Physicists Made an Insanely Precise Clock That Keeps Time Using Entanglement

 Nothing keeps time just like the beating heart of an atom. But even the crisp tick-tock of a vibrating nucleus is restricted by uncertainties imposed by the laws of quantum physics.

Several years ago, researchers from MIT and therefore the University of Belgrade in Serbia proposed that quantum entanglement could push clocks beyond this blurry boundary.

Now, we've got a symptom of concept within the type of experiment. Physicists connected together with a cloud of ytterbium-171 atoms with streams of photons reflected from a surrounding hall of mirrors and measured the timing of their tiny wiggles.

Their results show that entangling atoms during this way could speed up the time-measuring process of atomic nuclei clocks, making them more precise than ever. in theory, a clock supported this new approach would lose just 100 milliseconds since the dawn of your time itself.

Similar to other cutting-edge clocks supported by the nuclei of atoms of cesium and thorium, a time during this reasonable setup is split by oscillations during a ytterbium nucleus after it absorbs particular energy of sunshine.

Since ytterbium's core is made to hum at a rate 100,000 times faster than the nucleus of a cesium atom, it makes for a much more precise time-keeping mechanism.

But there comes a degree when physical science says it's impossible to mention exactly where an atom's oscillations start and stop. This Standard Quantum Limit (SQL) acts sort of a blur on the atomic pendulum; you may have a faster ticking clock, but what good does it do if you cannot even measure it?

Without the simplest way to beat this obstacle, it doesn't really matter if we swap out one set of atomic nuclei for a more precise type – their quantum messiness sets a tough limit on the precision of atomic clocks.

One trick is to record the frequencies of multiple atoms humming all without delay within a lattice consisting of many tiny atomic pendulums. Current timepiece technologies use lasers engineered to be as stable as possible, providing each atom with a particularly similar frequency of sunshine. By combining their collective blur, individual uncertainties average out.

This new method goes a step further during this averaging process. By connecting atoms together in a way that entangles the quantum probabilities of their spins, it's possible to redistribute the uncertainty within the system, increasing the precision in some parts at the expense of others.

"It's just like the light is a communication link between atoms," says MIT physicist Chi Shu.

"The first atom that sees this light will modify the sunshine slightly, which light also modifies the second atom, and also the third atom, and thru many cycles, the atoms collectively know one another and begin behaving similarly."

No matter which method is employed, the longer you listen, the more precise the top result is. during this case, the team found entanglement made the measurement process roughly thrice faster compared with clocks working at the SQL.

That might not seem all that dramatic, but a speed boost can be just the thing we'd like to review a number of the more subtle influences the Universe has on time.

"As the Universe ages, does the speed of sunshine change? Does the charge of the electron change?" says lead researcher Vladan Vuletic from MIT.

"That's what you'll probe with more precise atomic clocks."

It could even allow us to seek out the purpose at which Einstein's theory of relativity falls apart, pointing to new physics that connects the defined curvature of space-time with the uncertain nature of quantum fields. Or allow us to higher measure the fine time-warping characteristics of matter.

Standing at the sting of a replacement age in physics and astronomy, we're really visiting need time on our side.

Physicists Suggest All Matter May Be Made Up of Energy 'Fragments'

 The matter is what makes up the Universe, but what makes up matter? This question has long been tricky for people who consider it – especially for the physicists.

Reflecting recent trends in physics, my colleague Jeffrey Eischen and that I have described an updated thanks to giving some thought to the matter. We propose that matter isn't made from particles or waves, as was long thought, but – more fundamentally – that matter is created of fragments of energy.

From five to 1

The ancient Greeks conceived of 5 building blocks of matter – from bottom to top: earth, water, air, fire, and aether. Aether was the matter that filled the heavens and explained the rotation of the celebs, as observed from the planet viewpoint.

These were the primary most elementary elements from which one could build up a world. Their conceptions of the physical elements didn't change dramatically for nearly 2,000 years.

Then, about 300 years ago, Sir mathematician introduced the concept that every one matter exists at points called particles. 100 fifty years afterward, James Clerk Maxwell introduced the radiation – the underlying and infrequently invisible type of magnetism, electricity, and light-weight.

The particle served because the building blocks for mechanics and also the wave for electromagnetism – and therefore the public settled on the particle and also the wave because of the two building blocks of matter. Together, the particles and waves became the building blocks of all types of matter.

