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Category: quantum physics – Page 840

Best of last week: Flux capacitor invented, a better 3D printer and the true benefits of vitamins

It was a good week for physics as a team with members from Australia and Switzerland invented a flux capacitor able to break time-reversal symmetry. They proposed a device based on quantum tunneling of magnetic flux around a capacitor. And another team with members from across the U.S. reported on a gravitational wave event that likely signaled the creation of a black hole—the merger of two neutron stars.

In biology news, a team of engineers led by Sinisa Vukelic invented a noninvasive technique to correct vision. Like LASIK, it uses lasers but is non-surgical and has few side-effects. And an international team of researchers found what they describe as the mother of all lizards in the Italian Alps, the oldest known lizard fossil, from approximately 240 million years ago. Also, a team at the University of Sydney found that walking faster could make you live longer. People do not even need to walk more, the team reported, they just need to pick up the pace of their normal stride to see an improvement in several health factors. And a team from Cal Poly Pomona discovered how microbes survive clean rooms and contaminate spacecraft—and it involved the cleaning agents themselves.

In other news, a team of researchers from the University of California and the University of Southern Queensland announced that they had identified 121 giant planets that may have habitable moons. And a team at Stanford University found that wars and clan structure might explain a strange biological event that occurred 7,000 years ago—male genetic diversity appeared to collapse for a time. Also, a team of researchers from MIT and Harvard University report the development of a 3D printer that can print data sets as physical objects—offering far more realistic, nearly true-color renderings.

Physicists use terahertz flashes to uncover state of matter hidden

Using the physics equivalent of the strobe photography that captures every twitch of a cheetah in full sprint, researchers have used ultrafast spectroscopy to visualize electrons interacting as a hidden state of matter in a superconductive alloy.

It takes intense, single-cycle pulses of photons—flashes—hitting the cooled alloy at terahertz speed—trillions of cycles per second—to switch on this hidden state of by modifying interactions down at the atomic and subatomic levels.

And then it takes a second terahertz light to trigger an ultrafast camera to take images of the state of matter that, when fully understood and tuned, could one day have implications for faster, heat-free, , information storage and communication.

Quantum Computing Key Could Protect Blockchain Security

Although blockchain is traditionally seen as secure, it is vulnerable to attack from quantum computers. Now, a team of Russian researchers say they have developed a solution to the quantum-era blockchain challenge, using quantum key distribution (QKD).

Quantum computers are different from binary digital electronic computers based on transistors. Whereas common digital computing requires that the data be encoded into binary digits (bits), each of which is always in one of two definite states (0 or 1), quantum computation uses quantum bits, which can have more by being in superpositions of states.

Writing in the journal Quantum Science and Technology, the researchers set out a quantum-safe blockchain platform that uses QKD to achieve secure authentication.

A Forgotten Element Could Help Us Redefine The Way We Measure Time

A rare earth element that doesn’t get much mention could become the key to upgrading atomic clocks to become even more accurate. This could help us explore space and track satellites, and even keep the world’s time zones in sync.

Atomic clocks use the oscillations of atoms under laser fire as a measurement of time, in the same way a grandfather clock uses the swing of a pendulum. They can lose less than a second over 50 million years, depending on the elements used — but scientists want even greater accuracy.

That’s where lutetium (Lu) comes in. It offers both a higher level of stability and a higher degree of precision than the caesium or rubidium of today’s atomic clocks, according to a team of researchers from the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) in Singapore.

Physicists invent flux capacitor to break time-reversal symmetry

Physicists have invented a flux capacitor and, while it might not run a ‘Back to the Future’ inspired time machine, they say it will have important applications in communication technology and quantum computing.

The team from The University of Queensland, RMIT University and ETH Zurich have proposed a device which uses the quantum tunnelling of magnetic flux around a capacitor which they say can break time-reversal symmetry.

UQ Professor Tom Stace said the research proposed a new generation of electronic circulators – devices that control the direction in which microwave signals move.

Using the K computer, scientists predict exotic “di-Omega” particle

Based on complex simulations of quantum chromodynamics performed using the K computer, one of the most powerful computers in the world, the HAL QCD Collaboration, made up of scientists from the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Science and the RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) program, together with colleagues from a number of universities, have predicted a new type of “dibaryon”—a particle that contains six quarks instead of the usual three. Studying how these elements form could help scientists understand the interactions among elementary particles in extreme environments such as the interiors of neutron stars or the early universe moments after the Big Bang.

Particles known as “baryons”—principally protons and neutrons—are composed of three quarks bound tightly together, with their charge depending on the “color” of the quarks that make them up. A dibaryon is essentially a system with two baryons. There is one known dibaryon in nature—deuteron, a deuterium (or heavy-hydrogen) nucleus that contains a proton and a that are very lightly bound. Scientists have long wondered whether there could be other types of dibaryons. Despite searches, no other dibaryon has been found.

The group, in work published in Physical Review Letters, has now used powerful theoretical and computational tools to predict the existence of a “most strange” dibaryon, made up of two “Omega baryons” that contain three strange quarks each. They named it “di-Omega”. The group also suggested a way to look for these strange through experiments with heavy ion collisions planned in Europe and Japan.