Toggle light / dark theme

Superconductivity occurs when electrons in a metal pair up and move through the material without resistance. But there may be more to the story than we thought, as scientists in Germany have now discovered that electrons can also group together into families of four, creating a new state of matter and, potentially, a new type of superconductivity.

Conductivity is a measure of how easily electrons (and therefore electricity) can move through a material. But even in materials that make good conductors, like gold, electrons will still encounter some resistance. Superconductors, however, remove all such barriers and provide zero resistance at ultracold temperatures.

The reason electrons can move through superconductors so easily is because they pair up through a quantum effect known as Cooper pairing. In doing so, they raise the minimum amount of energy it takes to interfere with the electrons – and if the material is cold enough, its atoms won’t have enough thermal energy to disturb these Cooper pairs, allowing the electrons to flow freely with no loss of energy.

What is entanglement theory? It is a Mystery, and here is a potential solution. But its implications are so paradigm shattering that most scientists refuse to believe it. Maybe we can’t handle the truth?

Imagine you found a pair of dice such that no matter how you tossed them, they always added up to 7. Besides becoming the richest man in Vegas, what you would have there is something called an entangled pair of dice.

You could now separate these entangled dice. You could have your friend Alice take one of these to Macau, while the other one stays with you in Las Vegas. And as soon as you rolled your dice, the other one would always instantly show a number that added up to 7.

Since this happens instantly, did your dice communicate at faster than speed of light to Macau?

Scientists can create entangled photons, for example, by shining a laser on a nonlinear optical crystal. The Entanglement means that a pair of photons act like a single entity rather than two separate particles. To understand entanglement better, you first have to accept the fact that at the quantum scale, reality is fuzzy. Reality really doesn’t know what it is, until it is measured.

This is like a single dice tossed in the air that doesn’t have a distinct face until it lands. When tossed up, it is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 all at once. Quantum particles are similar in that they do not have distinct properties until they are measured. Particles such as a photon exists in all possible states simultaneously. But when it is measured, it is in only one state. And if the photon is entangled, this measurement of one particle causes its entangled pair to simultaneously exhibit the opposite state, no matter what the distance is between them.

In this video I explain why free will is incompatible with the currently known laws of nature and why the idea makes no sense anyway. However, you don’t need free will to act responsibly and to live a happy life, and I will tell you why.

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Sabine.

The reference I mentioned is here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5239816/

#physics #science #philosophy.

0:00 Intro and Content Summary.

Special offer for ArvinAsh viewers — Go to: https://brilliant.org/arvinash — you can sign up for free! The first 200 people will get 20% off their annual membership.

Background videos:
Fundamental forces: https://youtu.be/669QUJrF4u0
Electroweak theory: https://youtu.be/u05VK0pSc7I
Is Big Bang hidden in gravity waves: https://youtu.be/VXr1mzY2GnY
Cosmic Microwave background: https://youtu.be/XcXCrFIivyk.

Errata:
12:26 — Helium-3 has 2 protons and 1 Neutron.

Chapters:
0:00 — How many atoms are there?
1:01 — We don’t know what happened at or before t=0
3:34 — Cosmic inflation.
5:27 — What we do know.
8:29 — How protons and neutrons formed.
10:41 — How charged nucleons formed.
13:47 — How neutral atoms formed.
15:24 — How to learn more about atoms.

Summary:
Where did the first atom come from? The short answer is the big bang. In the early universe there was an immense amount of energy, The energy condensed, atoms formed. But there’s a lot more that happened, which will be explained here.

The big bang is often thought of as the theory explaining the beginning. but it’s not. We don’t know when the universe actually started, or whether it did. Our best theory of the early universe is the standard model of cosmology, We can only go back to one Planck time, about 10^−43 seconds. This is the smallest unit of time that can theoretically exist according to quantum mechanics. We don’t know what came before this.

Magnetene could have useful applications as a lubricant in implantable devices or other micro-electro-mechanical systems.

A team of researchers from University of Toronto Engineering and Rice University have reported the first measurements of the ultra-low-friction behaviour of a material known as magnetene. The results point the way toward strategies for designing similar low-friction materials for use in a variety of fields, including tiny, implantable devices.

Magnetene is a 2D material, meaning it is composed of a single layer of atoms. In this respect, it is similar to graphene 0, a material that has been studied intensively for its unusual properties — including ultra-low friction — since its discovery in 2004.

A team of researchers from University of Toronto Engineering and Rice University have reported the first measurements of the ultra-low-friction behavior of a material known as magnetene. The results point the way toward strategies for designing similar low-friction materials for use in a variety of fields, including tiny, implantable devices.

The properties of a complex and exotic state of a quantum material can be predicted using a machine learning method created by a RIKEN researcher and a collaborator. This advance could aid the development of future quantum computers.

We have all faced the agonizing challenge of choosing between two equally good (or bad) options. This frustration is also felt by when they feel two competing forces in a special type of quantum system.

In some magnets, particle spins—visualized as the axis about which a particle rotates—are all forced to align, whereas in others they must alternate in direction. But in a small number of materials, these tendencies to align or counter-align compete, leading to so-called frustrated magnetism. This frustration means that the spin fluctuates between directions, even at absolute zero temperature where one would expect stability. This creates an exotic state of matter known as a .

JILA researchers have tricked nature by tuning a dense quantum gas of atoms to make a congested “Fermi sea,” thus keeping atoms in a high-energy state, or excited, for about 10% longer than usual by delaying their normal return to the lowest-energy state. The technique might be used to improve quantum communication networks and atomic clocks.

Quantum systems such as atoms that are excited above their resting state naturally calm down, or decay, by releasing light in quantized portions called photons. This common process is evident in the glow of fireflies and emission from LEDs. The rate of decay can be engineered by modifying the environment or the internal properties of the atoms. Previous research has modified the electromagnetic environment; the new work focuses on the atoms.

The new JILA method relies on a rule of the quantum world known as the Pauli exclusion principle, which says identical fermions (a category of particles) can’t share the same quantum states at the same time. Therefore, if enough fermions are in a crowd—creating a Fermi sea—an excited fermion might not be able to fling out a photon as usual, because it would need to then recoil. That recoil could land it in the same quantum state of motion as one of its neighbors, which is forbidden due to a mechanism called Pauli blocking.