Lifeboat Foundation

Physicists have found the most convincing signs of a tetraneutron — a four neutron-no proton particle — to date, adding weight to the possibility that the hypothetical particle really does exist. According to theory, this highly elusive particle cluster is impossible, because of how unstable lone neutrons are, but scientists in Japan say they’ve spotted its signature during recent experiments.

While the results need to be replicated independently before we can truly say the fabled tetraneutron exists, if other teams can confirm its existence, we’re going to have to make some serious changes to current understanding of nuclear forces. “It would be something of a sensation,” nuclear theorist Peter Schuck from France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, who wasn’t involved in the discovery, told Science News.

Physicists have been searching for the tetraneutron for decades, and while this 1965 paper concluded that no evidence could be found and “the existence of tetraneutrons is most unlikely”, four separate papers have since reported experimental observations of the particle.

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Very nice; another article on photonic crystal.

Scientists have created a crystal structure that boosts the interaction between tiny bursts of light and individual electrons, an advance that could be a significant step toward establishing quantum networks in the future.

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We all have “Quantum Spark”.

For centuries philosophers have grappled with the question of what makes life, and thanks to the science of quantum mechanics we might just have the answer, writes Johnjoe McFadden.

What is life? Why is the stuff of life — flesh — so different from inanimate material? Does life obey the same laws as the inanimate world? And what happens when we die?

Continue reading “It seems life really does have a vital spark: quantum mechanics” »

In quantum physics, the creation of a state of entanglement in particles any larger and more complex than photons usually requires temperatures close to absolute zero and the application of enormously powerful magnetic fields to achieve. Now scientists working at the University of Chicago (UChicago) and the Argonne National Laboratory claim to have created this entangled state at room temperature on a semiconductor chip, using atomic nuclei and the application of relatively small magnetic fields.

When two particles, such as photons, are entangled – that is, when they interact physically and are then forcibly separated – the spin direction imparted to each is directly opposite to the other. However, when one of the entangled particles has its spin direction measured, the other particle will immediately display the reverse spin direction, no matter how great a distance they are apart. This is the “spooky action at a distance” phenomenon (as Albert Einstein put it) that has already seen the rise of applications once considered science fiction, such as ultra-safe cryptography and a new realm of quantum computing.

Ordinarily, quantum entanglement is a rarely observed occurence in the natural world, as particles coupled in this way first need to be in a highly ordered state before they can be entangled. In essence, this is because thermodynamic entropy dictates that a general chaos of particles is the standard state of things at the atomic level and makes such alignments exceedingly rare. Going up a scale to the macro level, and the sheer number of particles involved makes entanglement an exceptionally difficult state to achieve.

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Time triva facts that make you go hmmm.

Passage of time is faster for your face than for your feet (supposing you’re standing up). Einstein’s theory of relativity states that the nearer you are to the center of the Earth, the slower time passes – and this has been already measured. For an instance, at the top of Mount Everest, a year would be about 15 microseconds shorter than at sea level.

A second isn’t what just you consider it is. Technically, it’s not defined as 1/60th of a minute, but as “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation consistent to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom”.

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It takes 100 attoseconds for a krypton electron to respond to light. That might not seem like much, but someday it could limit the speed of optoelectronic circuits.

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Physicists in England claim they have discovered how to create matter from light, by smashing together individual massless photons– a feat that was first theorized back in 1934, and has been considered practically impossible until now. If this new discovery pans out, the final piece of the physics jigsaw puzzle that describes how light and matter interact would be complete. No one’s quite sure of the repercussions if matter can indeed be produced from photon-photon collision, but I’m sure something awesomely scientific will emerge before long.

Way back in 1930, British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac theorized that an electron and its antimatter counterpart (a positron) could be annihilated (combined) to produce two photons. Then, in 1934, two physicists — Breit and Wheeler — proposed that the opposite should also be true: That two photons could be smashed together to produce an electron and positron (a Breit-Wheeler pair). In other words, that light can be converted into matter, and vice versa — or, to phrase it another way, E=mc² works in both directions. This would close one of the last gaps in particle physics that has been theorized, but has proven very hard to prove through observation.

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Building building diamond lattices through DNA.

Using bundled strands of DNA to build Tinkertoy-like tetrahedral cages, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have devised a way to trap and arrange nanoparticles in a way that mimics the crystalline structure of diamond. The achievement of this complex yet elegant arrangement, as described in a paper published February 5, 2016, in Science, may open a path to new materials that take advantage of the optical and mechanical properties of this crystalline structure for applications such as optical transistors, color-changing materials, and lightweight yet tough materials.

“We solved a 25-year challenge in building diamond lattices in a rational way via self-assembly,” said Oleg Gang, a physicist who led this research at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) at Brookhaven Lab in collaboration with scientists from Stony Brook University, Wesleyan University, and Nagoya University in Japan.

Continue reading “DNA used to assemble nanoparticles into a copy of the crystalline structure of diamond” »

German scientists today will set about the first steps towards what has become the Holy Grail of energy—nuclear fusion, which has the potential for unlimited amounts of clean power. There are a number of challenges to harnessing this power —researchers need to build a device that can heat atoms to temperatures of more than 100 million °C (180 million °F).

After almost nine years of construction work and more than a million assembly hours, researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Greifswald are set to do just that by heating a tiny amount of hydrogen until it becomes as hot, hopefully, as the center of the Sun.

Researchers are keen to tap into the incredible amount of energy released when atoms join together at extremely high temperatures in the super-hot gas known as plasma. Today’s test will not produce any energy, just the plasma—a different state of matter created at extremely high temperatures. German chancellor Angela Merkel, who has a doctorate in physics, will reportedly attend.

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