Nothing escapes relativity—not top quarks. Scientists tested this with the Large Hadron Collider.
Scientists used the most massive fundamental particles to break special relativity, but even that didn’t work.
Category: particle physics – Page 45
An international team of researchers led by the Strong Correlation Quantum Transport Laboratory of the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) has demonstrated, in a world’s first, an ideal Weyl semimetal, marking a breakthrough in a decade-old problem of quantum materials.
Weyl fermions arise as collective quantum excitations of electrons in crystals. They are predicted to show exotic electromagnetic properties, attracting intense worldwide interest.
However, despite the careful study of thousands of crystals, most Weyl materials to date exhibit electrical conduction governed overwhelmingly by undesired, trivial electrons, obscuring the Weyl fermions. At last, researchers have synthesized a material hosting a single pair of Weyl fermions and no irrelevant electronic states.
A team of international researchers has developed an innovative approach to uncover the secrets of dark matter. In a collaboration between the University of Queensland, Australia, and Germany’s metrology institute (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, PTB), the team used data from atomic clocks and cavity-stabilized lasers located far apart in space and time to search for forms of dark matter that would have been invisible in previous searches.
This technique will allow the researchers to detect signals from dark matter models that interact universally with all atoms, an achievement that has eluded traditional experiments.
The team analyzed data from a European network of ultra-stable lasers connected by fiber optic cables (previously reported in a 2022 article), and from the atomic clocks aboard GPS satellites. By comparing precision measurements across vast distances, the analysis became sensitive to subtle effects of oscillating dark matter fields that would otherwise cancel out in conventional setups.
Scientists have developed ‘entanglement microscopy,’ a technique that maps quantum entanglement at a microscopic level.
By studying the deep connections between particles, researchers can now visualize the hidden structures of quantum matter, offering new perspectives on particle interaction that could revolutionize technology and our understanding of the universe.
Quantum entanglement is a fascinating phenomenon where particles remain mysteriously linked, even when separated by vast distances. Understanding how this connection works, especially in complex quantum systems, has been a long-standing challenge in physics.
The combination problem may, in fact, be a reason to favor a version of panpsychism in which consciousness is fundamental in the form of a continuous, pervasive field, analogous to spacetime. Just as spacetime and gravity have an interactive relationship, consciousness can be thought of as a fundamental “field” that interacts with, and is integral to, matter. We typically don’t think of spacetime as bits and pieces that build on each other (it’s simply everywhere), and I don’t think we should be tempted to think of consciousness, if it is indeed a pervasive field, as divisible into building blocks either. Rather, it makes more sense to talk about a field that contains a range of content —the content depending on the other forces or fields it’s interacting with. In the same way that gravity is a two-way street—matter warps spacetime and the shape of spacetime determines how matter moves—a consciousness field would imbue matter with another property, giving rise to the range of content experience d. Under this view, content is divisible, but consciousness isn’t. Therefore, consciousness is also not interacting with itself, as it would be in the act of “combining.” Considering consciousness to be fundamental allows for matter to have a specific internal character everywhere, in all of its various forms.
If consciousness is fundamental, then the questions that prompt the combination problem are potentially the same as all the other questions we might ask about spacetime in which we don’t anticipate this problem. All matter would entail consciousness, and complex systems, such as human brains, would give rise to certain types of content in those locations in spacetime. Even if each individual atom has its own experience, consciousness itself is not necessarily isolated. The matter might be isolated, and therefore the content associated with the consciousness at that location is isolated. But consciousness itself would not be said to be isolated. Again, we can think of consciousness as analogous to spacetime: How it’s affected by matter depends on the matter in question (its mass, in the case of spacetime). Similarly, a consciousness field might be “shaped” by matter in terms of experiential quality or content. And this line of thinking yields interesting questions.
In a universe stretched thin by eons, where stars have long faded and even atoms face their end, a single question remains: can intelligence find a way to outlast time itself?
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Credits:
Civilizations At The End Of Time: Eternal Intelligence.
Episode 483; January 23, 2025
Written, Produced \& Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Edited by: Ludwig Luska.
Graphics by: Jeremy Jozwik.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Phase Shift, \
The particle-physics funder will provide financial incentives to encourage practices such as data sharing and transparent peer review.
Chirality refers to objects that cannot be superimposed onto their mirror images through any combination of rotations or translations, much like the distinct left and right hands of a human. In chiral crystals, the spatial arrangement of atoms confers a specific “handedness,” which—for example—influences their optical and electrical properties.
A Hamburg-Oxford team has focused on so-called antiferro-chirals, a type of non-chiral crystal reminiscent of antiferro-magnetic materials, in which magnetic moments anti-align in a staggered pattern leading to a vanishing net magnetization. An antiferro-chiral crystal is composed of equivalent amounts of left-and right-handed substructures in a unit cell, rendering it overall non-chiral.
The research team, led by Andrea Cavalleri of the Max-Planck-Institut for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, used terahertz light to lift this balance in the non-chiral material boron phosphate (BPO4), in this way inducing finite chirality on an ultrafast time scale.
Perovskite solar cells are attracting attention as next-generation solar cells. These cells have high efficiency, are flexible, and can be printed, among other features. However, lead was initially used in their manufacture, and its toxicity has become an environmental issue.
Therefore, a method for replacing lead with tin, which has a low environmental impact, has been proposed. Nevertheless, tin is easily oxidized; consequently, the efficiency and durability of tin perovskite solar cells are lower than those of lead perovskite solar cells.
To improve the durability of tin perovskite by suppressing tin oxidation, a method that introduces large organic cations into tin perovskite crystals to form a two-dimensional layered structure called Ruddlesden-Popper (RP) tin-based perovskites has been proposed. However, the internal state of this structure and the mechanism by which it improves performance have not been fully elucidated.
The chemical composition of a material alone sometimes reveals little about its properties. The decisive factor is often the arrangement of the molecules in the atomic lattice structure or on the surface of the material. Materials science utilizes this factor to create certain properties by applying individual atoms and molecules to surfaces with the aid of high-performance microscopes. This is still extremely time-consuming and the constructed nanostructures are comparatively simple.
Using artificial intelligence, a research group at TU Graz now wants to take the construction of nanostructures to a new level. Their paper is published in the journal Computer Physics Communications.
“We want to develop a self-learning AI system that positions individual molecules quickly, specifically and in the right orientation, and all this completely autonomously,” says Oliver Hofmann from the Institute of Solid State Physics, who heads the research group. This should make it possible to build highly complex molecular structures, including logic circuits in the nanometer range.