Lifeboat Foundation

A team of physicists has proposed a way of teleporting energy over long distances. The technique, which is purely theoretical at this point, takes advantage of the strange quantum phenomenon of entanglement where two particles share the same existence.

The researchers, who work out of Tohoku University in Japan, and led by Masahiro Hotta,describe their proposal in the latest edition of Physical Review A. Their system exploits properties of squeezed light or vacuum states that should allow for the teleportation of information about an energy state. In turn, this teleported quantum energy could be made useable.

Unlike teleportation schemes as portrayed in Star Trek or The Fly, this type of teleportation describes entanglement experiments in which two entangled particles are joined despite no apparent connection between them. When a change happens to one particle, the same change happens to the other. Hence, the impression of teleportation. Physicists have conducted experiments using light, matter, and now, energy.

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A new type of “quasiparticle” theorized by Caltech’s Gil Refael, a professor of theoretical physics and condensed matter theory, could help improve the efficiency of a wide range of photonic devices—technologies, such as optical amplifiers, solar photovoltaic cells, and even barcode scanners, which create, manipulate, or detect light.

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If you’re on the east coast tonight, keep an eye on the sky between 7pm and 9pm: NASA is launching a test of some new tech that will include releasing colorful vapor tracers 130 miles above the Earth. It sounds like it’s going to be beautiful.

The vapors will be ejected from a sounding rocket launched from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. NASA explains that it has actually been injecting various vapor tracers into the atmosphere since the 1950s —these trails help scientists understand “the naturally occurring flows of ionized and neutral particles” in the upper atmosphere by injecting color tracers and tracking the flow across the sky.

Tonight, NASA says it’s ejecting four different payloads of a mix of barium and strontium, creating “a cloud with a mixture of blue-green and red color.” Here’s an example of a barium release provided by NASA; on the upper left you can see the barium’s “ionized component, which has become elongated along the Earth’s magnetic field lines.”

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For decades, researchers have been trying to build a computer that harnesses the enormous potential of quantum mechanics. Now engineers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia have overcome the final hurdle, by creating a quantum logic gate in silicon — the same material that today’s computer chips are made from.

The newly developed device allows two quantum bits — or qubits — to communicate and perform calculations together, which is a crucial requirement for quantum computers. Even better, the researchers have also worked out how to scale the technology up to millions of qubits, which means they now have the ability to build the world’s first quantum processor chip and, eventually, the first silicon-based quantum computer.

Continue reading “Australian engineers just built a quantum logic gate in silicon for the first time” »

Wow, first they create a real hoverboard, and now they’re on the road to creating a real lightsaber? Joy! wink

Killjoy physicists have long pointed out the sheer unlikelihood of building a working light saber. But now, they’ve taken a small step toward realizing the dream of Star Wars fans worldwide, by figuring out how to get photons to stick together like molecules in a super-chilled gas.

This latest work builds on prior experiments from 2013, when Harvard physicists first announced a new state of matter.

Continue reading “We’re One Small Step Closer to a Working Light Saber” »

According to scientists photons can travel through time. They already have simulated directing quantum light particles to the past for the first time in the history. University of Queensland scientists learned that a simulation of two wormhole-travelling photons might interrelate; signifying hopping through time is conceivable at smallest scales. Their study might help to comprehend how time-travel could be conceivable in the quantum realm. PhD student Martin Ringbauer spoke to The Speaker: “For the first, ‘photon one’ would travel through a wormhole into the past and interact with its older version. In the second, ‘photon two’ travels through normal space-time but interacts with a photon that is stuck in a time-travelling loop through a wormhole, known as a closed timelike curve (CTC).”

Tim Ralph, UQ Physics Professor, said: “We used single photons to do this, but the time-travel was simulated by using a second photon to play the part of the past incarnation of the time travelling photon.”

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Researchers from the Institute of General Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences and MIPT have made an important step towards creating medical nanorobots. They discovered a way of enabling nano- and microparticles to produce logical calculations using a variety of biochemical reactions.

Details of their research project are given in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. It is the first experimental publication by an exclusively Russian team in one of the most cited scientific magazines in many years.

The paper draws on the idea of computing using biomolecules. In electronic circuits, for instance, logical connectives use current or voltage (if there is voltage, the result is 1, if there is none, it’s 0). In biochemical systems, the result can a given substance.

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“If you were Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, and you carried a tiny green Jedi master on your back through the jungles of Dagobah for long enough, you could eventually raise your submerged X-wing out of the swamp just by using the Force.”

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I remember the time when states of matter were pretty simple: Solid, liquid and gas. Then came plasma state, supercritical fluid, Bose –Einstein condensate and more. Now this list of states of matter has grown by one more, with the surprising discovery of a new state dubbed “dropletons” that shows some similarity to liquids but occur under very unlike circumstances.

The discovery of new state of matter occurred when a team of scientists at the University of Colorado Joint Institute for Lab Astrophysics were concentrating laser light on gallium arsenide (GaAs) to generate excitons.

Excitons are made when a photon strikes a material, mostly a semiconductor. If an electron is knocked loose, or excited, it leaves what is labelled as “electron hole” behind. If the forces of other charges at very close distance keep the electron close enough to the hole in order to feel an attraction, a certain state forms called as an Exciton. Excitons are also called quasiparticles because the holes and electrons act together as if they were like a single particle.

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