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Category: particle physics – Page 335

In a world first, researchers combine two of the ‘spookiest’ features of quantum mechanics

Just in time for Halloween’s spooky season, a quantum sensor now has double the spookiness by combining entanglement between atoms and delocalization of atoms.

Future quantum sensors will be able to provide more precise navigation, explore for needed natural resources, more precisely determine fundamental constants, look more precisely for dark matter, or maybe someday discover gravitational waves thanks to a team of researchers led by Fellow James K. Thompson from the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Thompson and his team have for the first time successfully combined two of the “spookiest” features of quantum mechanics: entanglement between atoms and delocalization of atoms. By doubling down on these “spooky” features, better quantum sensors can be made.

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What are these ‘spooky’ features?

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Listen to the eerie sounds of a solar storm hitting the Earth’s magnetic field

Put horror movies and games aside for a few minutes to listen to something truly unsettling this Halloween season. The has released audio of what our planet’s magnetic field sounds like. While it protects us from cosmic radiation and charged particles from solar winds, it turns out that the magnetic field has an unnerving rumble.

You can’t exactly point a microphone at the sky and hear the magnetic field (nor can we see it). Scientists from the Technical University of Denmark collected by the ESA’s three Swarm satellites into sound, representing both the magnetic field and a solar storm.

The ethereal audio reminds me of wooden wind chimes rattling as a mass of land shifts, perhaps during an earthquake. It brings to mind the cracking sounds of a moving glacier as well. You might get something different out of the five-minute clip.

Astronomers find a potential “quark star” that defies conventional physics

Quarks all the way down.

Astronomers recently discovered that this neutron star left behind by the collapse and explosion of a supergiant is now roughly 77 percent the mass of our Sun, packed into a sphere about 10 kilometers wide. That’s a mind-bogglingly dense ball of matter — it’s squished together so tightly that it doesn’t even have room to be atoms, just neutrons. But as neutron stars go, it’s weirdly lightweight. Figuring out why that’s the case could reveal fascinating new details about exactly what happens when massive stars collapse and explode.

What’s New — When a massive star collapses, it triggers an explosion that blasts most of the star’s outer layers out into space, where they form an ever-widening cloud of hot, glowing gas. The heart of the star, however, gets squashed together in the final pressure of that collapse and becomes a neutron star. Normally, what’s left behind is something between 1.17 and 2.35 times as massive as the Sun, crammed into a ball a few dozen kilometers wide.

The antimatter factory: inside the project that could power fusion and annihilation lasers

Circa 2013 face_with_colon_three

Physicists have been chasing antimatter technology for more than 80 years now — driven by the promise of oppositely oriented particles that explode in a burst of energy whenever they make contact with their more common counterpart. If we could tame antimatter, those explosions could be used to power a new generation of technology, from molecular scanners to rocket engines to the so-called “annihilation laser,” a tightly concentrated energy beam fueled by annihilating positrons. But while scientists have seen recent breakthroughs in creating the particles, they still have trouble capturing and containing them.

Auroras blasted a 250-mile-wide hole in Earth’s ozone layer

Auroras set off spectacular light shows in the night sky, but they are also illuminating another reason the ozone layer is being eaten away.

Although humans are to blame for much of the ozone layer’s depletion, observations of a type of aurora known as an isolated proton aurora have revealed a cause of ozone depletion that comes from space: Charged particles in plasma belched out by solar flares and coronal mass ejections also keep gnawing at the ozone layer. Before now, the influence of these particles were only vaguely known.

Unexpected Behavior of Hybrid Matter–Antimatter Atoms in Superfluid Helium Surprises Physicists at CERN

Atom containing an antiproton, the proton’s antimatter equivalent, in place of an electron has an unexpected response to laser light when immersed in superfluid helium, reports the ASACUSA collaboration at CERN

Established in 1954 and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, CERN is a European research organization that operates the Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Its full name is the European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire) and the CERN acronym comes from the French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.

US7709819B2 — Apparatus and method for long-term storage of antimatter

A long-term antimatter storage device that may be energized by a low power magnetron and can function autonomously for hundreds of hours on the energy provided by batteries. An evacuated, cryogenic container is arranged with a source of positrons and a source of electrons positioned in capture relation to one another within the container so as to allow for the formation of a plurality of positronium atoms. A microwave resonator is located within the container forming a circularly polarized standing wave within which the plurality of positronium atoms rotate. Radioactive sources for small stores and low energy positron accelerators for large stores are used to efficiently fill the device with positronium in seconds to minutes. The device may also be arranged to provide for the extraction of positrons. A method for storing antimatter is also provided.

US20070110208A1 — Antimatter electrical generator

The present set of complementary inventions refer to a system for the practical and inexpensive procurement of huge amounts of energy derived from the principles of matter-antimatter generation and annihilation. The generator will comprise the functions of generation, amplification, concentration and collision of photons within a specially designed self-reflective chamber; the generation of particles of matter and antimatter derived from the collision of photons; the ionization of atoms and the production of avalanches of electrons and positrons within a specialized collecting chamber; the separation of electrons and positrons by the action of powerful rotational electromagnetic fields; and, the conversion of said avalanches of electrons and positrons into electrical power.