In a recent publication in Science, researchers at the University of Paderborn and the Fritz Haber Institute Berlin demonstrated their ability to observe electrons’ movements during a chemical reaction. Researchers have long studied the atomic-scale processes that govern chemical reactions, but were never before able to observe electron motions as they happened.
Posted in cosmology, particle physics
New kinds of messengers from the distant universe are joining the photons collected by telescopes—and revealing what light can’t show. So-called multimessenger astrophysics got started with high-speed particles called cosmic rays and gravitational waves, the ripples in space-time first detected in 2015 that Science named Breakthrough of the Year in 2016. This year, another messenger has joined the party: neutrinos, tiny, almost massless particles that are extraordinarily hard to detect.
Snaring one of these extra-galactic will-o’-the-wisps took a cubic kilometer of ice deep below the South Pole, festooned with light detectors to record the faint flash triggered—very rarely—by a neutrino. Known as IceCube, the massive detector has logged many neutrinos before, some from outside the Milky Way, but none had been pinned to a particular cosmic source. Then, on 22 September 2017, a neutrino collided with a nucleus in the ice, and the light sensors got a good fix on the direction it had come from.
An alert sent out to other telescopes produced, after a few days, a match. As the researchers reported in July, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope found an intensely bright source known as a blazar right where the neutrino appeared to come from. A blazar is the heart of a galaxy centered on a supermassive black hole, whose gravity heats up gas swirling around it, causing the material to glow brightly and fire jets of particles out of the maelstrom.
Although it’s impossible (at least for now) to travel back in time to see the Big Bang, The New York Times has provided its readers the closest simulation of the experience via its latest augmented reality feature.
On Friday, the Times published “It’s Intermission for the Large Hadron Collider,” an interactive story that gives readers a virtual tour of the Large Hadron Collider at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland and explores its most famous discovery, the Higgs boson.
These days, movies and video games render increasingly realistic 3D images on 2-D screens, giving viewers the illusion of gazing into another world. For many physicists, though, keeping things flat is far more interesting.
One reason is that flat landscapes can unlock new movement patterns in the quantum world of atoms and electrons. For instance, shedding the third dimension enables an entirely new class of particles to emerge—particles that that don’t fit neatly into the two classes, bosons and fermions, provided by nature. These new particles, known as anyons, change in novel ways when they swap places, a feat that could one day power a special breed of quantum computer.
But anyons and the conditions that produce them have been exceedingly hard to spot in experiments. In a pair of papers published this week in Physical Review Letters, JQI Fellow Alexey Gorshkov and several collaborators proposed new ways of studying this unusual flat physics, suggesting that small numbers of constrained atoms could act as stand-ins for the finicky electrons first predicted to exhibit low-dimensional quirks.
Researchers from the University of Basel have reported a new method that allows the physical state of just a few atoms or molecules within a network to be controlled. It is based on the spontaneous self-organization of molecules into extensive networks with pores about one nanometer in size. In the journal Small, the physicists reported on their investigations, which could be of particular importance for the development of new storage devices.
New NASA research confirms that Saturn is losing its iconic rings at the maximum rate estimated from Voyager 1 & 2 observations made decades ago. The rings are being pulled into Saturn by gravity as a dusty rain of ice particles under the influence of Saturn’s magnetic field.
“We estimate that this ‘ring rain’ drains an amount of water products that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool from Saturn’s rings in half an hour,” said James O’Donoghue of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “From this alone, the entire ring system will be gone in 300 million years, but add to this the Cassini-spacecraft measured ring-material detected falling into Saturn’s equator, and the rings have less than 100 million years to live. This is relatively short, compared to Saturn’s age of over 4 billion years.” O’Donoghue is lead author of a study on Saturn’s ring rain appearing in Icarus December 17.
Scientists have long wondered if Saturn was formed with the rings or if the planet acquired them later in life. The new research favors the latter scenario, indicating that they are unlikely to be older than 100 million years, as it would take that long for the C-ring to become what it is today assuming it was once as dense as the B-ring. “We are lucky to be around to see Saturn’s ring system, which appears to be in the middle of its lifetime. However, if rings are temporary, perhaps we just missed out on seeing giant ring systems of Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, which have only thin ringlets today!” O’Donoghue added.
‘’But they noticed an unrealistic defect in the calculations that had traditionally been used in models to validate the KTW idea: They “described populations as if individuals did not exist. It’s as if we described a liquid without acknowledging atoms,” Goldenfeld explained by email.’’
Modelers find evidence that a combination of competition, predation and evolution will push ecosystems toward species diversity anywhere in the universe.
The concept of teleportation comes primarily from science fiction literature throughout human history, but things are changing. It’s 2015 and developments in quantum theory and general relativity physics have been successful in exploring the concept of teleportation for quite some time now.
Today, numerous teleportation breakthroughs have been made. One example is the work of Professor Rainer Blatt, at the University of Innsbruck. They were successfully able to perform teleportation on atoms for the first time, their work was published in the journal Nature. They were able to transfer key properties of one particle to another without using any physical link. In this case, teleportation occurred in the form of transferring quantum states between two atoms, these include the atom’s energy, motion, magnetic field and other physical properties. This is possible due to the strange behavior that exists at the atomic scale, known as entanglement. It’s what Einstein referred to as a “spooky action.”
Another study was published by a team of University of Queensland physicists in the journal Nature in 2013 demonstrating the successful teleportation with solid state systems. A process by which, again, quantum information can be transmitted from one place to another without sending a physical carrier of information. This is the same concept, and is made possible through the phenomenon of entanglement.
Nearly 100 times farther from the Sun than the Earth is, there’s a point where the charged particles from the Sun no longer reach into the uncharged particles of interstellar space, or the pockets of space that exist between the various star systems of the universe.
This point, known as a heliopause, marks the very edge of the solar system where human beings themselves live.
The heliopause border around the solar system was first “discovered” by scientists using NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft as far back as 30 years ago. But recently, a newer NASA spacecraft, the New Horizons space probe, has found actual evidence of that point in space.
