Researchers succeed in an 80-year-old quest to find the elusive “angel particle”.
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Category: particle physics – Page 573
In the study, researchers from the Universities of York, Munich, and Cardiff explored the phenomenon known as backflow in particles that are not ‘free.’
Free quantum particles exist without any external forces, but the researchers note that this setting is idealized.
Through the new analysis, the researchers estimated the strength of backflow and found that it applies to all quantum particles, not just free ones.
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Cool Physics Links
Posted in particle physics
You are very lucky that you ended up about the size that you are today, somewhere between one and ten feet tall and weighing somewhere between one and one thousand pounds. This is a very good size. Not to body shame, but if you were, say, a quadrillion times shorter and weighed a nonillion times less (that’s one followed by 30 zeros), that would be very inconvenient for you. Everything would be very inconvenient for you.
One thing you take for granted as a human-sized thing, for example, is that when you push things, they move forward. But a team of researchers realized that this is not necessarily the case if you zoom into the quantum world, where particles might decide to go backwards, no matter what kind of outside force you put on them.
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Scientists aren’t yet certain that electrons and their relatives are violating the Standard Model of particle physics, but the evidence is mounting.
- By Jesse Dunietz on July 17, 2017
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Humanity is advancing rapidly towards a place where the news sounds an awful lot like science fiction. In fact, yesterday, Chinese scientists reported that they “teleported” a photon over hundreds of miles using a “quantum satellite.” But this isn’t Star Trek. It’s the real world.
Which happens to mean it’s a lot less exciting than Star Trek-style teleportation, unfortunately. But it’s still really cool, I promise!
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The $100 million plasma generator, the fifth in a series of devices built over the last 20 years, will continue validation of the company’s underlying technology and enable commercialization efforts toward delivering utility-scale fusion energy. With Norman now operational, the company will continue to move quickly down its developmental path, expanding temperature ranges and sustaining plasma for longer periods towards perfecting the essential operating characteristics required to sustain fusion reactions. Over the coming months, the company will be accelerating Norman’s levels of performance to further validate the fundamental confinement requirements that will ultimately be necessary for commercial operations.
Like previous iterations of the device, Norman uses an advanced field-reverse configuration (FRC) combined with intense neutral beam injection to create and confine plasma. onstruction on this fifth-generation machine began in June of 2016, and it sits in a newly designed headquarters facility and control room in Foothill Ranch, CA. It takes the place of the company’s previous plasma generator, C-2U, which was able to successfully achieve its critical milestones including at-will plasma sustainment in June of 2015. Norman expands upon these milestones with the opportunity to bring forward new understandings in plasmas dominated by highly energetic particles.
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In contrast to other particles of this type, in which the three quarks perform an elaborate dance around each other, a particle with two heavy quarks is expected to act like a planetary system, where the heavy quarks are like two stars orbiting one around the other, with the lighter quark orbiting around this binary system.
Scientists have detected a new particle at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern.
The discovery will help researchers learn more about the so-called “strong force” which holds the centres of atoms together.
The existence of the new particle was theoretically predicted but this is the first time it has been identified.
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Plasma, an extremely hot gas with electrically charged particles, is found all throughout the universe and is influenced by environmental forces, such as magnetic fields.
The complex behaviours observed in space and in the lab suggest plasma can generate the magnetic field in the opposite direction to the one applied, according to the researchers from Tohoku University.
This causes the field lines to diverge, much like magnets with their North poles facing toward each other.
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