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Category: particle physics – Page 615

Recent results from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland hint at activity going on beyond the standard model of particle physics — which means we could finally be about to enter a new era in physics.

Right now, the standard model is the best explanation we have for how the Universe works and how it’s held together. But there are big gaps — most noticeably, the fact that the model doesn’t actually account for gravity — so scientists have spent decades probing the boundaries of physics for signs of any activity that the standard model can’t explain. And now they’ve found one.

The discrepancy deals with a particle called the B meson. According to the standard model, B mesons should decay at very specific angles and frequencies — but those predictions don’t match up what’s been seen in LHC experiments, suggesting that something else is going on. And if we can figure out what that is, it’ll take us closer to unlocking some of the mysteries in our Universe.

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Q-Dots windows to power homes and other buildings.

Researchers at the Los Alamos National Lab may have found a way to take quantum dots and put them in your ordinary windows to turn them into solar collectors.

Photovoltaic cells may be cheaper and more efficient than ever, but you still need to find a place to put them.

Looking to solve these space constraints, Los Alamos partnered with the University of Milano in Italy to see if they could turn windows into electric generators.

As nanocrystals roughly one-billionth of a meter across, — that is as small as 10 atoms wide — quantum dots can absorb light at one wavelength, convert it and re-emit it at another wavelength.

So the dots would absorb sunlight and convert it to a wavelength best suited for the photovoltaic cells, then be guided to the solar cells installed at its edges to electricity.

The University of Milan is responsible for the new industrial method that embeds the dots in a transparent material.

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Solving the turbulence plasma mystery.

Cutting-edge simulations run at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) over a two-year period are helping physicists better understand what influences the behavior of the plasma turbulence that is driven by the intense heating necessary to create fusion energy. This research has yielded exciting answers to long-standing questions about plasma heat loss that have previously stymied efforts to predict the performance of fusion reactors and could help pave the way for this alternative energy source.

The key to making fusion work is to maintain a sufficiently high temperature and density to enable the atoms in the reactor to overcome their mutual repulsion and bind to form helium. But one side effect of this process is turbulence, which can increase the rate of plasma, significantly limiting the resulting energy output. So researchers have been working to pinpoint both what causes the turbulence and how to control or possibly eliminate it.

Because are extremely complex and expensive to design and build, supercomputers have been used for more than 40 years to simulate the conditions to create better reactor designs. NERSC is a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that has supported fusion research since 1974.

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An experiment that would allow humans to directly perceive quantum entanglement for the first time has been devised by researchers in Switzerland, and they say the same technique could be used to quantum entangle two people.

While it would be incredibly cool to be the first person ever to witness quantum entanglement with your own eyes, the experiment has been designed to answer some important and far-reaching questions, such as what does quantum entanglement actually look like, and what does it feel like to be entangled with another human being?

Quantum entanglement is a strange phenomenon where two quantum particles interact in such a way that they become deeply linked, and essentially ‘share’ an existence. This means that what happens to one particle will directly and instantly affect what happens to the other — even if that other particle is many light-years away.

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(Phys.org)—Many quantum technologies rely on quantum states that violate local realism, which means that they either violate locality (such as when entangled particles influence each other from far away) or realism (the assumption that quantum states have well-defined properties, independent of measurement), or possibly both. Violation of local realism is one of the many counterintuitive, yet experimentally supported, characteristics of the quantum world.

Determining whether or not multiparticle quantum states violate local realism can be challenging. Now in a new paper, physicists have shown that a large family of multiparticle quantum states called hypergraph states violates local realism in many ways. The results suggest that these states may serve as useful resources for quantum technologies, such as quantum computers and detecting.

The physicists, Mariami Gachechiladze, Costantino Budroni, and Otfried Gühne at the University of Siegen in Germany, have published their paper on the quantum hypergraph states in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

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Could this Quantum Technology inertial sensors be utilized to provide more reliable navigation to driverless autos? Quantum again proves to serve multiple usages.

Advances in laser cooling of atoms have produced a new generation of inertial sensors based on matter-wave interferometers, which are becoming an essential technology for accurate positioning or geodesy.

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