This was an unlimited improvement over the traditional Greeks' five elements but was still flawed. in a very famous series of experiments, referred to as the double-slit experiments, light sometimes acts sort of a particle and at other times acts sort of a wave. And while the theories and math of waves and particles allow scientists to form incredibly accurate predictions about the Universe, the foundations break down at the biggest and tiniest scales.

Einstein proposed a remedy in his theory of general relativity theory. Using the mathematical tools available to him at the time, Einstein was ready to better explain certain physical phenomena and also resolve a longstanding paradox referring to inertia and gravity.

But rather than improving on particles or waves, he eliminated them as he proposed the warping of space and time.

Using newer mathematical tools, my colleague and that i have demonstrated a brand new theory that will accurately describe the Universe. rather than basing the idea on the warping of space and time, we considered that there might be a building block that's more fundamental than the particle and therefore the wave.

Scientists understand that particles and waves are existential opposites: A particle could be a source of matter that exists at one point, and waves exist everywhere except at the points that make them.

My colleague and that I thought it made logical sense for there to be an underlying connection between them.

Flow and fragments of energy

Our theory begins with a replacement fundamental idea – that energy always "flows" through regions of space and time.

Think of energy as made from lines that replenish a locality of space and time, flowing into and out of that region, never beginning, never-ending, and never crossing each other.

Working from the concept of a universe of flowing energy lines, we hunted for one building block for the flowing energy. If we could find and define such a thing, we hoped we could use it to accurately make predictions about the Universe at the biggest and tiniest scales.

There were many building blocks to decide on from mathematically, but we sought one that had the features of both the particle and wave – concentrated just {like the} particle but also opened up over space and time like the wave.

The answer was a building block that appears sort of a concentration of energy – reasonably sort of a star – having energy that's highest at the middle, which gets smaller farther aloof from the middle.

Much to our surprise, we discovered that there have been only a limited number of the way to explain the amount of energy that flows. Of those, we found only 1 that works in accordance with our mathematical definition of flow.

We named it a fraction of energy. For the mathematics and physics aficionados, it's defined as A = -⍺/r where ⍺ is intensity and r is that the distance function.

Using the fragment of energy as a building block of matter, we then constructed the mathematics necessary to unravel physics problems. the ultimate step was to check it out.

Back to Einstein, adding universality

More than 100 ago, Einstein had turned to 2 legendary problems in physics to validate general relativity: the ever-so-slight yearly shift – or precession – in Mercury's orbit, and therefore the tiny bending of sunshine because it passes the Sun.

These problems were at the 2 extremes of the scale spectrum. Neither wave nor particle theories of matter could solve them, but the general theory of relativity did.

The theory of Einstein's theory of relativity warped space and time in such a way on cause the trajectory of Mercury to shift and lightweight to bend in barely the amounts seen in astronomical observations.

If our new theory was to possess an opportunity at replacing the particle and also the wave with the presumably more fundamental fragment, we might just be ready to solve these problems with our theory, too.

For the precession-of-Mercury problem, we modeled the Sun as an unlimited stationary fragment of energy and Mercury as a smaller but still enormous slow-moving fragment of energy. For the bending-of-light problem, the Sun was modeled the identical way, but the photon was modeled as a minuscule fragment of energy moving at the speed of sunshine.

In both problems, we calculated the trajectories of the moving fragments and got identical answers as those predicted by the speculation of relativity theory. We were stunned.

Our initial work demonstrated how a brand new building block is capable of accurately modeling bodies from the large to the minuscule. Where particles and waves break down, the fragment of energy building block held strong.

The fragment can be one potentially universal building block from which to model reality mathematically – and update the way people give some thought to the building blocks of the Universe.

Physicists have a massive problem as Higgs boson refuses to misbehave

 Physicists have spotted the Higgs boson performing a brand new trick, but one that brings us no closer to understanding the workings of fundamental particles.

The Higgs boson, discovered at the CERN high energy physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, in 2012, is that the particle that offers all other fundamental particles mass, in keeping with the quality model of high-energy physics. However, despite the work of thousands of researchers around the world, nobody has been ready to determine exactly how it does that or why some particles are more massive than others.

The only thanks to trying and solve that problem is by observing how the Higgs interacts with other particles using the massive Hadron Collider (LHC). For the primary time, both of the most important groups that use it – the CMS and ATLAS collaborations – have observed the Higgs decaying into two muons, a kind of particle we've never directly seen it interact with before. Members of the collaborations presented this work at the virtual International Conference on High Energy Physics.

Some researchers have suggested that particles have different masses because there's over one style of Higgs boson, with each sort of Higgs coupled to a special mass range of other particles.

