'Quantum Cheshire Cat' becomes reality. 29 July 2014Last updated at 13:36 ET By James Morgan Science reporter, BBC News The Cheshire Cat mysteriously disappeared leaving only his mischievous grin Scientists have for the first time separated a particle from one of its physical properties - creating a "quantum Cheshire Cat". The phenomenon is named after the curious feline in Alice in Wonderland, who vanishes leaving only its grin. Researchers took a beam of neutrons and separated them from their magnetic moment, like passengers and their baggage at airport security.
They describe their feat in Nature Communications. The same separation trick could in principle be performed with any property of any quantum object, say researchers from Vienna University of Technology. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote Well! End QuoteAlice's Adventures in Wonderland Their technique could have a useful application in metrology - helping to filter out disturbances during high-precision measurements of quantum systems. Schrodinger's paradox. Quantum memory 'world record' smashed. A fragile quantum memory state has been held stable at room temperature for a "world record" 39 minutes - overcoming a key barrier to ultrafast computers.
"Qubits" of information encoded in a silicon system persisted for almost 100 times longer than ever before. Quantum systems are notoriously fickle to measure and manipulate, but if harnessed could transform computing. The new benchmark was set by an international team led by Mike Thewalt of Simon Fraser University, Canada. "This opens the possibility of truly long-term storage of quantum information at room temperature," said Prof Thewalt, whose achievement is detailed in the journal Science. In conventional computers, "bits" of data are stored as a string of 1s and 0s.
But in a quantum system, "qubits" are stored in a so-called "superposition state" in which they can be both 1s and 0 at the same time - enabling them to perform multiple calculations simultaneously. There is no Guinness Book of quantum records. Neutrino 'faster than light' scientist resigns. 30 March 2012Last updated at 10:50 ET The results of the neutrino experiment shook the world of physics The head of an experiment that appeared to show subatomic particles travelling faster than the speed of light has resigned from his post. Prof Antonio Ereditato oversaw results that appeared to challenge Einstein's theory that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light.
Reports said some members of his group, called Opera, had wanted him to resign. Earlier in March, a repeat experiment found that the particles, known as neutrinos, did not exceed light speed. When the results from the Opera group at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy were first published last year, they shocked the world, threatening to upend a century of physics as well as relativity theory - which holds the speed of light to be the Universe's absolute speed limit. Call for caution "We tried to find all possible explanations for this," he said. LHC energy boost will aid hunt for Higgs boson. 14 February 2012Last updated at 06:02 ET Two teams at the LHC have seen hints of what may well prove to be the Higgs Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will increase the energies of the bunches of subatomic particles called protons that it smashes together.
The boost should improve the collider's chances of discovering "new physics" and definitively confirming or denying the existence of Higgs boson particle. The proton beams' energies will be increased by 14%, for a total collision energy of 8 trillion electron volts. The announced increase will break the LHC's own high-energy record. Since first switching on in 2008, operators at the LHC have cautiously increased the energy contained in each of the bunches of protons sent around the 27km collider, which lies beneath the Franco-Swiss border. The decision to turn up the energy when the collider switches on again later this year was taken at a conference about the LHC in Chamonix in France. Continue reading the main story. Electron particle's shape revealed. 25 May 2011Last updated at 21:36 By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News Electrons (blue) orbit the nucleus of an atom in this schematic The most accurate measurement yet of the shape of the electron has shown it to be almost perfectly spherical.
Electrons are negatively-charged elementary particles which orbit the nuclei of atoms. The discovery is important because it may make some of the emerging theories of particle physics - such as supersymmetry - less likely. The research, by a team at Imperial College London, is published in the latest edition of Nature journal. In their scientific paper, the researchers say the electron differs from being perfectly round by a minuscule amount. "Conventionally, people think that the electron is round like a little ball.
The current best theory to explain the interactions of sub-atomic particles is known as the Standard Model. But the Standard Model is incomplete. Egg off the menu So physicists have tried to build on this model. Future prospects. Bose--Einstein Condensate. Electron 'split-personality' seen in new quasi-particle. 18 April 2012Last updated at 15:12 ET The structure of the material permits careful study of electrons as they only have one way to move in it Researchers have discovered another way that electrons - one of the Universe's few fundamental particles - can undergo an "identity crisis". Electrons can divide into "quasi-particles", in which their fundamental properties can split up and move around like independent particles.
Two such quasi-particles had been seen before, but a team reporting in Nature has now confirmed a third: the orbiton. These orbitons carry the energy of an electron's orbit around a nucleus. Generally, these properties are not independent - a given electron has that set of properties, maintaining them as it moves around, while a nearby electron has a different set. But the idea of quasi-particles allow these properties to split and move around independently, granting them to nearby electrons. Electrons can be bumped up and down into different "orbits" around their host nucleus.