Lifeboat Foundation

By harnessing quantum phenomena, quantum devices have the potential to outperform their classical counterparts. Here, we examine using wave function symmetry as a resource to enhance the performance of a quantum Otto engine. Previous work has shown that a bosonic working medium can yield better performance than a fermionic medium. We expand upon this work by incorporating a singular interaction that allows the effective symmetry to be tuned between the bosonic and fermionic limits. In this framework, the particles can be treated as anyons subject to Haldane’s generalized exclusion statistics. Solving the dynamics analytically using the framework of “statistical anyons”, we explore the interplay between interparticle interactions and wave function symmetry on engine performance.

Basically this was found out in the 1980s and this allows for teleportation in real life 😳 😅 🙃

Wave functions for four identical spin‐one‐half fermions with total spin 0 1, and 2 are constructed. Lower bounds on the ground state energies of these spin states are derived. The results are illustrated with an.

Circa 2008

A theoretical study proposes that magnetic monopoles may appear not as elementary but as emergent particles in complex, strongly-correlated magnetic systems such as spin ice, in analogy to fractional electric charges in quantum Hall systems. This theory explains a mysterious phase transition in spin ice that has been observed experimentally.

Circa 2011 o,.o Foglet bodies around the corner sooner than we think 🤔

Could living things that evolved from metals be clunking about somewhere in the universe? Perhaps. In a lab in Glasgow, UK, one man is intent on proving that metal-based life is possible.

He has managed to build cell-like bubbles from giant metal-containing molecules and has given them some life-like properties. He now hopes to induce them to evolve into fully inorganic self-replicating entities.

Continue reading “Life-like cells are made of metal” »

Researchers at MIT have developed a way of quickly changing the magnetic polarity of a ferrimagnet 180 degrees, using just a small applied voltage. According to the researchers, the discovery could herald a new era of ferrimagnetic logic and data storage systems.

The findings were published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology in a paper co-authored by postdoctoral researcher Mantao Huang, MIT professor of materials science and technology Geoffrey Beach, and professor of nuclear science and technology Bilge Yildiz, as well as 15 other researchers from MIT and other institutions in Minnesota, Germany, Spain, and Korea.

The majority of magnets we come across are of “ferromagnetic” materials. The atoms in these materials are oriented in the same direction with their north-south magnet axes; thus, their combined strength is strong enough to create attraction. As a result, these materials are often used in the modern high-tech environment.

A subatomic particle has been found to switch between matter and antimatter, according to Oxford physicists analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider. It turns out that an unfathomably tiny weight difference between two particles could have saved the universe from annihilation soon after it began.

Antimatter is kind of the “evil twin” of normal matter, but it’s surprisingly similar – in fact, the only real difference is that antimatter has the opposite charge. That means that if ever a matter and antimatter particle come into contact, they will annihilate each other in a burst of energy.

To complicate things, some particles, such as photons, are actually their own antiparticles. Others have even been seen to exist as a weird mixture of both states at the same time, thanks to the quantum quirk of superposition (illustrated most famously through the thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat.) That means that these particles actually oscillate between being matter and antimatter.

Circa 2014

LEDs have come a long ways. From the early 70s when a bulky LED watch cost thousands of dollars to LG’s announcement last month that it had created an OLED TV as thin as a magazine, these glowing little bits of magic have become wonderfully cheap and impossibly small. But guess what: they’re about to get much smaller.

Physicists with the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms have just announced new success with a particular style of quantum computer —a “programmable quantum simulator”. In this architecture, they take supercold rubidium atoms and use optical tweezers (beams of light) to arrange the atoms into shapes.

As the Harvard Gazette writes …

This new system allows the atoms to be assembled in two-dimensional arrays of optical tweezers. This increases the achievable system size from 51 to 256 qubits. Using the tweezers, researchers can arrange the atoms in defect-free patterns and create programmable shapes like square, honeycomb, or triangular lattices to engineer different interactions between the qubits.

In a new study, a team of researchers proposed that Dark Matter detectors could also search for the elusive force that is causing our Universe to expand (Dark Energy)!

About 25 years ago, astrophysicists noticed something very interesting about the Universe. The fact that it was in a state of expansion had been known since the 1920s, thanks to the observation of Edwin Hubble. But thanks to the observations astronomers were making with the space observatory that bore his name (the Hubble Space Telescope), they began to notice how the rate of cosmic expansion was getting faster!

Continue reading “A Particle Physics Experiment Might Have Directly Observed Dark Energy” »