Muons are much less massive than the opposite styles of particles we’ve seen the regular Higgs interact with, therefore the new discovery makes it more likely there's only 1 Higgs. That behavior is precisely what we expect from the quality model. Adam Gibson-Even at Valparaiso University in Indiana, who hasn’t committed to this work, says that it's an instance of “Higgs boson, exactly as ordered”.

But that leaves the mystery of why particles have different masses completely unanswered. While this result might not be surprising, Gibson-Even says, it's somewhat frustrating because we all know the quality model is incomplete – additionally, to not explaining why particles have different masses, it also doesn’t account for the substance or dark energy. Nevertheless, experimental results are entirely in line with the model.

“It’s a controversy within the sense that we all know that the Higgs boson as-is doesn’t explain this stuff,” says CMS researcher Freya Blekman at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium. If the identical Higgs interacts with both muons and heavier particles, that's another avenue to solving the question of mass closed.

The next step, Blekman says, is to require even more precise measurements of the Higgs interacting with a variety of various particles. Many of those measurements have to be more precise than those the LHC can provide, which is an element of the argument for building a more powerful “Higgs factory” collider, she says.

“We have removed scenarios, but we don’t have a proof yet,” says Beekman. “But this can be what high energy physics is about – we've got tens of thousands of predictions and that we should eliminate them.”

World's Largest Atom Smasher May Have Just Found Evidence for Why Our Universe Exists

 For the primary time ever, physicists at the world’s largest particle accelerator have observed differences within the decay of particles and antiparticles containing a basic building block of matter, called the quark.

The finding could help explain the mystery of why matter exists in the least.

"It's a historic milestone," said Sheldon Stone, a professor of physics at Syracuse University and one among the collaborators on the new research.

Matter and antimatter

Every particle of matter has an antiparticle, which is identical in mass but with an opposite electrical charge. When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other. That's a controversy. the massive Bang should have created a constant amount of matter and antimatter, and every one of these particles should have destroyed one another rapidly, leaving nothing behind but pure energy.

Clearly, that did not happen. Instead, about 1 in a very billion quarks (the elementary particles that compose protons and neutrons) survived. Thus, the universe exists. What meaning is that particles and antiparticles must not behave entirely identically, Stone told Live Science. they ought to instead decay at slightly different rates, with an imbalance between matter and antimatter. Physicists call that difference in behavior the charge-parity (CP) violation.

The notion of the CP violation came from Russian physicist Andrei Sakharov, who proposed it in 1967 as evidence for why matter survived the massive Bang.

"This is one amongst the standards necessary for us to exist," Stone said, "so it's reasonably important to know what the origin of CP violation is."

There are six differing types of quarks, all with their own properties: up and down, top and bottom, and charm and strange. In 1964, physicists first observed the CP violation in reality in strange quarks. In 2001, they saw it happen with particles containing bottom quarks. (Both discoveries led to Nobel prizes for the researchers involved.) Physicists had long theorized that it happened with particles containing charm quarks, too, but nobody had ever seen it.

Stone is one in every one of the researchers on the massive Hadron Collider (LHC) beauty experiment, which uses CERN's Large Hadron Collider, the 16.5-mile (27 kilometers) ring on the French-Swiss border that sends subatomic particles careening into each other to re-create the flashes of mind-boggling energy that followed the large Bang. because the particles smash into one another, they forced the lock their constituent parts, which then decay within fractions of a second to more stable particles.

The latest observations involved combinations of quarks called mesons, specifically the D0 ("d-zero") meson and also the anti-D0 meson. The D0 meson is formed of one quark and one anti-up quark (the antiparticle of the up quark). The anti-D0 meson could be a combination of 1 anti-charm quark and one quark.

Both of those mesons decay in many ways, but a small percentage of them find themselves as mesons called kaons or pions. The researchers measured the difference in decay rates between the D0 and also the anti-D0 mesons, a process that involved taking indirect measurements to make sure they weren't just measuring a difference within the initial production of the 2 mesons, or differences in how well their equipment could detect various subatomic particles.

The bottom line? The ratios of decay differed by a tenth of a percent.

"The means the D0 and also the anti-D0 don't decay at the identical rate, and that is what we call CP violation," Stone said.

And that makes things interesting. The differences within the decays probably aren't sufficiently big to elucidate what happened after the large Bang to depart behind such a lot matter, Stone said, though it's large enough to be surprising. But now, he said, physics theorists get their turn with the information.

