Physicists have made a groundbreaking discovery that confirms a century-old quantum theory by capturing images of free-range atoms interacting in space for the first time.
Category: particle physics
Quantum technologies, which leverage quantum mechanical effects to process information, could outperform their classical counterparts in some complex and advanced tasks. The development and real-world deployment of these technologies partly relies on the ability to transfer information between different types of quantum systems effectively.
A long-standing challenge in the field of quantum technology is converting quantum signals carried by microwave photons (i.e., particles of electromagnetic radiation in the microwave frequency range) into optical photons (i.e., visible or near visible light particles). Devices designed to perform this conversion are known as microwave-to-optical transducers.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology recently developed a new microwave-to-optical transducer based on rare-earth ion-doped crystals. Their on-chip transducer, outlined in a paper published in Nature Physics, was implemented using ytterbium-171 ions doped in a YVO4 crystal.
The blazar BL Lacertae, a supermassive black hole surrounded by a bright disk and jets oriented toward Earth, provided scientists with a unique opportunity to answer a longstanding question: How are X-rays generated in extreme environments like this?
NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) collaborated with radio and optical telescopes to find answers. The results, available on the arXiv preprint server and set to be published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, show that interactions between fast-moving electrons and particles of light, called photons, must lead to this X-ray emission.
Scientists had two competing possible explanations for the X-rays, one involving protons and one involving electrons. Each of these mechanisms would have a different signature in the polarization of X-ray light. Polarization is a property of light that describes the average direction of the electromagnetic waves that make up light.
Future space missions could use quantum technologies to help us understand the physical laws that govern the universe, explore the composition of other planets and their moons, gain insights into unexplained cosmological phenomena, or monitor ice sheet thickness and the amount of water in underground aquifers on Earth.
NASA’s Cold Atom Lab (CAL), a first-of-its-kind facility aboard the International Space Station, has performed a series of trailblazing experiments based on the quantum properties of ultracold atoms. The tool used to perform these experiments is called an atom interferometer, and it can precisely measure gravity, magnetic fields, and other forces.
Atom interferometers are currently being used on Earth to study the fundamental nature of gravity and are also being developed to aid aircraft and ship navigation, but use of an atom interferometer in space will enable innovative science capabilities.
Neutrinos and antineutrinos are elementary particles with small but unknown mass. High-precision atomic mass measurements at the Accelerator Laboratory of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, have revealed that beta decay of the silver-110 isomer has a strong potential to be used for the determination of electron antineutrino mass. The result is an important step in paving the way for future antineutrino experiments.
The mass of neutrinos and their antineutrinos is one of the big unanswered questions in physics. Neutrinos are elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics and are very common in nature. They are produced, for example, by nuclear reactions in the sun. Every second, trillions of solar neutrinos travel through us.
“Their mass determination would be of utmost importance,” says Professor Anu Kankainen from the University of Jyväskylä. “Understanding them can give us a better picture of the evolution of the universe.”
A new way of explaining gravity could bring us a step closer to resolving the heretofore irresolvable differences it has with quantum mechanics.
Physicists Mikko Partanen and Jukka Tulkki at Aalto University in Finland have devised a new way of thinking about gravity that they say is compatible with the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory describing the other three fundamental forces in the Universe – strong, weak, and electromagnetic.
It’s not quite a theory of quantum gravity… but it could help us get there.
A nuclear fusion power plant prototype is already being built outside Boston. How long until unlimited clean energy is real?
Posted in nuclear energy, particle physics | Leave a Comment on A nuclear fusion power plant prototype is already being built outside Boston. How long until unlimited clean energy is real?
In an unassuming industrial park 30 miles outside Boston, engineers are building a futuristic machine to replicate the energy of the stars. If all goes to plan, it could be the key to producing virtually unlimited, clean electricity in the United States in about a decade.
The donut-shaped machine Commonwealth Fusion Systems is assembling to generate this energy is simultaneously the hottest and coldest place in the entire solar system, according to the scientists who are building it.
It is inside that extreme environment in the so-called tokamak that they smash atoms together in 100-million-degree plasma. The nuclear fusion reaction is surrounded by a magnetic field more than 400,000 times more powerful than the Earth’s and chilled with cryogenic gases close to absolute zero.
Researchers at the University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology recently connected their campuses with an experimental quantum communications network using two optical fibers. In a new paper published in Optica Quantum, scientists describe the Rochester Quantum Network (RoQNET), which uses single photons to transmit information about 11 miles along fiber-optic lines at room temperature using optical wavelengths.
Quantum communications networks have the potential to massively improve the security with which information is transmitted, making messages impossible to clone or intercept without detection. Quantum communication works with quantum bits, or qubits, that can be physically created using atoms, superconductors, and even in defects in materials like diamond. However, photons—individual particles of light—are the best type of qubit for long distance quantum communications.
Photons are appealing for quantum communication in part because they could theoretically be transmitted over existing fiber-optic telecommunications lines that already crisscross the globe. In the future, many types of qubits will likely be utilized because qubit sources, like quantum dots or trapped ions, each have their own advantages for specific applications in quantum computing or different types of quantum sensing.
Quantum ideas describe particles and fields in tiny packages, but general relativity paints gravity as smooth curves in space‑time. Until now.
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New physics theory claims spacetime dissolves and particles get super small.