Lifeboat Foundation

Shortly after learning he’d won the Nobel Prize in physics, Richard Taylor stared at his reflection in a mirror.

“Murray Gell-Mann is smart. Dick Garwin is smart,” he told himself, referring to two pioneering 20th century physicists. “You are lucky.”

The self-effacing Taylor, a Stanford University professor emeritus of physics who shared the Nobel in 1990 for his role in the discovery of quarks, died Feb. 22 at his home on the Stanford campus. He was 88.

Continue reading “Richard Taylor, Stanford physicist who won Nobel, dies” »

Millions of light-years from Earth, there’s a galaxy that is completely devoid of dark matter — the mysterious, unseen material that is thought to permeate the Universe. Instead, the galaxy seems to be made up of just regular ol’ matter, the kind that comprises stars, planets, and dust. That makes this galaxy a rare find, and its discovery opens up new possibilities for how dark matter is distributed throughout the cosmos.

No one knows what dark matter is. True to its name, the material doesn’t emit light, so we’ve never detected it directly. All scientists know is that it’s out there based on their observations of how galaxies and stars move. Some unseen substance is affecting these deep-space objects, filling up the space between stars and clusters of galaxies. And there seems to be a lot of it. Dark matter is thought to make up 27 percent of all the mass and energy of the Universe. The matter we can see — the atoms that make up you and me — accounts for just 5 percent.

This past June, 500 pounds of a specially fabricated crystal buried in an Italian mountain seemed to glow just a little brighter. It wasn’t the first time, nor the last—every year, the signal seems to increase and decrease like clockwork as the Earth orbits the Sun.

Some people think the crystal has spotted a signature of elusive dark matter particles.

Scientists from an Italian experiment called DAMA/LIBRA announced at the XLIX meeting of the Gran Sasso Scientific Committee that after another six years observing, the annual modulation of their crystal’s signal is still present. This experiment was specially built to detect dark matter, and indeed, DAMA/LIBRA’s scientists are convinced they’ve spotted the elusive dark matter particle. Others are more skeptical.

Continue reading “This Supposed Dark Matter Evidence Won’t Seem to Go Away” »

Out of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, there’s one in particular, orbiting 25,000 light-years from the galactic core, that affects Earth day by day, moment by moment. That star, of course, is the sun. While the sun’s activity cycle has been tracked for about two and a half centuries, the use of space-based telescopes offers a new and unique perspective of our nearest star.

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), has been in space for more than 22 years — the average length of one completed solar magnetic cycle, according to an image caption from ESA. In the new image, SOHO researchers pulled together 22 images of the sun, taken each spring over the course of a full solar cycle. When the sun is at its most active, strong magnetic fields show up as bright spots in the sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona; black sunspots appear as concentrations of magnetic fields reduce the sun’s surface temperature during active periods as well.

Throughout the sun’s magnetic cycles, the polarity of the sun’s magnetic field gradually flips. This initial phase takes 11 years, and after another 11 years, the magnetic field’s orientation returns to where it began. Monitoring the entire 22-year cycle provided significant data regarding the interaction between the sun’s activity and Earth, improved space-weather forecasting capabilities and more, ESA officials said in the caption. SOHO has revealed much about the sun itself, capturing “sunquakes,” discovering waves traveling through the corona and collecting details about the charged particles it propels into space, called the solar wind.

Continue reading “New image shows how the Sun changes over a 22-year cycle” »

Researchers at Griffith University working with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) have unveiled a stunningly accurate technique for scientific measurements which uses a single atom as the sensor, with sensitivity down to 100 zeptoNewtons.

Using highly miniaturised segmented-style Fresnel lenses — the same design used in lighthouses for more than a century — which enable exceptionally high-quality images of a single atom, the scientists have been able to detect position displacements with nanometre precision in three dimensions.

“Our atom is missing one electron, so it’s very sensitive to electrical fields. By measuring the displacement, we’ve built a very sensitive tool for measuring electrical forces.” Dr Erik Streed, of the Centre for Quantum Dynamics, explained.

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Scientists have used the same technology that brought us time crystals to create a room-temperature maser—a microwave laser—that overcomes many of masers’ past problems.

Masers predate lasers. They’re pretty much the same thing, but masers shoot out microwave light instead of visible or infrared light. Lasers have always been more popular, since masers have only worked in short pulses and required incredibly cold temperatures and vacuums to operate. But now, a team of scientists in the United Kingdom has overcome both old and new challenges to debut their continuously emitting, room-temperature maser. Their research was published this week in Nature.

Masers and lasers operate on basically the same principle. Atoms typically have electrons orbiting their nuclei in specific energy levels. Add some energy in the form of, say, a photon, and the electrons jump to higher energy levels. Pump enough of those electrons into the same higher energy level, and you can release a cascade of photons of the same color (or wavelength, in physics speak) whose waves line up.

Continue reading “New Room-Temperature Maser Uses Weird Diamond to Succeed Where Others Failed” »

Scientists at Rutgers University–New Brunswick and elsewhere are at a crossroads in their 50-year quest to go beyond the Standard Model in physics.

Rutgers Today asked professors Sunil Somalwar and Scott Thomas in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the School of Arts and Sciences to discuss mysteries of the universe. Somalwar’s research focuses on experimental elementary particle physics, or high energy physics, which involves smashing particles together at large particle accelerators such as the one at CERN in Switzerland. Thomas’s research focuses on theoretical particle physics.

The duo, who collaborate on experiments, and other Rutgers physicists – including Yuri Gershtein – contributed to the historic 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle responsible for the structure of all matter and a key component of the Standard Model.

Researchers from the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering are part of a group that has received a multi-million dollar grant from IUs’ Emerging Areas of Research program.

Amr Sabry, a professor of informatics and computing and the chair of the Department of Computer Science, and Alexander Gumennik, assistant professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering, are part of the “Center for Quantum Information Science and Engineering” initiative led by Gerardo Ortiz, a professor of physics in IU’s College of Arts and Sciences. The initiative will focus on harnessing the power of quantum entanglement, which is a theoretical phenomenon in which the quantum state of two or more particles have to be described in reference to one another even if the objects are spatially separated.

“Bringing together a unique group of physicists, computer scientists, and engineers to solve common problems in quantum sensing and computation positions IU at the vanguard of this struggle,” Gumennik said. “I believe that this unique implementation approach, enabling integration of individual quantum devices into a monolithic quantum computing circuit, is capable of taking the quantum information science and engineering to a qualitatively new level.”

Continue reading “SICE researchers part of grant to grow quantum information science” »

Neutral-particle beams, a concept first tried in the 1980s, may get a fresh look under Michael Griffin.

“Directed energy is more than just big lasers, Griffin said. ”That’s important. High-powered microwave approaches can effect an electronics kill. The same with the neutral particle beam systems we explored briefly in the 1990s” for use in space-based anti-missile systems. Such weapons can be ”useful in a variety of environments” and have the ”advantage of being non-attributable,” meaning that it can be hard to pin an attack with a particle weapon on any particular culprit since it leaves no evidence behind of who or even what did the damage.

Like lasers, neutral-particle beams focus beams of energy that travel in straight lines, unaffected by electromagnetic fields. But instead of light, neutral-particle beams use composed of accelerated subatomic particles traveling at near-light speed, making them easier to work with (though the folks that run CERNs hadron collider may disagree). When its particles touche the surface of a target, they takes on a charge that allows them to penetrate the target’s shell or exterior more deeply.

Continue reading “Pentagon’s New Arms-Research Chief Eyes Space-Based Ray Guns” »