Physicists depend on something called the quality Model to elucidate, well, everything at the subatomic scale. The question now, Stone said, is whether or not the predictions made by the quality Model can explain the quark measurement the team just made, or if it'll require some type of new physics — which, Stone said, would be the foremost exciting outcome.

"If this might only be explained by new physics, that new physics could contain the concept of where this CP violation is coming from," he said.

Weird AI Hoax Paper Claims That There’s a Black Hole At The Center of Earth

 

A strange report surfaced recently in an exceedingly medical journal and its observers absolutely baffling. crammed with incredible claims a few regions in the middle of the planet can be altering human genetics, the paper has been dismissed as a hoax. But is that each one there's to it?

Entitled “Apart from at the middle of Earth Plays the Role of the most important System of Telecommunication for Connecting DNAs, Dark DNAs and Molecules of Water on 4+N- Dimensional Manifold,” the initial paper in question was published by 13 different authors within the Open Access Macedonian Journal of life sciences.

In the paper’s abstract, things get weird right from the beginning.

“Recently, some scientists from NASA have claimed that there could also be a part like structure at the center of the planet,” it begins.

Additional papers began to surface with similarly outlandish claims. as an example, one stated:

“The earth’s core is that the biggest system of telecommunication which exchanges waves with all DNAs and molecules of water. Imaging of DNAs on the inside of the metal of the core produces a DNA black brane around 109 times longer than the core of the world which is compacted and creates a structure just like a region or black brane. we've shown that this DNA black brane is that the main reason for the warm temperature of core and magnetic of the earth.”

Another paper asserts, “First group couple to our universe from one side and produce matters like some genes of DNAs and couple to an anti-universe from another side with opposite sign and make anti-matters like some anti-genes of anti-DNAs.”

Since the publication, Macedonian Journal of Medical Science, isn't well-known, and also the papers haven't been peer-reviewed, it might appear that the journal was subject to an elaborate prank that exposed a shoddy editorial pipeline. But others believe this could transcend a hoax or a conspiratorial satire; analysts on Twitter have suggested a gaggle of scientists used these publications to check the peer-review system of the journal–an activity called “peer-review-tricking,” which can involve advanced sorts of algorithmic computing.

Others wondered whether or not the publisher is, in fact, a “predatory journal,” or a publication that feigns having a peer-review process, while it'll publish articles and papers for profit.

According to IFLSCIENCE! one of the authors, Torello Lotti, previously authored a paper about predatory journals. there's speculation that new advanced text-generation algorithms like GPT-2 and GPT-3, which have astounded technology reporters with their abilities, could are accustomed create a shot balloon article to work out if it can pass the smell test of professional publication.

In addition to the part claims, the odd papers assert the following:

“Each DNA has two parts which one are often seen on the four-dimensional universe, and another one has existed in extra dimensions, and only it’s e_ects is observed.”

“This dark a part of DNA called as a dark DNA in an additional dimension.”

The followup paper is entitled “Formation of Neural Circuits in an exceedingly Expanded Version of Darwin’s Theory: Effects of DNAs in Extra Dimensions and within the Earth’s Core on Neural Networks” and discusses “stringy black anti-DNA” and “radiated signals of neural circuits in a chick embryo.”

So, what's happening here? Trolling, a decent old-fashioned hoax (that could, unfortunately, help to further cast doubts on scientific papers), or an odd AI experiment?

A Modem With a Tiny Mirror Cabinet Could Help Connect The Quantum Internet

  Quantum physics promises huge advances not just in quantum computing but also during a quantum internet – a next-generation framework for transferring data from one place to a different. Scientists have now invented technology suitable for a quantum modem that might act as a network gateway.

What makes a quantum internet superior to the regular, existing internet that you're reading this through is security: interfering with the info being transmitted with quantum techniques would essentially break the connection. It's as near unhackable as you'll possibly get.

As with trying to provide practical, commercial quantum computers though, turning the quantum internet from potential to reality is taking time – not surprising, considering the incredibly complex physics involved. A quantum modem can be a really important success for the technology.

"In the long run, a quantum internet might be wont to connect quantum computers located in several places, which might considerably increase their computing power!" says physicist Andreas Reiserer, from the Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck Institute in Germany.

Quantum computing is made round the idea of qubits, which unlike classical computer bits can store several states simultaneously. The new research focuses on connecting stationary qubits in a very quantum computer with moving qubits traveling between these machines.

That's a troublesome challenge when you're handling information that's stored as delicately because it is with natural philosophy. during this setup, light photons are wont to store quantum data in transit, photons that are precisely tuned to the infrared wavelength of laser light employed in today's communication systems.

