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Category: particle physics – Page 69

A new piece in the matter–antimatter puzzle: A fundamental asymmetry in the behavior of baryons

On March 24, at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference taking place in La Thuile, Italy, the LHCb collaboration at CERN reported a new milestone in our understanding of the subtle yet profound differences between matter and antimatter.

In its analysis of large quantities of data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the international team found overwhelming evidence that particles known as baryons, such as the protons and neutrons that make up , are subject to a mirror-like asymmetry in nature’s fundamental laws that causes matter and antimatter to behave differently.

The discovery provides new ways to address why the that make up matter fall into the neat patterns described by the Standard Model of particle physics, and to explore why matter apparently prevailed over antimatter after the Big Bang. The paper is available on the arXiv preprint server.

Ultrafast Laser Breakthrough Reveals Light’s Ability to Instantly Transform Properties of Matter

Researchers say they are finally unraveling the effects of ultrafast lasers that can change material states in attoseconds —one-billionth of one-billionth of a second—the time required to complete one light wave’s optical cycle.

The new Israeli research opens up new avenues for scientists to observe light closely in laboratory settings. Under these conditions, a wave crosses a hydrogen atom in a single attosecond, compared to the time required for light to move from Earth to the Moon.

Beyond its immediate use, the development may drive future speed advancements in communications and computing by increasing researchers’ understanding of high-speed quantum light and matter interactions.

Nickel(0) and boron—together at last in square-planar complexes

The arrangement of small molecules—known as ligands—around transition metal atoms affects how the metal atoms behave. This is important because transition metals are used as catalysts in the synthesis of a wide range of important materials.

Now, in a study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, researchers from the University of Osaka have reported a chemical bond that hadn’t been reported before: complexes of , a metal, with simple containing , a non-metal.

Transition metals are known to form complexes with ligands containing atoms from group 13 elements, including aluminum, gallium, and indium. These are known as Z-type ligands, and they can accept electrons from a metal. However, boron, the smallest element in group 13, has only been shown to do this with the support of additional ligands that help approach metals to the boron center.

Listening to quantum atoms talk together thanks to acoustics

What happens when a quantum physicist is frustrated by the limitations of quantum mechanics when trying to study densely packed atoms? At EPFL, you get a metamaterial, an engineered material that exhibits exotic properties.

That frustrated physicist is Ph.D. student Mathieu Padlewski. In collaboration with Hervé Lissek and Romain Fleury at EPFL’s Laboratory of Wave Engineering, Padlewski has built a novel acoustic system for exploring condensed matter and their macroscopic properties, all the while circumventing the extremely sensitive nature that is inherent to . Moreover, the can be tweaked to study properties that go beyond solid-state physics. The results are published in Physical Review B.

“We’ve essentially built a playground inspired by that can be adjusted to study various systems. Our metamaterial consists of highly tunable active elements, allowing us to synthesize phenomena that extend beyond the realm of nature,” says Padlewski. “Potential applications include manipulating waves and guiding energy for telecommunications, and the setup may one day provide clues for harvesting energy from waves for instance.”

How an unconventional type of quantum computer opens a new door to the world of elementary particles

The standard model of particle physics is our best theory of the elementary particles and forces that make up our world: particles and antiparticles, such as electrons and positrons, are described as quantum fields. They interact through other force fields, such as the electromagnetic force that binds charged particles.

To understand the behavior of these quantum fields—and with that, our universe—researchers perform complex computer simulations of quantum field theories. Unfortunately, many of these calculations are too complicated for even our best supercomputers and pose great challenges for quantum computers as well, leaving many pressing questions unanswered.

Using a novel type of quantum computer, Martin Ringbauer’s experimental team at the University of Innsbruck, and the theory group led by Christine Muschik at IQC at the University of Waterloo, Canada, report in Nature Physics on how they have successfully simulated a complete quantum field theory in more than one spatial dimension.

Microwaves Can Suppress Chemical Reactions

The heating effect of microwaves has long been used to accelerate reactions. A new experiment shows that microwaves can also excite molecules into a less reactive state.

According to Arrhenius’ law, heating increases the energy of molecules so that more of them can overcome the activation barrier and undergo a chemical reaction. One way to deliver heat is via microwave radiation. Since its early use in chemical synthesis, scientists have noticed that microwave-induced reactions often proceed differently compared with ones enhanced with oil baths and other traditional heating methods. This finding has led to ongoing speculation and debate—and even controversy—about the existence of microwave effects beyond heating [1]. Now Valentina Zhelyazkova of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich and her collaborators have demonstrated that microwaves can both speed up and slow down chemical reactions [2]. The discovery provides clear evidence of the nonthermal influence of microwaves on chemical processes. It also opens a path toward controlling reactions and understanding them more deeply.

In their investigation Zhelyazkova and her collaborators manipulated the rate of the gas-phase reaction between positively charged helium ions (He+) and carbon monoxide (CO) molecules: He++ CO → He + C++ O. According to so-called capture theory, the reaction’s rate depends on the rotational states of CO, whose quantized energies lie within the microwave band (Fig. 1). The experiment began with the preparation of separate supersonic beams of He atoms and CO molecules via high-pressure expansion into vacuum. The CO molecules were initially in the rotational ground state. By applying a precisely timed microwave pulse before the reaction, the researchers excited a fraction of the population to the first rotationally excited state, which is less reactive than the ground state. The fraction that was excited could be fine-tuned by changing the duration of the microwave pulse.

This Tiny Particle is Redefining Our View of the Atomic Nucleus

University of Queensland scientists have cracked a long-standing puzzle in nuclear physics, showing that nuclear polarization, once thought to hinder experiments with muonic atoms, has a much smaller effect than expected.

This surprising result clears a major obstacle and paves the way for a new era of atomic research, offering deeper insights into the mysterious inner workings of atomic nuclei using exotic, muon-based atoms.

Breakthrough in Muonic Atom Research.

Looking for elusive quantum particles? Try a bad metal, researchers suggest

Metals, as most know them, are good conductors of electricity. That’s because the countless electrons in a metal like gold or silver move more or less freely from one atom to the next, their motion impeded only by occasional collisions with defects in the material.

There are, however, metallic materials at odds with our conventional understanding of what it means to be a metal. In so-called “bad metals”—a technical term, explains Columbia physicist Dmitri Basov—electrons hit unexpected resistance: each other. Instead of the electrons behaving like individual balls bouncing about, they become correlated with one another, clumping up so that their need to move more collectively impedes the flow of an electrical current.

Bad metals may make for poor electrical conductors, but it turns out that they make good quantum materials. In work published on February 13 in the journal Science, Basov’s group unexpectedly observed unusual optical properties in the bad metal molybdenum oxide dichloride (MoOCl2).

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