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Category: particle physics – Page 586

Until quite recently, creating a hologram of a single photon was believed to be impossible due to fundamental laws of physics. However, scientists at the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, have successfully applied concepts of classical holography to the world of quantum phenomena. A new measurement technique has enabled them to register the first ever hologram of a single light particle, thereby shedding new light on the foundations of quantum mechanics.

Scientists at the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, have created the first ever hologram of a single light particle. The spectacular experiment, reported in the journal Nature Photonics, was conducted by Dr. Radoslaw Chrapkiewicz and Michal Jachura under the supervision of Dr. Wojciech Wasilewski and Prof. Konrad Banaszek. Their successful registering of the hologram of a single photon heralds a new era in holography: quantum holography, which promises to offer a whole new perspective on quantum phenomena.

“We performed a relatively simple experiment to measure and view something incredibly difficult to observe: the shape of wavefronts of a single photon,” says Dr. Chrapkiewicz.

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Purifying H2O more cheaply.

WASHINGTON—()—Organic compounds in wastewater, such as dyes and pigments in industry effluents, are toxic or have lethal effect on aquatic living and humans. Increasing evidence has shown that the organic contaminants discharged from electroplating, textile production, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals are the main reasons for the higher morbidity rates of kidney, liver, and bladder cancers, etc. Organic contaminants, especially methyl blue and methyl orange, are stable to light, heat or oxidizing agents and very difficult to remove by conventional chemical or biological wastewater treatment techniques. Recently scientists have developed some new strategies with good dye-removal performance; however, a subsequent adsorbent purification procedure is unavoidable after water treatment, which are often complicated and not suitable for practical water treatment.

Now, using laser-induced fabrication technique, a team of Chinese researchers from Shandong University, China, have developed a novel dye adsorbent. Hybrid nano-particles of silver and silver sulfide (Ag2S@Ag hybrid nano-particles) have demonstrated the nanomaterial’s superior adsorption performance for removing methyl blue and methyl orange from wastewater. More importantly, the new adsorbents can be removed directly from solutions by filters without adsorbent purification procedures, as the silver-based hybrid nano-particles will be agglomerated and deposited on the bottom after adsorbing dyes, providing a green, simple, rapid and low-cost solution for water purification. This week in the journal Optical Materials Express, from The Optical Society (OSA), the researchers describe the work.

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A team has used simple quantum processors to run “quantum walk” algorithms, showing that even primitive quantum computers can outperform the classical variety in certain scenarios—and suggesting that the age of quantum computing may be closer than we imagined.

By now, most readers of Futurism are probably pretty well acquainted with the concept (and fantastic promise) of quantum computing.

For those who aren’t, the idea is fairly (!) simple: Quantum computers exploit three very unusual features that operate at the quantum scale—that electrons can be both particles and waves, that objects can be in many places at once, and they can maintain an instantaneous connection even when separated by vast distances (a property called “entanglement”).

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Physics, as you may have read before, is based around two wildly successful theories. On the grand scale, galaxies, planets, and all the other big stuff dance to the tune of gravity. But, like your teenage daughter, all the little stuff stares in bewildered embarrassment at gravity’s dancing. Quantum mechanics is the only beat the little stuff is willing get down to. Unlike teenage rebellion, though, no one claims to understand what keeps relativity and quantum mechanics from getting along.

Because we refuse to believe that these two theories are separate, physicists are constantly trying to find a way to fit them together. Part-in-parcel with creating a unifying model is finding evidence of a connection between the gravity and quantum mechanics. For example, showing that the gravitational force experienced by a particle depended on the particle’s internal quantum state would be a great sign of a deeper connection between the two theories. The latest attempt to show this uses a new way to look for coupling between gravity and the quantum property called spin.

I’m free, free fallin’

One of the cornerstones of general relativity is that objects move in straight lines through a curved spacetime. So, if two objects have identical masses and are in free fall, they should follow identical trajectories. And this is what we have observed since the time of Galileo (although I seem to recall that Galileo’s public experiment came to an embarrassing end due to differences in air resistance).

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Small magnetic fields from the human body can usually only be picked up by very sensitive superconducting magnetic field sensors that have to be cooled by liquid helium to near absolute zero (which is minus 273 degrees Celsius). But now researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen have developed a much cheaper and more practical optical magnetic field sensor that even works at room temperature or at body temperature.