That gives the new system a key advantage therein it'll work with existing fiber-optic networks, which might make a quantum upgrade rather more straightforward when the technology is prepared to roll out.

In working out the way to get stored qubits at rest reacting good with moving infrared photons, the researchers determined that the element erbium and its electrons were best fitted to the duty – but erbium atoms aren't naturally inclined to form the required jump between two states. to form that possible, the static erbium atoms and therefore the moving infrared photons are essentially locked up together until they get along.

Working out the way to try this required a careful calculation of the space and conditions needed. Inside their modem, the researchers installed a miniature mirrored cabinet around a crystal manufactured from a yttrium silicate compound. This founded was then was cooled to minus 271 degrees Celsius (minus 455.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

The modem mirror cabinet. (Max Planck Institute)

The cooled crystal kept the erbium atoms stable enough to force an interaction, while the mirrors bounced the infrared photons around tens of thousands of times – essentially creating tens of thousands of chances for the mandatory jump to happen. The mirrors make the system 60 times faster and far more efficient than it'd be otherwise, the researchers say.

Once that jump between the 2 states has been made, the data are often passed someplace else. That data transfer raises a full new set of problems to be overcome, but scientists are busy acting on solutions.

As with many advances in quantum technology, it's visiting take a long time to induce this from the lab into actual real-world systems, but it's another significant revolution – and also the same study could also help in quantum processors and quantum repeaters that pass data over longer distances.

"Our system thus enables efficient interactions between light and solid-state qubits while preserving the delicate quantum properties of the latter to an unprecedented degree," write the researchers in their published paper.

The Direct Fusion Drive That Could Get Us to Saturn in Just 2 Years

  Experts say the proper reasonable system could carry spacecraft to Saturn in only two years. The direct fusion drive (DFD), an idea being developed by Princeton physical science Laboratory, would make extremely fast work of the nearly billion miles between Earth and Saturn.

Researchers there say the Princeton field reversed configuration-2 (PFRC-2) drive might be the key to feasible travel within our scheme.

The research team chose Saturn’s moon Titan as a perfect, well, moonshot. The #1 moon in our system encompasses plenty of scientific interest thanks to its surface liquids, and therefore the indisputable fact that they’re hydrocarbons means Titan could even become a refueling waystation in some far-future space transportation system.

Universe Today reports:

“[T]he engine itself exploits many of the benefits of aneutronic fusion, most notably a very high power-to-weight ratio,” an announcement reads. “The fuel for a DFD drive can vary slightly in mass and contains deuterium and a helium-3 isotope. Essentially, the DFD takes the superb specific impulse of electrical propulsion systems and combines it with the superb thrust of chemical rockets, for a mix that melds the most effective of both flight systems.”

In a way, this is often lots like how hybrid consumer vehicles are designed. There are times when electricity provides the simplest, most effective push, and there are times when fossil fuels are still the foremost logical choice.

The PPPL direct fusion drive is being studied in two modes: one where it thrusts the whole time, and another where, sort of a Prius, it thrusts to induce up to hurry at the start only. The trip to Titan changes from about 2 years to about 2.5 reckonings on the mode.

the reactor itself is comparatively small because even a bigger spacecraft for our current imagination is much smaller than family homes or businesses on the bottom.

“DFD employs a singular plasma heating to supply fusion engines within the range of 1 to 10 MW, ideal for human solar-system exploration, robotic solar-system missions, and interstellar missions,” PPPL researchers wrote in 2019.

The plasma inside is heated to performance temperatures by radio waves, and like other rocket engines broadly, the look is open on one end so as to come up with thrust as energy pushes out extremely rapidly.

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For now, this design, as Universe Today jokes about all of the fusion, is about 30 years away. That’s because the subsequent good window to jaunt Saturn’s satellites is in 2046, giving scientists at PPPL a concrete timeframe further as a particular goal to figure toward.

And their DFD design has another major advantage: it also can power the ship’s internal systems.

That means propulsion and steering likewise as life support and research aboard the ship will all run on the identical energy-efficient drive.

It will still be decades before anyone travels to the moons of Saturn. But after they do, the achievement are going to be . . . Titanic.

The Quantum Experiment Reveals “Time” Doesn’t Exist as we Think it does

 Seven years ago, in 2012, one paper, which was published naturally Physics, has shown the globe that our present is, in fact, constrained by our future and our past. this suggests that what occurs now, in our past, could also be obsessed on what occurred in our future. Although this failed to be for lots of individuals, for people who are in physics matters, it made a large difference.

