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Researchers found increased levels of radioactive particles in wines made after Japan’s Fukushima meltdown.

Scientists made molecules that spin around each other a billion times per second, the fastest mechanical rotation on record. They want to use these spinning molecules to study the very fabric of spacetime.

The two independent teams were studying how light’s energy could make molecules move, and ended up generating incredible spin frequencies. But if the spins are fast enough, it could be a way to measure the friction that particles might feel against spacetime itself.

Monsignor Georges Lemaître was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, physicist and astronomer. He is usually credited with the first definitive formulation of the idea of an expanding universe and what was to become known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, which Lemaître himself called his “hypothesis of the primeval atom” or the “Cosmic Egg”.

Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître was born on 17 July 1894 at Charleroi, Belgium. After a classical education at a Jesuit secondary school, the Collège du Sacré-Coeur in Charleroi, he began studying civil engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain) at the age of 17. In 1914, he interrupted his studies to serve as an artillery officer in the Belgian army for the duration of World War I, at the end of which he received the Military Cross with palms.

A team at the University of Science and Technology of China packed three qubits into each of six particles to pull off the unprecedented feat.

Neutrino-detecting IceCube teams up with other instruments to study distant galaxy’s “blazar”.

Physicists Pinpoint The Origin Of A Powerful Neutrino For The First Time Ghostly particles called neutrinos can travel nearly unimpeded across the universe. For the first time, physicists have been able to pinpoint the origin of a powerful neutrino.

Scientists can’t take pictures of the Higgs boson. But they can find proof of its existence by watching “E=mc” play out in hundreds of millions of particle collisions per second and detecting how it decays into other particles they do know how to spot. Now, six years after officially discovering the Higgs boson, particle physicists are announcing that they’ve spotted the Higgs in another way.

This announcement isn’t a surprise. It matches the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics, the rock-solid but probably incomplete blueprint of the Universe on the smallest scales. But the news is certainly important; you might say it closes the first chapter of the Higgs boson’s story, and offers a potential window to explore some of most confounding questions in the Universe.

Transistors are tiny switches that form the bedrock of modern computing; billions of them route electrical signals around inside a smartphone, for instance.

Quantum computers will need analogous hardware to manipulate quantum information. But the design constraints for this new technology are stringent, and today’s most advanced processors can’t be repurposed as quantum devices. That’s because quantum information carriers, dubbed qubits, have to follow different rules laid out by quantum physics.

Scientists can use many kinds of quantum particles as qubits, even the photons that make up light. Photons have added appeal because they can swiftly shuttle information over long distances, and they are compatible with fabricated chips. However, making a quantum transistor triggered by light has been challenging because it requires that the photons interact with each other, something that doesn’t ordinarily happen on its own.

Continue reading “Semiconductor quantum transistor opens the door for photon-based computing” »

Diamonds are prized for their purity, but their flaws might hold the key to a new type of highly secure communications.

Princeton University researchers are using diamonds to help create a communication network that relies on a property of subatomic particles known as their quantum state. Researchers believe such quantum information networks would be extremely secure and could also allow new quantum computers to work together to complete problems that are currently unsolvable. But scientists currently designing these networks face several challenges, including how to preserve fragile quantum information over long distances.

Now, researchers have arrived at a possible solution using synthetic diamonds.

Continue reading “Implanting diamonds with flaws offers key technology for quantum communications” »