“The optical magnetic field sensor is based on a gas of caesium atoms in a small glass container. Each caesium atom is equivalent to a small bar magnet, which is affected by external magnetic fields. The atoms and thus the magnetic field are picked up using laser light. The method is based on quantum optics and atomic physics and can be used to measure extremely small magnetic fields,” explains Kasper Jensen, assistant professor in the Center for Quantum Optics, Quantop at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

Ultra sensitive magnetic field sensor.

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Invisibility cloak has hidden Harry Potter and hobbits from view and now, this sci-fi staple may be moving closer to reality!

Scientists at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) have made an object disappear by using a composite material with nano-size particles that can enhance specific properties on the object’s surface.

Researchers demonstrated for the first time a practical cloaking device that allows curved surfaces to appear flat to electromagnetic waves.

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Scientists invent particles that will provide oxygen to your body without breathing!!!

This may seem like something out of a science fiction movie: researchers have designed microparticles that can be injected directly into the bloodstream to quickly oxygenate your body, even if you can’t breathe anymore. It’s one of the best medical breakthroughs in recent years, and one that could save millions of lives every year.

The invention, developed by a team at Boston Children’s Hospital, will allow medical teams to keep patients alive and well for 15 to 30 minutes despite major respiratory failure. This is enough time for doctors and emergency personnel to act without risking a heart attack or permanent brain injuries in the patient.

The solution has already been successfully tested on animals under critical lung failure. When the doctors injected this liquid into the patient’s veins, it restored oxygen in their blood to near-normal levels, granting them those precious additional minutes of life.

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A team of scientists at the Boston Children’s Hospital have invented what is being considered one the greatest medical breakthroughs in recent years. They have designed a microparticle that can be injected into a person’s bloodstream that can quickly oxygenate their blood. This will even work if the ability to breathe has been restricted, or even cut off entirely.

This finding has the potential to save millions of lives every year. The microparticles can keep an object alive for up to 30 min after respiratory failure. This is accomplished through an injection into the patients’ veins. Once injected, the microparticles can oxygenate the blood to near normal levels. This has countless potential uses as it allows life to continue when oxygen is needed but unavailable. For medical personnel, this is just enough time to avoid risking a heart attack or permanent brain injury when oxygen is restricted or cut off to patients.

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(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with the University of California, MIT, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan has created images of relativistic electrons trapped in graphene quantum dots. In their paper published in the journal Nature Physics the team describes how they achieved this feat and where they plan to take their work in the future.

As the many unique properties of graphene continue to unfold, scientists seek new ways to harness and eventually make use of them. One such use might be to control electrons to allow their use in nano-scaled devices, which could also inadvertently lead to a deeper understanding of Dirac fermions. In this new effort, the researchers have made progress in that area by devising a means for capturing and holding electrons and for creating images of the result.

Obtaining images of electron waveforms has thus far been particularly difficult—virtually all existing methods have resulted in too many defects. To get around such problems, the researchers took another approach to capturing the electrons. They first created circular p-n junctions by sending voltage through the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope down to a graphene sample below. At the same time, they also applied voltage to a slab of silicon underneath the piece of graphene, which was kept separated by a layer of silicon-oxide and a flake of . Doing so caused defects in the boron nitride to ionize, resulting in charges migrating to the graphene.

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Is search of the sound of silence.

To a physicist, perfect quiet is the ultimate noise. Silence your cellphone, still your thoughts, and muffle every kind of vibration, and you would still be left with quantum noise. It represents an indeterminacy deep within nature, bursts of static and inexplicable motions that cannot be gotten rid of, or made sense of. It seems devoid of meaning.

Considering how pervasive this noise is, you might presume that physicists would have a good explanation for it. But it remains one of the great unsolved problems in science. Quantum theory is silent not just on where the noise comes from, but on how exactly it enters the world. The theory’s defining equation, the Schrödinger equation, is completely deterministic. There is no noise in it at all. To explain why we observe quantum particles to be noisy, we need some additional principle.

For physicists in the Niels Bohr tradition, the act of observation itself is decisive. The Schrödinger equation defines a menu of possibilities for what a particle could do, but only when measured does the particle actually do anything, choosing at random from the menu. Identical particles will make different choices, causing the outcomes of fundamental processes to vary in an uncontrollable way. On Bohr’s view, quantum noise cannot be explained further. It is what physicist John Wheeler called “an elementary act of creation,” with no antecedents. Genesis was not a singular event in the distant past, but an ongoing process that we bring about. We create the world by observing it.

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