Blog – Page 5982

Can information become a source of energy? Scientists from Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Canada devised an ultrafast engine that claims to operate on information, potentially opening up a groundbreaking new frontier in humanity’s search for new kinds of fuel. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), describes how the researchers turned the movements of tiny particles into stored energy.

Practical demon-keeping

How would an information engine even work? The idea for such a contraption, which at first sounds like it would break the laws of physics, was first proposed by the Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell back in 1867. Colorfully named “Maxwell’s demon,” such a machine would theoretically achieve something akin to perpetual motion. Maxwell’s thought experiment was meant to show that it may be possible to violate the second law of thermodynamics, which basically states that the amount of entropy, or disorder, always increases.

Nearly a century after Italian physicist Ettore Majorana laid the groundwork for the discovery that electrons could be divided into halves, researchers predict that split photons may also exist, according to a study from Dartmouth and SUNY Polytechnic Institute researchers.

The finding that the building blocks of light can exist in a previously-unimaginable split form advances the fundamental understanding of light and how it behaves.

The theoretical discovery of the split photon – known as a “Majorana boson” – was published in Physical Review Letters.