Lifeboat Foundation

Clusters composed of a few atoms tend to be spherical. They are usually organized in shells of atoms around a central atom. This is the case for many elements, but not for gold! Experiments and advanced computations have shown that freestanding clusters of twenty gold atoms take on a pyramidal shape. They have a triangular ground plane made up of ten neatly arranged atoms, with additional triangles of six and three atoms, topped by a single atom.

The remarkable tetrahedral structure has now been imaged for the first time with a scanning tunnelling microscope. This high-tech microscope can visualise single atoms. It operates at extremely low temperatures (269 degrees below zero) and uses quantum tunnelling of an electrical current from a sharp scanning metallic tip through the cluster and into the support. Quantum tunnelling is a process where electrical current flows between two conductors without any physical contact between them.

The researchers used intense plasmas in a complex vacuum chamber setup to sputter gold atoms from a macroscopic piece of gold. “Part of the sputtered atoms grow together to small particles of a few up to a few tens of atoms, due to a process comparable with condensation of water molecules to droplets,” says Zhe Li, the main author of the paper, currently at the Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen. “We selected a beam of clusters consisting of exactly twenty gold atoms. We landed these species with one of the triangular facets onto a substrate covered with a very thin layer of kitchen salt (NaCl), precisely three atom layers thick.”

The study also revealed the peculiar electronic structure of the small gold pyramid. Similar to noble gas atoms or aromatic molecules, the cluster only has completely filled electron orbitals, which makes them much less reactive than clusters with one or a few atoms more or less.

Continue reading “Clusters of gold atoms form peculiar pyramidal shape” »

Intel introducing the ‘Horse Ridge’ to help enable Quantum Computers that are commercially viable, compared to the current models.

Researchers at Columbia University and University of California, San Diego, have introduced a novel “multi-messenger” approach to quantum physics that signifies a technological leap in how scientists can explore quantum materials.

The findings appear in a recent article published in Nature Materials, led by A. S. McLeod, postdoctoral researcher, Columbia Nano Initiative, with co-authors Dmitri Basov and A. J. Millis at Columbia and R.A. Averitt at UC San Diego.

“We have brought a technique from the inter-galactic scale down to the realm of the ultra-small,” said Basov, Higgins Professor of Physics and Director of the Energy Frontier Research Center at Columbia. Equipped with multi-modal nanoscience tools we can now routinely go places no one thought would be possible as recently as five years ago.”

Quantum computers, quantum cryptography and quantum (insert name here) are often in the news these days. Articles about them inevitably refer to entanglement, a property of quantum physics that makes all these magical devices possible.

Einstein called entanglement “spooky action at a distance,” a name that has stuck and become increasingly popular. Beyond just building better quantum computers, understanding and harnessing entanglement is also useful in other ways.

Continue reading “Remote connections? Detangling entanglement in quantum physics” »

During one of these phase transitions (which happened when the universe was less than a second old), the axions of string theory didn’t appear as particles. Instead, they looked like loops and lines — a network of lightweight, nearly invisible strings crisscrossing the cosmos.

This hypothetical axiverse, filled with a variety of lightweight axion strings, is predicted by no other theory of physics but string theory. So, if we determine that we live in an axiverse, it would be a major boon for string theory.

How can we search for these axion strings? Models predict that axion strings have very low mass, so light won’t bump into an axion and bend, or axions likely wouldn’t mingle with other particles. There could be millions of axion strings floating through the Milky Way right now, and we wouldn’t see them.

Happy New year everyone! We wanted to give you an inside look as to what happens on our Dr. Joe live calls that take place once a month. Here’s a moment from our last Dr. Joe live call.

⁣ Some of the subjects Dr. Joe may address: latest scientific discoveries; health and wealth; love and relationships; neuroscience and epigenetics; happiness and vitality; the quantum model of reality; how you can make great and lasting changes in yourself and your life!⁣

⁣ With his vast experience and deepening knowledge of how each one of us can unlock unlimited abilities and transform our lives for the better, these classes offer you a unique opportunity to continually learn and interact with Dr. Joe! If you want to take it a step further in the work, Dr. Joe live is a great way to deepen your understanding, keep you plugged into the community and interact with Dr. Joe personally.⁣.

Does string theory offer an all-encompassing alternative to the Standard Model — or is this one-dimensional approach fraying at the edges?

The smallest-scale events have giant consequences, and quantum physics showed us how strange and varied those consequences can be in 2019.

The theoretical notion of a ‘quantum heat engine’ has been around for several decades. It was first introduced around sixty years ago by Scovil and Schulz-DuBois, two physicists at Bell Labs who drew an analogy between three-level masers and thermal machines.