Well, physical science could also be said to be something which plenty of individuals find it difficult to wrap their heads around. Although plenty of them will do their best so as to understand it, they will sometimes be left in confusion.

This wasn't the only time quantum physicists studied the time structure.

It was exhausted the past, and something which goes to be researched and studied within the years within the future.

This ‘delayed-choice’ experiment has been a groundbreaking one which is additionally said to be the modified sort of the so-called double slit experiment. This double silt experiment has been that during which some small bits of matter are shot towards one screen with two slits inside it. While on the screen’s other side, there was a technology camera which recorded the landing of protons. When one slit closes, the camera shows some expected pattern, the one you'll be able to see during this video here.

However, regarding the opening of the 2 slits, there comes up the so-called ‘interference pattern.’ These will start acting like some quite waves, and each photon will individually undergo the 2 slits simultaneously. it'll undergo one in all the 2 slits, through the 2 of them, or none of them. Then, the matter pieces will become waves of potential.

On the opposite hand, the so-called ‘delayed-choice’ experiment was demonstrated several times, and in an almost identical way because the double silt experiment was. This one includes the adding of the quantum eraser within the mix. you'll watch this video here, so as to seek out something more about the experiment or also about the differences existing between both of the experiments.

Talking about physics, this sort of thing feels like a daily phenomenon. The second experiment suggests that the quantum entanglement definitely exists, irrespective of of the time. This, in fact, means just two bits of matter is also entangled continuously in time. All this also points to the massive answer which says that the time which we all know, doesn't really exist.

After 86 Years, Physicists Have Finally Made an Electron Crystal

 In 1934, theoretical physicist Wigner proposed a replacement style of crystal.

If the density of charged electrons may be maintained below a particular level, the subatomic particles can be held in a very repeating pattern to form a crystal of electrons; this concept came to called a Wigner crystal.

That's plenty easier said than done, though. Electrons are fidgety, and it's extremely difficult to urge them to take a seat still. Nevertheless, a team of physicists has now achieved it - by trapping the wiggly little brats between a pair of two-dimensional semiconducting tungsten layers.

Conventional crystals - like diamonds or quartz - are formed from a lattice of atoms arranged in an exceedingly fixed, three-dimensional repeating grid structure. per Wigner's idea, electrons may well be arranged in an exceedingly similar fashion to make a solid crystal phase, but as long as the electrons were stationary.

If the density of the electrons is low enough, the Coulomb repulsion between electrons of the identical charge produces mechanical energy that ought to dominate their mechanical energy, leading to the electrons sitting still. Therein lies the issue.

"Electrons are quantum mechanical. whether or not you do not do anything to them, they're spontaneously jiggling around all the time," said physicist Kin Fai Mak of Cornell University.

"A crystal of electrons would even have the tendency to simply melt because it is so hard to stay the electrons fixed at a periodic pattern."

Attempts to form Wigner crystals, therefore, depend on some type of electron trap, like powerful magnetic fields or single-electron transistors, but complete crystallization has still eluded physicists as yet. In 2018, MIT scientists attempting to make a kind of insulator may have instead produced a Wigner crystal, but their results left room for interpretation.

(UCSD Department of Physics)

MIT's trap was a graphene structure referred to as a moiré superlattice, where two two-dimensional grids are superimposed at a small twist and bigger regular patterns emerge, as seen within the example image above.

Now the Cornell team, led by physicist Yang Xu, has used a more targeted approach with their own moiré superlattice. for his or her two semiconducting layers, they used tungsten disulfide (WS2) and tungsten diselenide (WSe2) specially grown at Columbia.

When overlaid, these layers produced a hexagonal pattern, allowing the team to manage the common electron occupancy at any specific moiré site.

The next step was to carefully place electrons in specific places within the lattice, using calculations to see the occupancy ratio at which different arrangements of electrons will form crystals.

The final challenge was a way to actually see if their predictions were correct, by observing the Wigner crystals or lack thereof.

"You have to hit just the proper conditions to form an electron crystal, and at the identical time, they're also fragile," Mak said.

"You need an honest thanks to probing them. you do not actually need to perturb them significantly while probing them."

This problem was solved with insulating layers of hexagonal boron nitride. An optical sensor was placed very near (but not touching) the sample, at a distance of only one nanometre, separated by a boron nitride layer. This prevented electrical coupling between the sensor and therefore the sample while maintaining enough proximity for prime detection sensitivity.

