The Universe we live in is a transparent one, where light from stars and galaxies shines bright against a clear, dark backdrop.
But this wasn’t always the case – in its early years, the Universe was filled with a fog of hydrogen atoms that obscured light from the earliest stars and galaxies.
The intense ultraviolet light from the first generations of stars and galaxies is thought to have burned through the hydrogen fog, transforming the Universe into what we see today.
Quantum information (QI) processing has the potential to revolutionize technology, offering unparalleled computational power, safety, and detection sensitivity.
Qubits, the fundamental units of hardware for quantum information, serve as the cornerstone for quantum computers and the processing of quantum information. However, there remains substantial discussion regarding which types of qubits are actually the best.
Research and development in this field are growing at astonishing paces to see which system or platform outruns the other. To mention a few, platforms as diverse as superconducting Josephson junctions, trapped ions, topological qubits, ultra-cold neutral atoms, or even diamond vacancies constitute the zoo of possibilities to make qubits.
A group of international researchers led by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian (CfA) achieved the once-unimaginable four years ago: using a groundbreaking telescope to capture an image of a black hole.
Last month some of those researchers, engineers, and physicists convened at Harvard to consider and begin drawing up plans for the next step: a closer study of the photon rings that encircle black holes in glowing orange. The mission has been dubbed the Event Horizon Explorer (EHE), and the group hopes it will offer additional insight into black holes, which sit at the center of galaxies.
The $300 million project examining the nature of space and time builds on the success of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project of 2019, when researchers took the first-ever picture of a black hole, a focal point so tiny “the biggest ones on the sky are only about the same size as an atom held at arm’s length,” said Michael Johnson, an astrophysicist at the CfA.
Weird things happen on the quantum level. Whole clouds of particles can become entangled, their individuality lost as they act as one.
Now scientists have observed, for the first time, ultracold atoms cooled to a quantum state chemically reacting as a collective, rather than haphazardly forming new molecules after bumping into each other by chance.
“What we saw lined up with the theoretical predictions,” says Cheng Chin, a physicist at the University of Chicago and senior author of the study. “This has been a scientific goal for 20 years, so it’s a very exciting era.”
In 1929, astronomers discovered that galaxies are streaming away from us and each other. They interpreted this observation that the universe is expanding. However, when they measured how fast it is expanding, they got different answers using different methods. The difference continues to be a thorn in their description of the expanding universe.
A potential solution has been proposed by a research team headed by Souvik Jana from the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in Bengaluru. Their paper, recently published in the Physical Review Letters.
Physical Review Letters (PRL) is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Physical Society. It is one of the most prestigious and influential journals in physics, with a high impact factor and a reputation for publishing groundbreaking research in all areas of physics, from particle physics to condensed matter physics and beyond. PRL is known for its rigorous standards and short article format, with a maximum length of four pages, making it an important venue for rapid communication of new findings and ideas in the physics community.
“This has been a scientific goal for 20 years, so it’s a very exciting era.”
In a significant advance, scientists have obtained the first proof of a phenomenon known as “quantum superchemistry.” This effect was previously predicted but never actually observed in the laboratory.
The University of Chicago researchers that led this experiment characterize quantum superchemistry as a “phenomenon where particles in the same quantum state undergo collectively accelerated reactions.”
John Zich.
This effect was previously predicted but never actually observed in the laboratory.
Using a 192-beam laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility, researchers heated and compressed hydrogen atoms, exceeding solar temperatures.
Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California have successfully repeated the breakthrough experiment in nuclear fusion performed in December last year, Reuters.
The experiment performed on July 30 had a higher yield than what was obtained in December, a spokesperson said.
Pythagoras first discovered that the vibrations of strings are drastically enhanced at certain frequencies. This discovery forms the basis of our tone system. Such natural vibrations ubiquitously exist in objects regardless of their size scales and are widely utilized to derive their species, constituents, and morphology. For example, molecular vibrations at a terahertz rate have become the most common fingerprints for the identification of chemicals and the structural analysis of large biomolecules.
Recently, natural vibrations of particles at the mesoscopic scale have received growing interest, since this category includes a wide range of functional particles, as well as most biological cells and viruses. However, natural vibrations of these mesoscopic particles have remained hidden from existing technologies.
These particles with sizes ranging from 100 nm to 100 μm are expected to vibrate faintly at megahertz to gigahertz rates. This frequency regime could not be resolved by current Raman and Brillouin spectroscopies, however, due to strong Rayleigh-wing scattering, while the performances of piezoelectric techniques that are widely exploited in macroscopic systems degrade significantly at frequencies beyond a few megahertz.
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We have no idea what dark matter is, other than it’s some source of gravity that is completely invisible but exerts way more pull that all of the regular matter. More than all of the stars, all of the gas, all of the black holes…unless dark matter is black holes, then black holes are most of everything. Dark matter constitutes 80% or so of the mass in the universe, which means even our Milky Way galaxy is mostly a vast ball of dark matter that happens to have attracted a relative sprinkling of baryons—atoms in the form of gas, which lit up as starry glitter spinning in the middle of this invisible gravitational well.
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