edge states with peculiar transport and spin properties. For example, the quantum Hall effect can arise in two-dimensional (2-D) electron systems subjected to a perpendicular magnetic field. When distinct characteristics of quantum Hall systems are compared with time-reversal symmetric (entropy conserved) topological insulators (TIs), they appear to rely on Coulomb interactions between electrons to induce a wealth of strongly correlated, topologically or symmetry-projected phases in a variety of experimental systems.

In a new report now on Science, Louis Veyrat and a research team in materials science, quantum optics and optoelectronics in France, China and Japan tuned the ground state of the graphene zeroth Landau level i.e. orbitals occupied by charged particles with discrete energy values. Using suitable screening of the Coulomb interaction with the high dielectric constant of a strontium titanate (SrTiO₃) substrate, they observed robust helical edge transport at magnetic fields as low as 1 Tesla, withstanding temperatures of up to 110 kelvin across micron-long distances. These versatile graphene platforms will have applications in spintronics and topological quantum computation.

Topological insulators (TIs), i.e., a material that behaves as an insulator in its interior but retains a conducting surface state, with zero Chern number have emerged as quantum Hall topological insulators (QHTIs) arising from many-body interacting Landau levels. They can be pictured as two independent copies of quantum Hall systems with opposite chirality, but the experimental system is at odds with the described scenario, where a strong insulating state is observed on increasing the perpendicular magnetic field in charge-neutral, high-mobility graphene devices.

The world’s first self-sufficient sea vessel, Energy Observer, is due to leave her home port of Saint-Malo in Brittany, France, over the next few days on the first leg of a global voyage to test and promote renewable energy technologies.

This isn’t just any yacht though, it uses nothing but renewable energy sources to run. Specifically, it produces hydrogen from seawater with zero CO₂ emissions and zero fine particles.

At a quantum level, the vanishingly tiny particles that make up the building blocks of everything don’t even have a set location, just a smear of possible positions dictated by complex rules of probability.

And theoretical physicist Sean Carroll is entirely happy with that. He says that the fact that tiny particles like electrons and photons don’t have one set place in the universe is evidence that there are many parallel universes.