This arrangement allowed the team to probe the sample cleanly, and that they made their detection. Within the moiré superlattice, electrons arranged into a range of crystal configurations, including triangular Wigner crystals, stripe phases, and dimers.

This achievement doesn't just have implications for studying electron crystals. The findings demonstrate the untapped potential of moiré superlattices for physics research.

"Our study," the researchers wrote in their paper, "lays the groundwork for using moiré superlattices to simulate a wealth of quantum many-body problems that are described by the two-dimensional extended Hubbard model or spin models with long-range charge-charge and exchange interactions."

Physicists have discovered the ultimate speed limit of sound

 The universal regulation of any reasonably wave – be it electromagnetic or gravitational – travelling through a vacuum has been known since physicist developed his theory of Einstein's special theory of relativity in 1905. But the most speed of sound moving through a solid or a liquid has just been calculated for the primary time. it's about 36 kilometres per second, over 8000 times not up to the speed of sunshine during a vacuum.

To make this calculation, Kostya Trachenko at the Queen Mary University of London and his colleagues started with two well-known physical constants: the ratio of proton mass to the electron mass, and also the spectrum line constant, which characterises the strength of interactions between charged particles.

Trachenko says we've a fairly good idea of those values because if they were changed even touch, the universe wouldn’t observe all prefer it does. “If you modify these constants by some per cent, then the proton may not be stable anymore, and you would possibly not even have the processes in stars leading to the synthesis of heavy elements, so there would be no carbon, no life,” he says.

The sound may be a wave that propagates by making neighbouring particles interact with each other, so its speed depends on the density of cloth and the way the atoms within it are bound together. Atoms can only move so quickly, and also the speed of sound is restricted by that movement.

Trachenko and his colleagues used that fact together with the proton-electron mass ratio and therefore the spectrum line constant to calculate the most speed at which sound could theoretically travel in any liquid or solid: about 36 kilometres per second.

“The common wisdom was that diamond has the best speed of sound, because it's the toughest material, but we didn’t know whether there was a theoretical fundamental limit to that,” says Trachenko. The theoretical bound is about twice the speed of sound in a very diamond.

The speed of sound is additionally enthusiastic about the mass of the atoms within the material, therefore the researchers predicted that solid metallic hydrogen – a fabric that theoretically exists at the centre of giant planets, except for which laboratory evidence has been hotly contested – should have the best speed of sound. They calculated that it should be near the theoretical limit. They also checked out experimental data for 133 materials and located that none of them broke the limit.

However, Graeme Ackland at the University of Edinburgh within the UK says that it isn’t clear the calculations produce an ordinance. “You can use these fundamental constants to urge something with units of velocity, but I can’t quite see an honest fundamental reason for why it abounds. I’m not completely convinced.” He says that more work is critical to search out exactly how it applies to sound moving through heavier elements.

The Direct Fusion Drive That Could Get Us to Saturn in Just 2 Years

 Experts say the correct quite system could carry spacecraft to Saturn in barely two years. The direct fusion drive (DFD), an idea being developed by Princeton physical science Laboratory, would make extremely fast work of the nearly billion miles between Earth and Saturn.

Researchers there say the Princeton field reversed configuration-2 (PFRC-2) drive can be the key to feasible travel within our scheme.

The research team chose Saturn’s moon Titan as a perfect, well, moonshot. The #1 moon in our scheme encompasses a tidy sum of scientific interest due to its surface liquids, and also the undeniable fact that they’re hydrocarbons means Titan could even become a refueling waystation in some far-future space transportation.

Universe Today reports:

“[T]he engine itself exploits many of the benefits of aneutronic fusion, most notably a particularly high power-to-weight ratio,” a release reads. “The fuel for a DFD drive can vary slightly in mass and contains deuterium and a helium-3 isotope. Essentially, the DFD takes the wonderful specific impulse of electrical propulsion systems and combines it with the wonderful thrust of chemical rockets, for a mix that melds the simplest of both flight systems.”

In a way, this is often plenty like how hybrid consumer vehicles are designed. There are times when electricity provides the most effective, best push, and there are times when fossil fuels are still the foremost logical choice.

The PPPL direct fusion drive is being studied in two modes: one where it thrusts the complete time, and another where, sort of a Prius, it thrusts to induce up to hurry at the start only. The trip to Titan changes from about 2 years to about 2.5 reckonings on the mode.

the reactor itself is comparatively small because even a bigger spacecraft for our current imagination is way smaller than family homes or businesses on the bottom.

