IN A NUTSHELL 🔬 Rice University researchers discovered copper boride, a novel two-dimensional material with transformative potential. 🧪 The study highlights copper boride’s strong covalent bonding and distinct electronic properties, setting it apart from other 2D materials. 🔋 This breakthrough could significantly impact electrochemical energy storage and applications in quantum information technology. 🌟 The discovery
For the design of future materials, it is important to understand how the individual atoms inside a material interact with each other quantum mechanically. Previously inexplicable vibrational states between carbon chains (carbyne) and nanotubes have puzzled materials scientists.
Researchers from Austria, Italy, France, China and Japan led by the University of Vienna have now succeeded in getting to the bottom of this phenomenon with the help of Raman spectroscopy, innovative theoretical models and the use of machine learning. The results, published in Nature Communications, show the universal applicability of carbyne as a sensor due to its sensitivity to external influences.
For the design of future materials, it is important to understand how matter interacts on an atomic scale. These quantum mechanical effects determine all macroscopic properties of matter, such as electrical, magnetic, optical or elastic properties. In experiments, scientists use Raman spectroscopy, in which light interacts with matter, to determine the vibrational eigenstates of the atomic nuclei of the samples.
Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment has always been deeply misunderstood. In this article I’d like to explain how, if understood properly, it might shed new light on the mechanism by which consciousness evolved.
Schrödinger’s cat and schrödinger’s hat
The purpose of Schrödinger’s thought experiment was to highlight serious problems in the (then very new) “Copenhagen Interpretation” of Quantum Mechanics (CI). The CI was a bit of a botch-job, because the founders of QM had no idea how to “interpret” the strange new physics they had discovered. The CI says quantum systems remain in a superposition (a “smeared out” state where everything than can happen is somehow happening in parallel) until measured, but does not define what counts as a “measurement”, or why. Schrödinger always rejected this idea, and his thought experiment was intended to demonstrate why. He proposes a sealed box (so no “measurements” can take place), in which has been placed a cat, and a quantum source with a 50% probability of releasing poison. According to the CI, so long as the system inside the box remains “unmeasured”, the poison has both been released and not-released and therefore that cat is both dead and alive.
Very soon after the Big Bang, the universe enjoyed a brief phase where quarks and gluons roamed freely, not yet joined up into hadrons such as protons, neutrons and mesons. This state, called a quark-gluon plasma, existed for a brief time until the temperature dropped to about 20 trillion Kelvin, after which this “hadronization” took place.
Now a research group from Italy has presented new calculations of the plasma’s equation of state that show how important the strong force was before the hadrons formed. Their work is published in Physical Review Letters.
The equation of state of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) represents the collective behavior of particles that experience the strong force—a gas of strongly interacting particles at equilibrium, with its numbers and net energy unchanging. It’s analogous to the well-known, simple equation of state of atoms in a gas, PV=nRT, but can’t be so simply summarized.
A novel microscopic imaging technique, developed by Brown University engineers to capture 3D images using quantum entanglement, may finally solve the problem of phase wrapping.
Undergraduate students Moe (Yameng) Zhang and Wenyu Liu presented their work at the recent Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics. They worked on an independent project under the supervision of senior research associate Petr Moroshkin and Professor Jimmy Xu.
