Lifeboat Foundation

An instrument aboard NASA’s New Horizons is sending back data that could help scientists predict when the unmanned deep-space probe will reach interstellar space. Using the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument aboard the spacecraft, a team of researchers led by Southwest Research Institute are learning more about how the solar winds change in the outer regions of the solar system.

Though the solar system may look like a big ball of nuclear fire at the center surrounded by a scattering of tiny, solid objects sitting in a lot of very hard vacuum, all that nothingness is permeated by the solar winds – an unceasing flow of ionized particles from the Sun that forms an uneven bubble around our family of planets called the heliosphere.

The outer limit of the heliosphere is where it encounters materials from interstellar space. This is the point where the solar wind slow down to subsonic speeds due to interacting and then is stopped altogether by the interstellar medium. These two points are called, respectively, the termination shock and the heliopause.

Three physicists have proposed a new solution to one of the deepest mysteries in particle physics: why the Higgs boson has such a tiny mass.

Fresh evidence of an unknown particle that could carry a fifth force of nature gives the NA64 collaboration at CERN a new incentive to continue searches.

In 2015, a team of scientists spotted an unexpected glitch, or “anomaly,” in a nuclear transition that could be explained by the production of an unknown particle. About a year later, theorists suggested that the new particle could be evidence of a new fundamental force of nature, in addition to electromagnetism, gravity and the strong and weak forces. The findings caught worldwide attention and prompted, among other studies, a direct search for the particle by the NA64 collaboration at CERN.

A new paper (pdf) from the same team, led by Attila Krasznahorkay at the Atomki institute in Hungary, now reports another anomaly, in a similar nuclear transition, that could also be explained by the same hypothetical particle.

Determining the quantum mechanical behavior of many interacting particles is essential to solving important problems in a variety of scientific fields, including physics, chemistry and mathematics. For instance, in order to describe the electronic structure of materials and molecules, researchers first need to find the ground, excited and thermal states of the Born-Oppenheimer Hamiltonian approximation. In quantum chemistry, the Born-Oppenheimer approximation is the assumption that electronic and nuclear motions in molecules can be separated.

A variety of other scientific problems also require the accurate computation of Hamiltonian ground, excited and thermal states on a quantum computer. An important example are combinatorial optimization problems, which can be reduced to finding the ground state of suitable spin systems.

So far, techniques for computing Hamiltonian eigenstates on quantum computers have been primarily based on phase estimation or variational algorithms, which are designed to approximate the lowest energy eigenstate (i.e., ground state) and a number of excited states. Unfortunately, these techniques can have significant disadvantages, which make them impracticable for solving many scientific problems.

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In 1981 astronomer Robert Kirshner made a shocking intergalactic discovery. 700 million light years from the Earth lies an enormous, barren sphere known as the Boötes Void. Its very existence challenges what we know about the universe and its origins. The Void is at least ten times larger than the rules of modern physics say is reasonably likely. As a structure, the Void verges on the impossible.

Yet, this disturbing formation is consistent with Nikolai Kardashev’s 1962 theory of advanced alien civilizations and their behavior. Could it be home to a hyper-intelligent extraterrestrial species? A void is a massive region of space that holds either minimal or no galaxies. They are created when mass collapses, and is followed by subatomic particle implosions. With a diameter of 330 million light years, the Boötes Void makes up 0.27% of the observable universe. But according to established scientific understanding its huge size is impossible. The Big Bang theory states that the universe is 14 billion years old, and that it has been expanding exponentially since its birth. Given the age of the universe, there has only been enough time for voids to form that are tens of millions of light years across, not hundreds. Stranger still, is just how empty the Bootes Void is.

Continue reading “The Boötes Void: Is This Evidence Of An Alien Civilization?” »

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In the world of materials science, many have heard of crystals—highly ordered structures in which atoms are arranged in a tight and periodic manner (in which the atomic arrangement is repeated). But, not many people know about quasicrystals, which are unique structures with strange atomic arrangements. Like crystals, quasicrystals are also tightly arranged, but what’s different about them is the fact that they possess an unprecedented pentagonal symmetry, such that the atomic arrangement is highly ordered but not periodic.

This distinctive feature gives them unique properties, like high stability, resistance to heat, and low friction. Since their discovery only about 30 years ago, scientists globally have been trying to understand the properties of quasicrystals, in an effort to make more advancements in materials research. But, this is not easy, as quasicrystals are not prevalent in nature. Luckily, they have been able to make use of structures similar to quasicrystals, called “Tsai-type approximants.” Understanding these structures in detail could give insights into the many properties of quasicrystals. One such property is antiferromagnetism, in which magnetic moments are aligned in a quasiperiodic order, strikingly distinguished from conventional antiferromagnets. This property has never been observed in quasicrystals so far, but the possibility was exciting for materials scientists, as it could be a gateway to a plethora of new applications.

Continue reading “New study shows unique magnetic transitions in quasicrystal-like structures” »

Here’s a curious thought experiment. Imagine a cloud of quantum particles that are entangled—in other words, they share the same quantum existence. The behavior of these particles is chaotic. The goal of this experiment is to send a quantum message across this set of particles. So the message has to be sent into one side of the cloud and then extracted from the other.

The first step, then, is to divide the cloud down the middle so that the particles on the left can be controlled separately from those on the right. The next step is to inject the message into the left-hand part of the cloud, where the chaotic behavior of the particles quickly scrambles it.

Can such a message ever be unscrambled?

A pair of physicists from Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University (IKBFU) in Russia recently proposed an entirely new view of the cosmos. Their research takes the wacky idea that we’re living in a computer simulation and mashes it up with the mind-boggling “many worlds” theory to say that, essentially, our entire universe is part of an immeasurably large quantum system spanning “uncountable” multiverses.

When you think about quantum systems, like IBM and Google’s quantum computers, we usually imagine a device that’s designed to work with subatomic particles – qubits – to perform quantum calculations.

The universe is governed by four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. These forces drive the motion and behavior of everything we see around us. At least that’s what we think. But over the past several years there’s been increasing evidence of a fifth fundamental force. New research hasn’t discovered this fifth force, but it does show that we still don’t fully understand these cosmic forces.

The fundamental forces are a part of the standard model of particle physics. This model describes all the various quantum particles we observe, such as electrons, protons, antimatter, and such. Quarks, neutrinos and the Higgs boson are all part of the model.

Continue reading “A Fifth Fundamental Force Could Really Exist, But We Haven’t Found It Yet” »