Particles can be quantum entangled through time as well as space. Entangled En Masse: Physicists Crank Out Billions of Entangled Nucleus-Electron Pairs on Demand. Entanglement, that most counterintuitive quantum phenomenon by which particles share an unseen link that aligns their properties, is looking more mundane all the time. Just last week two groups of researchers reported entangling a photon with a crystal-based device, potentially paving the way for solid-state memories that can store and then release entangled particles as needed. Another week, another advance. In a paper published online January 19 in Nature a team of physicists announced that they have developed the capability to churn out pairs of entangled particles, billions at a time. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) The advance might someday allow for the streamlined development of quantum processors with a large number of quantum bits working in parallel.
Ultimately, ensembles of entangled particle pairs could find use as quantum bits, or qubits, in quantum computers. Fermilab is Building a 'Holometer' to Determine Once and For All Whether Reality Is Just an Illusion. Researchers at Fermilab are building a "holometer" so they can disprove everything you thought you knew about the universe. More specifically, they are trying to either prove or disprove the somewhat mind-bending notion that the third dimension doesn't exist at all, and that the 3-D universe we think we live in is nothing more than a hologram. To do so, they are building the most precise clock ever created. The universe-as-hologram theory is predicated on the idea that spacetime is not perfectly smooth, but becomes discrete and pixelated as you zoom in further and further, like a low-res digital image.
This idea isn't novel; recent experiments in black-hole physics have offered evidence that this may be the case, and prominent physicists have proposed similar ideas. Under this theory, the universe actually exists in two dimensions and the third is an illusion produced by the intertwining of time and depth. So enjoy the third dimension while you still can. [Symmetry, Fermilab] How to Test What Really Happened After the Big Bang | Wired Science.
A new test that takes data from several realms of physics could explain what really happened in the first sliver of a second after the Big Bang. Most cosmologists believe the universe burst from an extremely dense, hot state around 13.7 billion years ago, and has been expanding and cooling ever since. The universe ballooned ridiculously fast in its first moments, doubling in size thousands of times in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. “That would take a region the size of an atomic nucleus or a proton, and stretch it to a size exponentially greater than our observable universe at present,” said cosmologist Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University. “Superlatives are not enough here. Incredible, remarkable, unbelievable amounts of stretching.” This idea, known as inflation, is the most popular theory for explaining why the universe looks the way it does.
“You take two completely different sets of measurements,” Steinhardt said. See Also: Missing Black Holes Cause Trouble for String Theory | Wired Science. By John Timmer, Ars Technica The results continue to pour out of the Large Hadron Collider’s first production run. This week, the folks behind the CMS, or compact muon solenoid, detector have announced the submission of a paper to Physics Letters that describes a test of some forms of string theory. If this form of the theory were right, the LHC should have been able to produce small black holes that would instantly decay (and not, as some had feared, devour the Earth). But a look at the data obtained by CMS shows that a signature of the black holes’ decay is notably absent. [partner id="arstechnica" align="right"] String theory is an attempt to deal with the fact that the two major theories in physics, quantum mechanics and relativity, are fundamentally incompatible.
In one form of string theory — the paper calls it the ADD model because Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos and Dvali proposed it — this unification has consequences for gravity. This decay would be visible as jets of particles. No Black Holes Formed at Large Hadron Collider. Upgrade likely to be delayed in bid to capture Higgs particle. No black holes here: the Compact Muon Solenoid. Credit: M. Brice/CERN The end of the world is not nigh after all. Flouting predictions from some theorists, microscopic black holes have so far failed to appear inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), scientists there have revealed.
The result, which will be posted this week on arXiv.org, comes as researchers make plans to keep the LHC running until the end of 2012, rather than 2011 as previously scheduled. Predictions of mini black holes forming at collision energies of a few teraelectronvolts (TeV) were based on theories that consider the gravitational effects of extra dimensions of space. The find is one of a stream of recent papers from the LHC, made possible by the machine's unexpectedly high performance. The plan to extend the LHC's run will be discussed at a meeting of LHC managers in Chamonix, France, in late January, with a final decision expected shortly after. Dark Matter Rush: Physics Gives Gold Mine New Life | Wired Science.
