Lifeboat Foundation

Astounding simulation shows magnetic fields create fluffy, not flat, accretion disks around supermassive black holes, altering our understanding of black hole dynamics.

A team of astrophysicists from Caltech has achieved a groundbreaking milestone by simulating the journey of primordial gas from the early universe to its incorporation into a disk of material feeding a supermassive black hole. This innovative simulation challenges theories about these disks that have persisted since the 1970s and opens new doors for understanding the growth and evolution of black holes and galaxies.

Continue reading “Caltech Astrophysicists Flip Black Hole Theories With Stunning New Simulations” »

In a new study, researchers at Osaka University have created the world’s first compact, tunable-wavelength blue semiconductor laser, a significant advancement for far-ultraviolet light technology with promising applications in sterilization and disinfection.

This innovative laser employs a specially-designed periodically slotted structure in nitride semiconductors, making possible a blue wavelength laser that is both practical and adaptable for various disinfection technologies. The work is published in the journal Applied Physics Express.

The research team had previously demonstrated second-harmonic generation at wavelengths below 230 nm by using transverse quasi-phase-matching devices crafted from aluminum nitride and vertical microcavity wavelength conversion devices incorporating SrB₄O₇ nonlinear optical crystals.

Scientists discovered a way to encode more data into light by creating light vortices with quasicrystals. This method could potentially increase data transmission rates through optic fibers by up to 16 times, marking a significant advancement in telecommunications technology.

Modern life relies heavily on efficiently encoding information for transmission. A common method involves encoding data in laser light and sending it through fiber optic cables. As demand for data capacity grows, finding more advanced encoding methods is essential.

Breakthrough in Light Vortex Creation.

An international team of researchers has uncovered evidence that astrophysics models of massive stars and supernovae are inconsistent with observational gamma-ray astronomy.

A new study published in Physical Review Letters and led by researchers from the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has demonstrated that a Coulomb explosion induced by highly charged ions is a unique tool for precisely imaging the structures of complex molecules.

MIT CSAIL researchers have developed a generative AI system, LucidSim, to train robots in virtual environments for real-world navigation. Using ChatGPT and physics simulators, robots learn to traverse complex terrains. This method outperforms traditional training, suggesting a new direction for robotic training.

A team of roboticists and engineers at MIT CSAIL, Institute for AI and Fundamental Interactions, has developed a generative AI approach to teaching robots how to traverse terrain and move around objects in the real world.

Continue reading “Virtual training uses generative AI to teach robots how to traverse real world terrain” »

Cern physicists searching for the telltale signs of new physics within the Large Hardon Collider have released their first results.

It turns out that the evolution of the most violent collisions between nuclei, as they are studied at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, depends on the initial conditions, namely the geometry and shape of the colliding nuclei, which are in their ground state. More surprisingly, this insight also allows us to determine properties of the colliding nuclei that cannot easily be studied by other methods.

The researchers have predicted how the shape changes and fluctuations of the colliding nuclei will influence the outcome of extreme high-energy conditions. This paves the way for further studies which will yield a better understanding of the dynamic behavior of nuclei. An article on the results has been published in Physical Review Letters.

The predictions are theoretical but based on an experiment at the world’s leading physics research center, CERN, Switzerland.

Much of modern life depends on the coding of information into means of delivering it. A common method is to encode data in laser light and send it through optic cables. The increasing demand for more information capacity demands that we constantly find better ways of encoding it.