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Category: particle physics – Page 402

In her March 7 public lecture at Perimeter Institute, Emily Levesque discusses the history of stellar astronomy, present-day observing techniques and exciting new discoveries, and explores some of the most puzzling and bizarre objects being studied by astronomers today.

Perimeter Institute (charitable registration number 88,981 4323 RR0001) is the world’s largest independent research hub devoted to theoretical physics, created to foster breakthroughs in the fundamental understanding of our universe, from the smallest particles to the entire cosmos. The Perimeter Institute Public Lecture Series is made possible in part by the support of donors like you. Be part of the equation: https://perimeterinstitute.ca/inspiring-and-educating-public.

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Last year, physicists reported that an experimental dark matter detector picked up a strange signal that could hint at new physics, with several suspects highlighted. Now, Cambridge scientists have proposed an answer that wasn’t considered at the time – the experiment may have picked up the first direct detection of dark energy, the mysterious force that’s accelerating the expansion of the universe.

Although it’s thought to outnumber regular matter five to one, dark matter remains elusive. It doesn’t interact with light and seems to mostly make itself known through gravitational influence on cosmic scales, like stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters. But once in a while, a dark matter particle might bump into a regular matter particle in a way that we could detect, with the right equipment.

XENON1T was one version of that equipment. Running in Italy between 2016 and 2,018 the experiment was essentially a big tank full of liquid xenon, kept deep underground. The idea was that if a dark matter particle zipped through the tank, it would excite the xenon atoms to produce a flash of light and free electrons, which a suite of sensors can detect.

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Today, the LHCb experiment at CERN is presenting a new discovery at the European Physical Society Conference on High Energy Physics (EPS-HEP). The new particle discovered by LHCb, labelled as Tcc+, is a tetraquark – an exotic hadron containing two quarks and two antiquarks. It is the longest-lived exotic matter particle ever discovered, and the first to contain two heavy quarks and two light antiquarks.

A tetraquark composed of two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark (Image: D. Dominguez/CERN)

Quarks are the fundamental building blocks from which matter is constructed. They combine to form hadrons, namely baryons, such as the proton and the neutron, which consist of three quarks, and mesons, which are formed as quark-antiquark pairs. In recent years a number of so-called exotic hadrons – particles with four or five quarks, instead of the conventional two or three — have been found. Today’s discovery is of a particularly unique exotic hadron, an exotic exotic hadron if you like.

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By harnessing quantum phenomena, quantum devices have the potential to outperform their classical counterparts. Here, we examine using wave function symmetry as a resource to enhance the performance of a quantum Otto engine. Previous work has shown that a bosonic working medium can yield better performance than a fermionic medium. We expand upon this work by incorporating a singular interaction that allows the effective symmetry to be tuned between the bosonic and fermionic limits. In this framework, the particles can be treated as anyons subject to Haldane’s generalized exclusion statistics. Solving the dynamics analytically using the framework of “statistical anyons”, we explore the interplay between interparticle interactions and wave function symmetry on engine performance.

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Circa 2008

A theoretical study proposes that magnetic monopoles may appear not as elementary but as emergent particles in complex, strongly-correlated magnetic systems such as spin ice, in analogy to fractional electric charges in quantum Hall systems. This theory explains a mysterious phase transition in spin ice that has been observed experimentally.

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Circa 2011 o,.o Foglet bodies around the corner sooner than we think 🤔

Could living things that evolved from metals be clunking about somewhere in the universe? Perhaps. In a lab in Glasgow, UK, one man is intent on proving that metal-based life is possible.

He has managed to build cell-like bubbles from giant metal-containing molecules and has given them some life-like properties. He now hopes to induce them to evolve into fully inorganic self-replicating entities.

“I am 100 per cent positive that we can get evolution to work outside organic biology,” says Lee Cronin (see photo, right) at the University of Glasgow. His building blocks are large “polyoxometalates” made of a range of metal atoms – most recently tungsten – linked to oxygen and phosphorus. By simply mixing them in solution, he can get them to self-assemble into cell-like spheres.

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Researchers at MIT have developed a way of quickly changing the magnetic polarity of a ferrimagnet 180 degrees, using just a small applied voltage. According to the researchers, the discovery could herald a new era of ferrimagnetic logic and data storage systems.

The findings were published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology in a paper co-authored by postdoctoral researcher Mantao Huang, MIT professor of materials science and technology Geoffrey Beach, and professor of nuclear science and technology Bilge Yildiz, as well as 15 other researchers from MIT and other institutions in Minnesota, Germany, Spain, and Korea.

The majority of magnets we come across are of “ferromagnetic” materials. The atoms in these materials are oriented in the same direction with their north-south magnet axes; thus, their combined strength is strong enough to create attraction. As a result, these materials are often used in the modern high-tech environment.

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A subatomic particle has been found to switch between matter and antimatter, according to Oxford physicists analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider. It turns out that an unfathomably tiny weight difference between two particles could have saved the universe from annihilation soon after it began.

Antimatter is kind of the “evil twin” of normal matter, but it’s surprisingly similar – in fact, the only real difference is that antimatter has the opposite charge. That means that if ever a matter and antimatter particle come into contact, they will annihilate each other in a burst of energy.

To complicate things, some particles, such as photons, are actually their own antiparticles. Others have even been seen to exist as a weird mixture of both states at the same time, thanks to the quantum quirk of superposition (illustrated most famously through the thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat.) That means that these particles actually oscillate between being matter and antimatter.

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