Lifeboat Foundation

Strange diamonds from an ancient dwarf planet in our solar system may have formed shortly after the dwarf planet collided with a large asteroid about 4.5 billion years ago, according to scientists.

The research team says they have confirmed the existence of lonsdaleite, a rare hexagonal form of diamond, in ureilite meteorites from the mantle of the dwarf planet.

Lonsdaleite is named after the famous British pioneering female crystallographer Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, who was the first woman elected as a Fellow to the Royal Society.

A study co-led by physicists at UC Riverside and UC Irvine has found that dark matter halos of ultra-diffuse galaxies are very odd, raising questions about physicists’ understanding of galaxy formation and the structure of the universe.

Ultra-diffuse galaxies are so called because of their extremely low luminosity. The distribution of baryons—gas and stars—is much more spread out in ultra-diffuse galaxies compared to “normal” galaxies with similar masses.

In the following Q&A, Hai-Bo Yu, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at UCRhis thoughts on the findings he and UCI’s Manoj Kaplinghat, his long-term collaborator, have published in The Astrophysical Journal about newly discovered ultra-diffuse galaxies and their dark matter halos.

Not everything needs to be seen to be believed; certain things are more readily heard, like a train approaching its station. In a recent paper, published in Physical Review Letters, researchers have put their ears to the rail, discovering a new property of scattering amplitudes based on their study of sound waves through solid matter.

Be it light or sound, physicists consider the likelihood of particle interactions (yes, sound can behave like a particle) in terms of probability curves or scattering amplitudes. It is common lore that when the momentum or energy of one of the scattered particles goes to zero, scattering amplitudes should always scale with integer powers of momentum (i.e., p¹, p², p³, etc.). What the research team found however, was that the amplitude can be proportional to a fractional power (i.e., p^1/2, p^1/3, p^1/4, etc.).

Why does this matter? While quantum field theories, such as the Standard Model, allow researchers to make predictions about particle interactions with extreme accuracy, it is still possible to improve upon current foundations of fundamental physics. When a new behavior is demonstrated—such as fractional-power scaling—scientists are given an opportunity to revisit or revise existing theories.

A new device has been fabricated that can demonstrate the quantum anomalous Hall effect, in which tiny, discrete voltage steps are generated by an external magnetic field. This work may enable extremely low-power electronics, as well as future quantum computers.

If you take an ordinary wire with electrical current running through it, you can create a new electrical voltage perpendicular to the flow of current by applying an external magnetic field. This so-called Hall effect has been used as part of a simple magnetic sensor, but the sensitivity can be low.

There is a corresponding quantum version, called the quantum anomalous Hall effect that comes in defined increments, or quanta. This has raised the possibility of using the quantum anomalous Hall effect for the purpose of constructing new highly conductive wires or even quantum computers. However, the physics that leads to this phenomenon is still not completely understood.

A matter-wave interferometer can probe the magnetism of a broad range of species, from single atoms to very large, weakly magnetic molecules.

This year marks the centenary of the ground-breaking experiment of Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach that demonstrated the quantization of the spin angular momentum of an atom [1]. The evidence came from the observation that a beam of silver atoms, upon traversing a spatially varying magnetic field, split into two beams. The spatial splitting of the spin-up and spin-down atoms corresponded to an atomic magnetic moment of 1 Bohr magneton—the magnetic moment of a single spinning electron. The deflection of particle beams in a spatially varying magnetic field remains the basis of techniques for characterizing the magnetic properties of isolated atoms and molecules. Such techniques, however, aren’t sufficiently sensitive to study very large, weakly magnetic molecules, including many biological molecules.

Predictive models that relate brain activity to phenotype reliably fail when applied to subgroups of participants who do not fit stereotypical profiles, showing that the utility of a one-size-fits-all modelling approach is limited.

Understanding how the brain organizes and accesses spatial information — where we are, what’s around the corner, how to get there — remains an exquisite challenge. The process involves recalling an entire network of memories and stored spatial data from tens of billions of neurons, each connected to thousands of others. Neuroscientists have identified key elements such as grid cells, neurons that map locations. But going deeper will prove tricky: It’s not as though researchers can remove and study slices of human gray matter to watch how location-based memories of images, sounds and smells flow through and connect to each other.

Artificial intelligence offers another way in. For years, neuroscientists have harnessed many types of neural networks — the engines that power most deep learning applications — to model the firing of neurons in the brain. In recent work, researchers have shown that the hippocampus, a structure of the brain critical to memory, is basically a special kind of neural net, known as a transformer, in disguise. Their new model tracks spatial information in a way that parallels the inner workings of the brain. They’ve seen remarkable success.

“The fact that we know these models of the brain are equivalent to the transformer means that our models perform much better and are easier to train,” said James Whittington, a cognitive neuroscientist who splits his time between Stanford University and the lab of Tim Behrens at the University of Oxford.

Collaboration will seek to advance the development of a quantum internet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UM8kpnLSNw

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