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Archive for the ‘particle physics’ category: Page 545

Dec 13, 2015

A multiverse hiding in the Large Hadron Collider

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

Physicists will be looking for mini black holes when the Large Hadron Collider restarts this month. It’s impossible for the LHC to generate any sort of black hole that would be remotely unsafe, but this theory suggests that microscopic black holes that vanish almost instantly could be produced from the high-power particle collisions in the LHC.

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Dec 12, 2015

Scientists Create Most Expensive Material on Earth, Costs $4.2 Billion per Ounce

Posted by in categories: materials, mobile phones, particle physics, robotics/AI, transportation

$4.2 billion per ounce. That’s how much the most expensive material on Earth costs. Priced at £100m per gram, the most expensive material on Earth is made up of “endohedral fullerenes,” a cage of carbon atoms containing nitrogen atoms. It could help us make atomic clocks and accurate autonomous cars.


Current atomic clocks are the size of rooms. This material could allow us to make atomic clocks that fit in your smartphone.

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Dec 11, 2015

German plasma success raises nuclear fusion hopes

Posted by in categories: nuclear energy, particle physics

A German nuclear fusion experiment has produced a special super-hot gas which scientists hope will eventually lead to clean, cheap energy.

The helium plasma — a cloud of loose, charged particles — lasted just a tenth of a second and was about one million degrees Celsius.

It was hailed as a breakthrough for the Max Planck Institute’s stellarator — a chamber whose design differs from the tokamak fusion devices used elsewhere.

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Dec 7, 2015

Tiny dark matter stars would harbour particles that act as one

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

A certain dark matter candidate could clump into stars where it would behave like the Borg race in Star Trek – and this might make it observable.

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Dec 3, 2015

Australian Physicists Prove Time Travel is Possible

Posted by in categories: particle physics, quantum physics, time travel

Scientists from the University of Queensland have used photons (single particles of light) to simulate quantum particles travelling through time. The research is cutting edge and the results could be dramatic!

Their research, entitled “Experimental simulation of closed timelike curves “, is published in the latest issue of Nature Communications. The grandfather paradox states that if a time traveler were to go back in time, he could accidentally prevent his grandparents from meeting, and thus prevent his own birth.

However, if he had never been born, he could never have traveled back in time, in the first place. The paradoxes are largely caused by Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the solution to it, the Gödel metric.

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Dec 2, 2015

China Plans Enormous Particle Collider

Posted by in category: particle physics

The country is plotting a separate path to the Large Hadron Collider’s successor.

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Nov 30, 2015

Chinese satellite to shine a light on mysterious dark matter

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

Shadowy hints of dark matter’s true nature are set to be boosted by a new particle and gamma-ray detector being launched into orbit.

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Nov 28, 2015

Scientists have discovered a material that could create quantum optical computers

Posted by in categories: computing, materials, particle physics, quantum physics

When people talk about the next-generation of computers, they’re usually referring to one of two things: quantum computers – devices that will have exponentially greater processing power thanks to the addition of quantum superposition to the binary code – and optical computers, which will beam data at the speed of light without generating all the heat and wasted energy of traditional electronic computers.

Both of those have the power to revolutionise computing as we know it, and now scientists at the University of Technology, Sydney have discovered a material that has the potential to combine both of those abilities in one ridiculously powerful computer of the future. Just hold on for a second while we freak out over here.

The material is layered hexagonal boron nitride, which is a bit of a mouthful, but all you really need to know about it is that it’s only one atom thick – just like graphene – and it has the ability to emit a single pulse of quantum light on demand at room temperature, making it ideal to help build a quantum optical computer chip.

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Nov 25, 2015

‘Material universe’ yields surprising new particle

Posted by in categories: computing, materials, particle physics, quantum physics

An international team of researchers has predicted the existence of a new type of particle called the type-II Weyl fermion in metallic materials. When subjected to a magnetic field, the materials containing the particle act as insulators for current applied in some directions and as conductors for current applied in other directions. This behavior suggests a range of potential applications, from low-energy devices to efficient transistors.

The researchers theorize that the particle exists in a material known as tungsten ditelluride (WTe2), which the researchers liken to a “material universe” because it contains several , some of which exist under normal conditions in our universe and others that may exist only in these specialized types of crystals. The research appeared in the journal Nature this week.

The new particle is a cousin of the Weyl fermion, one of the particles in standard theory. However, the type-II particle exhibits very different responses to electromagnetic fields, being a near perfect conductor in some directions of the field and an insulator in others.

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Nov 25, 2015

Physicists set quantum record

Posted by in categories: particle physics, quantum physics

Researchers from Stanford have advanced a long-standing problem in quantum physics – how to send “entangled” particles over long distances.

Their work is described in the online edition of Nature Communications.

Scientists and engineers are interested in the practical application of this technology to make networks that can send highly secure information over long distances – a capability that also makes the technology appealing to governments, banks and militaries.

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