LEAD, South Dakota — The gold rush glow has long faded from South Dakota, but a different kind of precious material is drawing crowds to the Black Hills. An old mine that produced billions of dollars in gold may be North America's best shot at finding dark matter.Until it closed in 2002, the Homestake Mine, nestled in the town that inspired the HBO drama Deadwood, was the oldest, largest and deepest mine in the western hemisphere.That tremendous depth makes Homestake the perfect hunting ground for rare, elusive particles that stubbornly refuse to interact with the rest of the world, like neutrinos and hypothetical particles that could explain dark matter.Similar detectors already exist in Italy, Japan, Canada and Minnesota. But the 8,000-foot-deep pit possible at Homestake would be deeper than them all, nearly as deep as Mount St. Helens is high. Condensed matter: The supersolid's nemesis. X Particle Explains Dark Matter and Antimatter at the Same Time | Wired Science.
A new hypothetical particle could solve two cosmic mysteries at once: what dark matter is made of, and why there’s enough matter for us to exist at all. “We know you have to have these two ingredients to the universe, both atoms and dark matter,” said physicist Kris Sigurdson of the University of British Columbia, coauthor of a paper describing the new particle. “Since you know you need those ingredients anyway, it seems like a natural thing to try to explain them from the same mechanism.” Cosmologists think the same amount of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang, and particles and antiparticles immediately started colliding and extinguishing each other. But the fact that stars, planets and physicists exist now is proof that that’s not what happened. “If matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts in the early universe, they would all have annihilated [each other],” said theoretical physicist Sean Tulin of the Canadian physics institute TRIUMF.
LHC Researchers Glimpse the 'Primordial Soup' of the Universe for the First Time. The milestones just keep coming over at the Large Hadron Collider. The latest: CERN researchers have glimpsed for the first time the so-called quark-gluon plasma that existed in the early universe before things cooled enough for neutrons, protons, and all the matter in the universe as we know it to form. Via heavy lead ion collisions underway at the LHC over the last month, researchers have recreated the conditions in the universe just a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. The results – publishing in the journal Physics Review Letters – come just three weeks after CERN researchers began circulating heavy ions through the LHC, an impressively swift feat by just about any scientific standard. In some respects, researchers found just what they thought they might by creating these mini Big Bangs: quarks and gluons unbound, roaming freely in a sort of subatomic soup.
Www.iter.org/newsline/155/505. Upping the Anti: CERN Physicists Trap Antimatter Atoms for the First Time. It is the stuff that both science fiction and a good part of author Dan Brown's fortune are made of—antimatter. A research group at CERN, the European lab for particle physics in Geneva, has managed for the first time to confine atoms of the stuff. Fleeting antimatter atoms have been produced in the lab for years, but until now the ability to trap the elusive atoms for detailed study has been out of reach. (The confined amounts of antimatter are many orders of magnitude smaller than that swiped from CERN by insidious plotters in Brown's Angels & Demons.) The new advance, published online November 17 in Nature by the ALPHA Collaboration experiment at CERN, is only a proof of principle—the anti-atoms have only been confined for less than two tenths of a second—but the research could set the stage for a new round of fundamental physics tests.
(Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) Antimatter held for questioning. Space–time cloak could hide events. Demonic device converts information to energy. Astronomers Make Extraordinarily Detailed Map of the Universe's Dark Matter. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have made one of the most detailed dark matter maps ever, taking advantage of the dark matter's own gravitational effects to bring it into the light. The map suggests massive galaxy clusters may have formed earlier than expected, before dark energy stunted their growth, according to the Space Telescope Science Institute. To measure the dark matter, astronomers used Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys to snap pictures of the galaxy cluster Abell 1689, located about 2.2 billion light-years away.
The cluster is so massive that its gravity warps the light from galaxies behind it, an effect called gravitational lensing. Faraway galaxies appear as warped smears or distorted blobs, like you would see in a funhouse mirror. By studying the warped smears, astronomers determined how much mass is in the Abell cluster. (More mass leads to more distortion.) Dark matter makes up most of the universe, and through gravity, it acts to pull things together. Dark Worlds: A Journey to a Universe of Unseen Matter [Interactive] String theory tackles strange metals. Signs of Destroyed Dark Matter Found in Milky Way’s Core | Wired Science. Cosmologists say they’ve found the most compelling evidence of dark matter particles to date, deep inside the Milky Way’s core.
There, the thinking goes, the mysterious stuff is colliding to create gamma rays more frequently than anywhere else in the celestial neighborhood. Similar studies have peppered scientific journals in recent years, but establishing the source definitively has been troublesome. That’s not the case in this study, posted Oct. 13 on the preprint server arXiv.org, says Dan Hooper, its lead author and a cosmologist at both Fermilab in Illinois and the University of Chicago. “We’ve considered every astronomical source and nothing we know of, except dark matter, can account for the observations,” Hooper said.
