Lifeboat Foundation

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– Tri Alpha Energy (TAE), the world’s largest private fusion company ($500 million in funding), has achieved first plasma on its newest generator, Norman, formerly known as C-2W and now named after the company’s late co-founder, Dr. Norman Rostoker.

The $100 million plasma generator, the fifth in a series of devices built over the last 20 years, will continue validation of the company’s underlying technology and enable commercialization efforts toward delivering utility-scale fusion energy. With Norman now operational, the company will continue to move quickly down its developmental path, expanding temperature ranges and sustaining plasma for longer periods towards perfecting the essential operating characteristics required to sustain fusion reactions. Over the coming months, the company will be accelerating Norman’s levels of performance to further validate the fundamental confinement requirements that will ultimately be necessary for commercial operations.

Continue reading “Tri-alpha Energy Fusion achieves first plasma on upgraded 13MW 8 beam fusion device” »

In contrast to other particles of this type, in which the three quarks perform an elaborate dance around each other, a particle with two heavy quarks is expected to act like a planetary system, where the heavy quarks are like two stars orbiting one around the other, with the lighter quark orbiting around this binary system.

Scientists have detected a new particle at the Large Hadron Collider at Cern.

The discovery will help researchers learn more about the so-called “strong force” which holds the centres of atoms together.

Continue reading “LHC double heavy particle to shine light on strong force” »

Plasma, an extremely hot gas with electrically charged particles, is found all throughout the universe and is influenced by environmental forces, such as magnetic fields.

The complex behaviours observed in space and in the lab suggest plasma can generate the magnetic field in the opposite direction to the one applied, according to the researchers from Tohoku University.

This causes the field lines to diverge, much like magnets with their North poles facing toward each other.

Continue reading “Plasma rocket engine breakthrough as researchers solve key issue” »

IBM scientists have made carbon nanotube transistors smaller and faster silicon transistors. Carbon nanotube transistors have long had the potential to be better than silicon, but this is the first time when that promise has been realized. Now IBM and others will have to scale up superior carbon nanotube devices.

IBM scientists have been experimenting with carbon nanotubes, rolled-up sheets of carbon atoms just 1 nanometer, or a billionth of a meter, in diameter. But difficulties working with the material have meant that, for optimal performance, nanotube transistors have to be even larger than current silicon transistors, which are about 100 nanometers across. To cut that number down, a team of scientists used a new technique to build the contacts that draw current into and out of the carbon nanotube transistor. They constructed the contacts out of molybdenum, which can bond directly to the ends of the nanotubes, making them smaller. They also added cobalt so the bonding could take place at a lower temperature, allowing them to shrink the gap between the contacts. Another advance allowed for practical transistors. Carrying enough electrical current from one contact to another requires several nanotube “wires.

Scientists beamed particles from a satellite to two locations on Earth 750 miles apart — and the particles were still mysteriously connected.

“For example, Hasan says, “we can test theoretical ideas in the early universe,” simulating how particles may have behaved just after the Big Bang, when Lorentz symmetry may not have been obeyed.”

It’s interesting how often I hear condensed matter physicists justify their work by saying “might be important for something with quantum gravity” while condensed matter physics by itself is much more likely than quantum gravity to be good for something.

A cluster of 64 superfluid helium atoms mimic properties similar to a Black hole. Could this lead to the formation of a unified Quantum Gravity theory?

After two decades of trying, physicists at CERN have reported the first ever measurement of the light emitted by an antimatter atom, revealing that antihydrogen is the exact mirror image of regular hydrogen.

The result, which finally confirms what has long been predicted by the laws of physics, opens up a new way of testing Einstein’s special theory of relativity, and could help us answer one of the biggest mysteries in modern physics — why is there so much more regular matter than antimatter in the Universe?

“This represents a historic point in the decades-long efforts to create antimatter and compare its properties to those of matter,” theoretical physicist Alan Kostelecky from Indiana University, who was not involved in the study, told NPR.

Continue reading “Physicists Have Observed The Light Spectrum of Antimatter For First Time” »

Of the many ‘white whales’ that theoretical physicists are pursuing, the elusive magnetic monopole — a magnetic with only one pole — is one of the most confounding.

Compared to the Higgs boson in terms of its potential impact on modern physics, the magnetic monopole has been on scientists’ minds for even longer. And now our best shot at finding it just got weird — two phenomena that resemble the magnetic monopole have become one.

If you’re unfamiliar with the magnetic monopole, it’s a hypothetical particle that’s long been predicted by quantum physics, but no one has ever been able to prove that it exists.

Continue reading “Our Quest to Find a One-Sided Magnet Just Took an Unexpected Turn” »