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Category: particle physics – Page 342

If true, this idea could even help us understand all of the dark matter in our universe.

Trying to make sense of information is a universal daily experience. For physicist Melvin Vopson, this pursuit goes well beyond the mundane—he’s trying to prove that information has a physical presence. It’s a weighty task that could lead to new insights about how we can manage the future of information storage. It could also lead to a fundamental shift in how we think about the universe.

Vopson, who studies information theory at University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, wants to use an experiment to confirm that elementary particles have measurable mass. It would involve a matter-antimatter annihilation process that would shoot a beam of positrons at electrons in a piece of metal. Positrons and electrons are both subatomic particles, with the same mass and magnitude of charge. However, positrons are positively charged, and electrons are negatively charged.

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Now, though, new research is helping us understand this strange dusty environment and paving the way for safer Mars missions in the future — like a crewed landing and possibly even a permanent settlement.

The problem of dust

Mars’s surface is covered in fine particles of dust. With its smaller size than Earth, it has lower gravity – around one-third of the gravity here – and a thinner atmosphere, which is around one percent of the density of Earth’s atmosphere. That means it is easy for winds to form and to pick up those dust particles, blowing them into a dust storm.

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The sunspot, called AR2975, has been shooting out flares of electrically charged particles from the sun’s plasma soup since Monday (March 28). Sunspots are areas on the sun’s surface where powerful magnetic fields, created by the flow of electrical charges, knot into kinks before suddenly snapping. The resulting release of energy launches bursts of radiation called solar flares, or explosive jets of solar material called coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

Related: Strange new type of solar wave defies physics

Cannibal coronal mass ejections happen when fast-moving solar eruptions overtake earlier eruptions in the same region of space, sweeping up charged particles to form a giant, combined wavefront that triggers a powerful geomagnetic storm.

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Australia’s first fusion energy company HB11 Energy has demonstrated a world-first ‘material’ number of fusion reactions by a private company, producing ten times more fusion reactions than expected based on earlier experiments at the same facility. The technology utilizes high-power, high-precision lasers to start non-thermal fusion reactions between hydrogen and boron-11 rather than heating hydrogen isotopes to hundred-million-degrees temperatures.

This approach was predicted in the 1970s at UNSW by Australian theoretical physicist and HB11 Energy co-founder Professor Heinrich Hora. It differs radically from most other fusion efforts to date that require heating of hydrogen isotopes to millions of degrees.

Nuclear fusion powers the Sun and other stars as hydrogen atoms fuse together to form helium, and the matter is converted into energy. The Sun accomplishes fusion by having a huge amount of hydrogen atoms packed into a plasma that’s superheated to tens of millions of degrees at its core. At these temperatures, the hydrogen atoms move so fast and eventually reach speeds high enough to bring the ions close enough together that they smack into each other and fuse, releasing the energy that warms our planet.

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A group of researchers working with data from the Borexino detector at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy, has shown that it is possible to measure solar neutrinos with both directional and energy sensitivity. Two teams within the group have written papers describing the work by the group—one of them has published their work in Physical Review D, the other in Physical Review Letters.

The Borexino detector was first proposed back in 1986 and its structure was completed in 2004. In May of 2007, it began providing researchers with data. Its purpose has been to measure neutrino fluxes in proton-proton chains. The detector, which is currently being dismantled, was made using 280 metric tons of radio-pure liquid scintillator which was shielded by a layer of water. Detections were made as scattered off electrons in the scintillator—the light that was emitted was picked up by sensors lining the tank.

For most of its existence, data from the Borexino detector was an excellent source of high-resolution sensitivity data down to low energy thresholds, but it offered little in the way of directional trajectories. In this new effort, the researchers found a way to use the data from the detector with data from another detector to provide trajectory information.

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HB11 is approaching nuclear fusion from an entirely new angle, using high power, high precision lasers instead of hundred-million-degree temperatures to start the reaction. Its first demo has produced 10 times more fusion reactions than expected, and the company says it’s now “the only commercial entity to achieve fusion so far,” making it “the global frontrunner in the race to commercialize the holy grail of clean energy.”

We’ve covered Australian company HB11’s hydrogen-boron laser fusion innovations before in detail, but it’s worth briefly summarizing what makes this company so different from the rest of the field. In order to smash atoms together hard enough to make them fuse together and form a new element, you need to overcome the incredibly strong repulsive forces that push two positively-charged nuclei apart. It’s like throwing powerful magnets at each other in space, hoping to smash two north poles together instead of having them just dance out of each other’s way.

The Sun accomplishes this by having a huge amount of hydrogen atoms packed into a plasma that’s superheated to tens of millions of degrees at its core. Heat is a measure of kinetic energy – how fast a group of atoms or molecules are moving or vibrating. At these temperatures, the hydrogen atoms are moving so fast that they smack into each other and fuse, releasing the energy that warms our planet.

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The secret sauce? An improved manufacturing process that eliminates corrosive carbon dioxide gas.

There’s a better way to build solid-state lithium batteries, scientists say. By studying the battery manufacturing process, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Upton, New York-based Brookhaven National Laboratory have eliminated a tiny (but crucial) contamination issue, which could cut down on the complexity in future battery designs.

Solid-state batteries are widely considered to be the next great thing in rechargeable battery design. With an energy capacity at least two times greater than traditional lithium-ion batteries with flammable liquid electrolytes, solid-state batteries are safer, as well as more efficient—a huge pair of selling points for electric consumer vehicles in particular.

So what’s stopping solid-state lithium batteries from fully revolutionizing the industry? There are two issues: conductivity, and instability where the materials join. The first is easy to explain: volatile liquid electrolytes allow electrons to move freely, which is more challenging within a solid material with less particle mobility.

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The prospects for directly testing a theory of quantum gravity are poor, to put it mildly. To probe the ultra-tiny Planck scale, where quantum gravitational effects appear, you would need a particle accelerator as big as the Milky Way galaxy. Likewise, black holes hold singularities that are governed by quantum gravity, but no black holes are particularly close by — and even if they were, we could never hope to see what’s inside. Quantum gravity was also at work in the first moments of the Big Bang, but direct signals from that era are long gone, leaving us to decipher subtle clues that first appeared hundreds of thousands of years later.

But in a small lab just outside Palo Alto, the Stanford University professor Monika Schleier-Smith and her team are trying a different way to test quantum gravity, without black holes or galaxy-size particle accelerators. Physicists have been suggesting for over a decade that gravity — and even space-time itself — may emerge from a strange quantum connection called entanglement. Schleier-Smith and her collaborators are reverse-engineering the process. By engineering highly entangled quantum systems in a tabletop experiment, Schleier-Smith hopes to produce something that looks and acts like the warped space-time predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

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The Mu2e experiment at Fermilab will look for a never-before-seen subatomic phenomenon that, if observed, would transform our understanding of elementary particles: the direct conversion of a muon into an electron. An international collaboration of over 200 scientists is building the Mu2e precision particle detector that will hunt for new physics beyond the Standard Model.

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A gas made of particles of light, or photons, becomes easier to compress the more you squash it. This strange property could prove useful in making highly sensitive sensors.

While gases are normally made from atoms or molecules, it is possible to create a gas of photons by trapping them with lasers. But a gas made this way doesn’t have a uniform density – researchers say it isn’t homogeneous, or pure – making it difficult to study properly.

Now Julian Schmitt at the University of Bonn, Germany, and his colleagues have made a homogeneous photon gas for the first time by trapping photons between two nanoscale mirrors.

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