“No other explanation comes anywhere close.” The claim has yet to meet the full scrutiny of other scientists, but those who have read it said they’ll be following discussions about the work closely. “This decade is the decade of dark matter. Via: symmetry breaking. Science Story | Physicists Say Graphene Could Create Mass. Erasing Dark Energy. Illustration by Mike Pick Against all reason, the universe is accelerating its expansion. When two prominent research teams dropped this bombshell in 1998, cosmologists had to revise their models of the universe to include an enormous and deeply mysterious placeholder they called “dark energy.” For dark energy to explain the accelerating expansion, it had to constitute more than 70 percent of the universe.
It joined another placeholder, “dark matter,” constituting 20 percent, in overshadowing the meager 4 percent that make up everything else—things like stars, planets, and people. That a huge fraction of the universe could be composed of this enigmatic stuff was unnerving, to say the least. But what was most disturbing to cosmologists was that the discovery required adding a term to Einstein’s equations of general relativity.
The theory is attractive because it describes the effect astronomers observed using only general relativity. Incoming Cosmic Rays Hit Record High | Wired Science. The Earth was pummeled with record-setting levels of cosmic rays in 2009. Measurements from NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) and other spacecraft found that more high-energy particles from galactic space penetrated the inner solar system in the last few years than at any other time since the beginning of the space age. The spike is almost certainly due to several weird aspects of the most recent solar minimum, and could be the start of a new normal for cosmic ray levels. “It’s sort of like everything’s working in the same direction right now, to allow cosmic rays greater access to the inner solar system,” said space scientist Richard Mewaldt of Caltech.
Mewaldt and colleagues published their findings Oct. 7 in Astrophysical Journal Letters. This solar system shield fluctuates in effectiveness every 11 years, as the sun goes through its regular cycle from lots of sunspots and solar flares to relatively boring solar weather. Image: NASA See Also: Superlaser fires a blank. From Fermilab, a New Clue to Explain Human Existence? - NYTimes. In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why. Sifting data from collisions of protons and antiprotons at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons.
So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter. Dr. Quantum Entanglement May Hold DNA Together, New Study Says. A new research paper brings new meaning to the joke that all science is just physics. A team of scientists at the National University of Singapore suggests that it is quantum entanglement that holds our DNA together. It's hard to prove, but it would be a potentially explosive finding, as Technology Review explains. In quantum entanglement, two objects are connected by an invisible wave, like an umbilical cord, that allows them to essentially share the same existence.
When something happens to one object, it immediately happens to the other, no matter how far apart they are. Elisabeth Rieper and colleagues at the National University of Singapore say this entanglement might prevent the DNA double helix from shaking itself apart. Technology Review's blog provides a nice description of some complex physics. Here's a breakdown: Rieper and colleagues used a theoretical model of DNA in which each nucleotide consists of electrons orbiting a positively charged nucleus.
[Technology Review] Breaking time reversal symmetry with light. Why Graphene Won Scientists the Nobel Prize | Gadget Lab. Physics Nobel Prize Goes To Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov For Graphene's Unusual And Useful Properties: Scientific American Podcast. Fusion is reaching a state of maturing - ITER Newsline #148. Fundamental Physics Laws Change Depending on When and Where You Are, New Study Says. On the deceleration behaviour of black holes. Exotic matter : Insight : Nature. Beginning and End of the Universe. Law & Disorder: A Companion. Behold our dark, magnificent horror.
Big Bang Abandoned in New Model of the Universe. Researchers Achieve Quantum Teleportation Over 10 Miles of Empty. Quantum Physics Online. "Twistor" Theory Reignites the Latest Superstring Revolution: Sc. The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia. Hundreds of Possible Alien Planets Discovered By NASA Spacecraft. Bose–Einstein condensate. AtlasResults < Atlas < TWiki. Moon Phase. Is the Universe Leaking Energy? Monster' Black Holes Activate When Galaxies Collide. HyperPhysics. Scientists present first “bre. Did a 'sleeper' field awake to expand the universe? - space - 11.
Saturn Lightning Superbolts Revealed in New Photos. Mass Transits: Kepler Mission Releases Data on Hundreds of Possi. Quantum Physics made simple. Big Bang Poured Out "Liquid" Universe, Atom Smasher Hints.