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Neutrons, rotating black holes, and a galactic PeVatron at the center of the Milky Way

Galactic black holes are cosmic mitochondria, powerhouses of the universe. Most of the energy these supermassive black holes produce comes from the material surrounding them: superheated plasma in their accretion disks interacting with tremendous magnetic fields. But there is a more direct way to extract energy from a black hole. It’s known as the Penrose process, and a new study asks whether we could discover a signature of this process.

First proposed by Roger Penrose in 1969, the mechanism describes how you could extract energy directly from a rotating black hole, thus decreasing its total mass. This is different from the usual mechanism in which black holes generate power as a byproduct of consuming matter and increasing mass. It relies on a feature of rotating black holes known as the ergosphere.

As a black hole rotates, it drags space around it. This frame-dragging effect is most powerful very close to the black hole. The ergosphere is a region around the black hole where the frame dragging is so strong you can’t counter it. Even if you had a spaceship capable of approaching the speed of light, you couldn’t overcome the rotating frame. You will rotate around the black hole no matter what. Because of this, the timey-wimey effects of relativity get a little mucky-wucky.

Vagus Nerve Stimulation Could Help New Skills Stick

Stimulating the vagus nerve after practice helped mice develop stronger long-term motor learning, revealing a potentially important window when the brain is still locking in a new skill. The effect was linked to rhythmic changes in brain blood vessels, hinting that body-to-brain signals may help prepare the brain for lasting change.

GTA 1’s Vehicle Physics Are Now Playable In Your Browser

Patrick Kerr, a former programmer on the original Grand Theft Auto, has published a playable physics demo that eventually became the game’s vehicle system.

Learn more and play it here.

Former Grand Theft Auto programmer Patrick Kerr has shared his system and explained how it works.

First Nuclear Clocks Kick Off a Precision Race

Clocks have always been about more than keeping time. In the 18th century, marine chronometers helped solve the “longitude problem,” enabling sailors to determine their ships’ east–west position at sea [1]. A new generation of ultraprecise clocks may now help researchers navigate uncharted territory beyond the standard model of particle physics. Building on decades of development, two independent teams—one led by Thorsten Schumm of the Vienna University of Technology and Ekkehard Peik of PTB, the German National Metrology Institute [2] and the other by Shiqian Ding of Tsinghua University in China [3]—have reported in Nature the first operating nuclear clocks. Their ticks are set by a transition in the atomic nucleus rather than by transitions of the electrons surrounding it.

Peik says he was “absolutely delighted” by the rapid progress and surprised by the clock’s robustness. Ding says he felt humbled to see decades of work come together in an operating clock. “Two years earlier, that still felt almost too ambitious to imagine,” he says.

These clocks don’t yet match the stability of today’s best atomic clocks, but they hold promise for both practical applications and tests of fundamental physics. Nuclear clocks could eventually become compact and robust, doing away with the ultrahigh-vacuum chambers and elaborate laser-cooling and trapping systems required by today’s most precise atomic clocks.

Hybrid Quantum Computer Could Simulate Both Fermions and Bosons

Pairing superconducting qubits with microwave cavities could reduce the hardware requirements for quantum simulations of fundamental physics.

Performing simulations of quantum systems on an ordinary computer is fundamentally difficult. The resources required to track the state of a quantum system grow exponentially with the size of the system. Therefore, even modest-sized simulations can exceed the capacity of the largest supercomputers. In 1982, Richard Feynman proposed using a controllable quantum system as the computer, so that the quantum mechanics of the machine itself performs the computation [1]. This proposal has grown into a worldwide effort to build quantum computers made up of large numbers of quantum bits, or qubits. But simulating fundamental physics poses a special challenge, as the two classes of particles—fermions and bosons—map to qubits in distinctly different ways.

Radio galaxy from 12.5 billion years ago may be most powerful ever found

Astronomers have confirmed a powerful radio galaxy from nearly 12.5 billion years ago. The source, TXS 2354+015, was originally identified as a high-redshift candidate from its characteristic drop in optical light, and follow-up spectroscopy placed it at a redshift of 4.946. Their paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Sept. 23.

When material falls onto a galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, the resulting accretion activity can power an active galactic nucleus (AGN) and launch powerful relativistic jets of plasma, producing large amounts of radio waves. Such a galaxy is called a radio-loud active galactic nucleus (RLAGN). The energy that the jets carry can influence star formation in the galaxy and heat its surrounding gas.

This “AGN feedback” is incorporated in simulations to correctly predict the number of galaxies in the universe. Such powerful galaxies in the early universe—called high-z RLAGNs—tend to mark the locations of the most massive, earliest-forming galaxies and galaxy clusters.

First observation of quantum spins shifting a centimeter-scale object in the lab

Modern technological breakthroughs like lasers, MRI scanners, semiconductors and quantum computers rest on the study of quantum mechanics. However, the field has predominantly focused on (sub)atomic phenomena far removed from our human senses.

Demonstrating quantum phenomena in objects massive enough to be meaningfully influenced by gravity has proven difficult, as large objects are significantly harder to isolate from environmental factors, such as heat and vibration, than nanoscopic particles are.

But now, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have moved a levitating, centimeter-wide diamond using the force generated by electron spin alone, the first time a quantum effect has been observed directly manipulating an object subject to gravity.

Levitating glass sphere becomes entangled with light at room temperature

Today, many physicists are actively exploring how light could be used to link objects through quantum entanglement. By fully harnessing the effect, they hope to unlock a wide array of applications, from secure communication networks spanning vast distances to sensitive new tests of the fundamental laws of physics.

Through new research published in Science, a team led by Francesco Marin at the University of Florence has taken an important step toward this goal by entangling the motion of a tiny levitating glass sphere with light, without needing to cool their experiment to ultralow temperatures.

Ultrashort laser pulses let new microscope map electron interactions across thin materials

A new type of advanced microscope (wide-field coherent multidimensional microscopy) has been developed. It uses a carefully designed sequence of ultrashort light pulses to study the behavior of high-tech materials, with potential practical applications in the study of innovative materials such as those used to build solar panels. This is the result of work by a research group of physicists from the Faculty of Sciences, Mathematics, Physics, and Natural Sciences at Università Cattolica’s Brescia campus who, for the first time, have developed a “multidimensional microscope” that, in a sense, records the behavior of materials.

The study is published in the journal Optica and coordinated by the dean of the faculty, professor Claudio Giannetti, director of the Interdisciplinary Laboratories for Advanced Materials Physics (ILAMP).

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