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Category: particle physics – Page 703

UCLA physicists discover ‘apparent departure from the laws of thermodynamics’

Proving 2 temperatures coexist — disrupting thermodynamics.

Stuart Wolpert.

According to the basic laws of thermodynamics, if you leave a warm apple pie in a winter window eventually the pie would cool down to the same temperature as the surrounding air.

For chemists and physicists, cooling samples of charged particles, also called ions, makes them easier to control and study. So they use a similar approach — called buffer gas cooling — to lower the temperature of ions by trapping them and then immersing them in clouds of cold atoms. Collisions with the atoms cool the originally hot ions by transferring energy from the ions to the atoms — much the same way a warm pie is cooled next to the cold window, said Eric Hudson, associate professor of physics at UCLA.

But new research by Hudson and his team, published in the journal Nature Communications, demonstrates that ions never truly cool to the temperature of the surrounding gas. Also, very surprisingly, they discovered that under certain conditions, two final temperatures exist, and the temperature that the ions choose depends on their starting temperature.

Focus: Giant Molecule Made from Two Atoms

Experiments confirm the existence of 1-micrometer-sized molecules made of two cesium atoms by showing that their binding energies agree with predictions.

Strongly bound diatomic molecules such as H2H2or O2O2 are less than a nanometer across. Surprisingly, scientists have been able to create two-atom molecules more than a thousand times larger by using exotic atoms that attract one another only very weakly. Now, a pair of physicists have calculated what makes these “macrodimers” stable, and they have verified their predictions by creating micrometer-sized molecules containing two cesium atoms. The macrodimers could have applications in quantum computing.

The birth of quantum holography—making holograms of single light particles

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 was reported in the prestigious journal Nature Photonics.The successful registering of the hologram of a single photon heralds a new era of quantum holography, which offers 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. Radoslaw Chrapkiewicz.

Exploring the promise of the quantum realm

Nice work; understanding the quantum effects in nanomechanical systems is closer to reality in being achieved. Imagine a nanobot or microbot with quantum mechanic properties.

Rob Knobel is probing the ultimate limits of nanomechanical systems to develop and build tiny vapour sensors, which could be used as airport security tools to prevent terrorism or drug smuggling.

He and his students are using highly specialized equipment in the $5-million Kingston Nano Fabrication Laboratory (KNFL), which opened a year ago in Innovation Park, to fabricate nanosensors made from graphene, a form of carbon a single atom thick.

“Graphene is the strongest, lightest material yet discovered, and it has remarkable electrical and mechanical properties. We’re developing graphene chemical sensors that can detect vapours in parts per billion or trillion concentration. These could potentially be used for detecting explosives or biological agents,” says Dr. Knobel, an associate professor, the Chair of Engineering Physics and a Queen’s Engineering graduate himself.

New Evidence For a Fifth Fundamental Force of Nature Could Completely Change Our Understanding of The Universe

Recent findings indicating the possible discovery of a previously unknown subatomic particle may be evidence of a fifth fundamental force of nature, according to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters by theoretical physicists at the University of California, Irvine.

“If true, it’s revolutionary,” said Jonathan Feng, professor of physics & astronomy. “For decades, we’ve known of four fundamental forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. If confirmed by further experiments, this discovery of a possible fifth force would completely change our understanding of the universe, with consequences for the unification of forces and dark matter.”

The UCI researchers came upon a mid-2015 study by experimental nuclear physicists at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences who were searching for “dark photons,” particles that would signify unseen dark matter, which physicists say makes up about 85 percent of the universe’s mass. The Hungarians’ work uncovered a radioactive decay anomaly that points to the existence of a light particle just 30 times heavier than an electron.

China Launches New Space Race with World’s First Quantum Satellite –“Portal to a Whole New Universe”

At 1.40am this morning, China launched a new Space Race with the world’s first quantum satellite, recently named Micius after an ancient Chinese philosopher and engineer, who, more than 2,400 years ago, proposed that light always travelled in a straight line and that the physical world was made up by particles. Quantum teleportation technology would be able to eliminate the 20-minute time delay in communication between earth and Mars and would allow tiny spacecraft to send back images and videos of planets many light years away without the need to carry a huge antenna. It could even give us a glimpse of what’s inside a black hole.

Physicists confirm possible discovery of fifth force of nature

Recent findings indicating the possible discovery of a previously unknown subatomic particle may be evidence of a fifth fundamental force of nature, according to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters by theoretical physicists at the University of California, Irvine.

“If true, it’s revolutionary,” said Jonathan Feng, professor of physics & astronomy. “For decades, we’ve known of four fundamental forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. If confirmed by further experiments, this discovery of a possible fifth force would completely change our understanding of the universe, with consequences for the unification of forces and dark matter.”

The UCI researchers came upon a mid-2015 study by experimental nuclear physicists at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences who were searching for “dark photons,” that would signify unseen dark matter, which physicists say makes up about 85 percent of the universe’s mass. The Hungarians’ work uncovered a radioactive decay anomaly that points to the existence of a light particle just 30 times heavier than an electron.

How will quantum communication change life?

Although this another article that highlights again China’s planned launch; I wanted to share it because it does (in a pragmatic approach) highlight a couple of the key benefits for having QC.

The imminent launch of the world’s first quantum communication satellite is widely believed to herald a breakthrough in China’s development of quantum technology.

Mysterious and confusing, the study of minute particles smaller than atoms has been applied in fields as diverse as computer processing, lasers and nuclear technology.

How will quantum communication change our lives — especially in the age of cyber attacks, wiretapping and information leakage?

Consciousness Lives in Quantum State After Death Physicists Claim

Hmmm.

Testimonials from prominent physics researchers from institutions such as Cambridge University, Princeton University, and the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich claim that quantum mechanics predicts some version of “life after death.”

They assert that a person may possess a body-soul duality that is an extension of the wave-particle duality of subatomic particles.

Wave-particle duality, a fundamental concept of quantum mechanics, proposes that elementary particles, such as photons and electrons, possess the properties of both particles and waves. These physicists claim that they can possibly extend this theory to the soul-body dichotomy. If there is a quantum code for all things, living and dead, then there is an existence after death (speaking in purely physical terms). Dr. Hans-Peter Dürr, former head of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, posits that, just as a particle “writes” all of its information on its wave function, the brain is the tangible “floppy disk” on which we save our data, and this data is then “uploaded” into the spiritual quantum field. Continuing with this analogy, when we die the body, or the physical disk, is gone, but our consciousness, or the data on the computer, lives on.

Is Quantum the Future of High-Performance Analytics?

If you think quantum computing sounds like something out of science fiction, you’re not alone. It’s still more theory than practice, but it might be able to answer questions that are unsolvable by current computers. Earlier this year, IBM made a small quantum computer available via the cloud.

Quantum Mechanics and the Weirdness of Particles

To understand quantum computers, you must first know a little bit about quantum mechanics. In the briefest possible description, quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that models how particles behave at the smallest scales.

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