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Category: particle physics – Page 464

Neutral atoms and charged ions can be cooled down to extremely low temperatures (i.e., to microkelvins, 1 millionth of a degree above absolute zero) using laser techniques. At these low temperatures, the particles have often been found to behave in accordance with the laws of quantum mechanics.

Researchers have been conducting laser cooling experiments on and ions for decades now. So far, however, no study had observed mixtures of both atoms and ions at extremely low temperatures.

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam were the first to achieve this by placing an ion inside a cloud of lithium atoms pre-cooled to a few millionths of a kelvin. Their observations, published in Nature Physics, unveiled numerous effects that could have interesting implications for the development of new quantum technologies.

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Physicists at Purdue University and the University of New South Wales have built a transistor from a single atom of phosphorous precisely placed on a bed of silicon, taking another step towards the holy grail of tech research: the quantum computer.

Revealed on Sunday in the academic journal Nature Nanotechnology, the research is part of a decade-long effort at the University of New South Wales to deliver a quantum computer – a machine that would use the seemingly magical properties of very small particles to instantly perform calculations beyond the scope of today’s classical computers.

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Massive-scale particle physics produces correspondingly large amounts of data – and this is particularly true of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, which is housed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. In 2026, the LHC will receive a massive upgrade through the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) Project. This will increase the LHC’s data output by five to seven times – billions of particle events every second – and researchers are scrambling to prepare big data computing for this deluge of particle physics data. Now, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are working to tackle high volumes of particle physics data with quantum computing.

When a particle accelerator runs, particle detectors offer data points for where particles crossed certain thresholds in the accelerator. Researchers then attempt to reconstruct precisely how the particles traveled through the accelerator, typically using some form of computer-aided pattern recognition.

This project, which is led by Heather Gray, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a particle physicist at Berkeley Lab, is called Quantum Pattern Recognition for High-Energy Physics (or HEP.QPR). In essence, HEP.QPR aims to use quantum computing to speed this pattern recognition process. HEP.QPR also includes Berkeley Lab scientists Wahid Bhimji, Paolo Calafiura and Wim Lavrijsen.

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For the first time, researchers have used light to control the shape of nanoparticles and create micron-size hollow shells from crystals of cuprous oxide (copper and oxygen). Such particles could have future applications as a low-cost catalyst to help pull excess carbon dioxide from the air, a way to improve microscopic imaging and more, says Bryce Sadtler, a chemist at Washington University in St. Louis and senior author of a study on the new method, published last October in Chemistry of Materials.

Hollowed-out microcrystals could lock away carbon.

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Superfluid helium, describable by a two-component order parameter, exhibits only the Bogolubov mode with energy $\to 0$ at long wavelengths, while a Lorentz-invariant theory with a two-component order parameter exhibits a finite energy mode at long wavelengths (the Higgs Boson), besides the above mass-less mode. The mass-less mode moves to high energies if it couples to electromagnetic fields (the Anderson-Higgs mechanism). Superconductors, on the other hand have been theoretically and experimentally shown to exhibit both modes. This occurs because the excitations in superconductors have an (approximate) particle-hole symmetry and therefore show a similarity to Lorentz-invariant theories.

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