Lifeboat Foundation

Our current best understanding of the universe requires the existence of an invisible substance known as dark matter. The exact nature of dark matter (or its actual existence) is still unknown, and there are multiple competing theories to explain the effect of this matter on the Universe. An exciting new one is called Recycled Dark Matter.

The idea behind Recycled Dark Matter is that dark matter is produced in a specific mechanism that researchers have dubbed “recycling” in a paper awaiting peer-review, because dark matter forms twice in the universe, with weird quantum mechanics and a black hole phase in the middle. All of that just a few instants after the beginning of the cosmos.

So, let’s take a journey back about 13.8 billion years. You don’t have to move, because the Big Bang happened everywhere. At the very moment that time as we know it starts ticking, the fundamental forces and the building blocks of particles we know of (the Standard Model) are in equilibrium with the Dark Sector (we know it sounds like a bad fantasy novel location, but bear with).

It just launched into space—so we’re about to find out if that’s actually true.

Some neural nets can work well using both bits and qubits.

A significant milestone has been reached in the field of quantum chemistry.

The Cold Atom Lab facility equipped on the International Space Station (ISS) has successfully generated a quantum gas composed of two distinct types of atoms for the first time in space.

You’re familiar with the states of matter we encounter daily – such as solid, liquid, and gas – but in more exotic and extreme conditions, new states can appear, and scientists from the US and China found one earlier this year.

They’re calling it the chiral bose-liquid state, and as with every new arrangement of particles we discover, it can tell us more about the fabric and the mechanisms of the Universe around us – and in particular, at the super-small quantum scale.

States of matter describe how particles can interact with one another, giving rise to structures and various ways of behaving. Lock atoms in place, and you have a solid. Allow them to flow, you have a liquid or gas. Force charged partnerships apart, you have a plasma.

Teleportation might just be the next big thing – and no, we’re not talking about sci-fi dreams! Scientists are seriously delving into quantum teleportation, where information about particles is transmitted instantly. It’s currently happening on the teeny-tiny scale, but progress is zooming at warp speed. While teleporting your morning commute might take a bit, the future seems to be knocking at the teleportation door, and it’s saying, “Open up, it’s science!” 🚀🔮

#brightside.

Continue reading “Teleportation Will Be Here Sooner Than You Think” »

In a breakthrough at CERN

Established in 1954 and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, CERN is a European research organization that operates the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Its full name is the European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire) and the CERN acronym comes from the French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire. CERN’s main mission is to study the fundamental structure of the universe through the use of advanced particle accelerators and detectors.

A color wheel (CW) is one of the most essential devices for contemporary projection displays because it provides the color initialization definition and determines the color performance of the whole system. However, conventional color wheels remain limited in terms of color performance and efficiency because of the light-absorbing material and time sequential color generation. Quantum dots, found in 1981 and known as a kind of quasi-zero-dimensional nanomaterial, exhibit excellent features for displays due to their quantum confinement effect, which won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Inspired by this, the paper systematically demonstrates a quantum-dot color wheel (QD-CW) device through theoretical derivation, simulation analysis, and experimental verification. The theoretical model to define the duty circle ratio is presented for the QD-CW and verified by Monte Carlo ray-tracing simulation. In terms of experimental verification, the QD-CW device is realized by multiple rounds of a photolithography process, and then assembled into a blue laser pumped projection prototype for full-color display. The chromaticity coordinates of white-balanced output are finally located at (0.317,0.338), which matches well with a standard D65 source. The color gamut area of the QD-CW device reaches 116.6% NTSC, and the average light conversion efficiency (LCE) of the prepared QD-CW is 57.0%. The proposed QD-CW device has ∼40% higher color gamut area and 1.2× higher LCE than a conventional CW device. These exciting findings show a groundbreaking approach to color generation in projection displays, which are expected to shed light on other high-quality display applications.

The addition of an additional step in a long-established workflow can help reduce substantial costs show cybersecurity researchers.

Sakkmesterke/iStock.

The increasing use of cloud storage has increased the risks to data security, and cybersecurity researchers have been looking at distributed cloud storage as a plausible solution to this problem.