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Category: particle physics – Page 93

Grasping the precise energy landscapes of quantum particles can significantly enhance the accuracy of computer simulations for material sciences. These simulations are instrumental in developing advanced materials for applications in physics, chemistry, and sustainable technologies. The research tackles longstanding questions from the 1980s, paving the way for breakthroughs across various scientific disciplines.

An international group of physicists, led by researchers at Trinity College Dublin, has developed new theorems in quantum mechanics that explain the “energy landscapes” of quantum particle collections. Their work resolves decades-old questions, paving the way for more accurate computer simulations of materials. This advancement could significantly aid scientists in designing materials poised to revolutionize green technologies.

The new theorems have just been published in the prominent journal Physical Review Letters. The results describe how the energy of systems of particles (such as atoms, molecules, and more exotic matter) changes when their magnetism and particle count change. Solving an open problem important to the simulation of matter using computers, this extends a series of landmark works commencing from the early 1980s.

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Scientists are closer to giving the next generation of solar cells a powerful boost by integrating a process that could make the technology more efficient by breaking particles of light—photons—into small chunks.

In a study published in Nature Chemistry researchers unravel the scientific understanding of what happens when light particles split—a process called —and its underlying workings.

Lead researcher Professor Tim Schmidt from UNSW Sydney’s School of Chemistry has studied singlet fission for more than a decade. He says the process could be invoked and applied to improve existing silicon solar cell technologies.

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In recent years, physicists and engineers have developed increasingly sophisticated instruments to study particles and the interactions between them with high precision. These instruments, which include particle detectors, sensors and accelerometers, could help researchers to study physical processes in greater detail, potentially contributing to interesting new discoveries.

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Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have created the first-ever atomic movies showing how atoms rearrange locally within a quantum material as it transitions from an insulator to a metal. With the help of these movies, the researchers discovered a new material phase that settles a yearslong scientific debate and could facilitate the design of new transitioning materials with commercial applications.

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In most neutral-atom quantum computers, atoms are held in arrays of optical tweezers. Researchers typically populate the arrays stochastically, meaning that whether a given site receives an atom is down to chance. Atoms can later be rearranged individually, but the total number of atoms depends on the success of the initial loading.

The Atom Computing team developed an iterative process to fill an array to capacity. Instead of filling the array directly, the researchers first stochastically populated a second “reservoir” array. They then transferred atoms one by one from this reservoir to the target array using an optical tweezer. Between each loading step, the researchers imaged both arrays to determine which sites in each array were occupied. This step required temporarily switching off the tweezers and holding the atoms in an optical lattice formed from interfering laser beams.

The researchers showed that this sequence could be repeated as many times as necessary without losing atoms from the target array. They also showed that they could limit atom loss during the imaging step by enhancing the lattice strength using optical cavities. This enhancement allowed the atoms to be more strongly confined without increasing the optical lattice’s laser-power requirements.

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“We discovered that the glass beads in the Chang’e-5 lunar soil can preserve iron particles of different sizes, from about 1 nanometer to 1 micrometer,” said Prof. Bai.

“It is generally difficult to distinguish npFe0 of different origins observed together in single samples. Here we used the rotation feature of the impact glass beads to clearly distinguish npFe0 formed before and after the solidification of the host glass beads.”

In this study, the scientists found numerous discrete large npFe0, tens of nanometers in size, which tended to concentrate towards the extremities of the glass beads. This concentration effect can cause ultralarge npFe0 to protrude from the extremities.

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Researchers at the Ye Lab at JILA (the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado Boulder) and University of Delaware recently created a highly precise optical lattice clock based on trapped strontium atoms. Their clock, presented in a Physical Review Letters paper, exhibits a total systematic uncertainty of 8.1 × 10–19, which is the lowest uncertainty reported to date.

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New research may have found a link between supermassive black holes and dark matter particles which might solve an issue which has irked astrophysicists for decades: the “final parsec problem.”

Last year, an international team of researchers discovered a background “hum” of gravitational waves. They hypothesised that this background signal is emanating from millions of merging pairs of supermassive black hole.

Supermassive black holes are hundreds of thousands to billions of times larger than our Sun.

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