“DFD employs a singular plasma heating to provide fusion engines within the range of 1 to 10 MW, ideal for human solar-system exploration, robotic solar-system missions, and interstellar missions,” PPPL researchers wrote in 2019.

 The plasma inside is heated to performance temperatures by radio waves, and like other rocket engines broadly, the look is open on one end so as to get thrust as energy pushes out extremely rapidly.

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For now, this design, as Universe Today jokes about all of the nuclear fusion reaction, is about 30 years away. That’s because the subsequent good window to travel Saturn’s satellites is in 2046, giving scientists at PPPL a concrete timeframe additionally as a particular goal to figure toward.

And their DFD design has another major advantage: it may also power the ship’s internal systems.

That means propulsion and steering yet life support and research aboard the ship will all run on the identical energy-efficient drive.

It will still be decades before anyone travels to the moons of Saturn. But after they do, the achievement is going to be . . . Titanic.

Quantum Tunneling Is So Quick It Could Be Instantaneous And Could Be Breaking The Speed Of Light

Among the strange features of quantum physics is that the phenomenon called quantum tunneling, where a particle overcomes a barrier that may be impassable in other types of physics. Generations of physics students are taught this phenomenon with analogies like objects passing through solid walls, but the time this process takes has always been a mystery. a brand new study has set an edge on the time it takes, one so short the method could also be instantaneous, during which case these particles would be exceeding the speed of sunshine.

Tunneling certainly happens so quickly it's hard to live. Recent efforts have used heavier atoms, necessitating indirect measurements. Dr. Igor Litvinyuk of Griffith University told IFLScience the Australian Attosecond Science Facility is that the only place within the world with all three kinds of equipment required to live the time it takes electrons to tunnel from the grip of hydrogen atoms.

Litvinyuk helped put that combination to use, reporting in Nature that the method takes no quite 1.8 attoseconds. An attosecond is 10-18 or a billionth of a second. “It’s hard to understand how short that's, but it takes an electron a couple of hundred attoseconds to orbit a nucleus in an atom,” said co-author Professor Robert Sang in an exceeding statement. 

Tunneling time sets a limit on how briskly transistors could theoretically switch, so having such a brief time makes ultra-fast computers more realistic.

rearealistic. 

Physicist: Universe May Be a “Strange Loop” of Self-Simulating Consciousness

 When it involves cosmology, astronomy, and physics, there's no shortage of off-the-wall arguments and hypotheses. While new discoveries from the first moments of the large Bang and quantum and high-energy physics still amaze us and fill within the gaps of our mysterious universe, there remains a shocking number of questions we still can’t answer.

The most fundamental of those questions revolve around “why anything” and “why consciousness.” Why is there anything here at all? What primal state of existence could have possibly birthed all that matter, energy, and time, all that everything? and the way did consciousness arise—is it some fundamental proto-state of the universe itself, or an emergent phenomenon that's purely neurochemical and material in nature?

A new physics hypothesis attempts to answer both questions at an identical time with a brand new spin on panpsychism that weds aspects of Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument with something called “timeless emergentism.” The hypothesis, outlined during a new paper by a team of researchers at the Quantum Gravity Research institute, is termed the “panpsychism self-simulation model,” and while the authors certainly aren’t earning any points for intellectual modesty, their idea could be capable of peacefully mapping a number of the universe’s most wild conundrums.

The first pieces of this puzzle you'll have already heard of: the Simulation Argument could be a pop-culture staple now, most famously popularized when Elon Musk claimed it’s way more likely that we live in an exceeding simulation created by a complicated intelligence. Then there's the age-old belief in panpsychism, which posits that the whole universe could be a form of plan conscious entity in which even ordinary matter is imbued with proto-consciousness.

The new argument gets to eliminate the middleman and suggests that pain consciousness itself is generating the simulations, not advanced aliens, which the universe is one giant “mental self-stimulation.”

The paper, titled “The Self-Simulation Hypothesis Interpretation of quantum physics,” says the physical universe may be a “strange loop” that may self-generate new sub-realities in an almost infinite hierarchy of tiers in-laid with simulated realities of conscious experience, quite a sort of a psychic Matryoshka doll.

You’re still left with the mystery of the physical origins of this self-generating consciousness, to which the researchers reply that the solution is truly non-material. The paper argues that universal consciousness “self-actualizes” employing a natural algorithm called “the principle of efficient language.”

In other words, the universe is creating itself through thought, willing itself into existence on a perpetual loop that efficiently uses all mathematics and fundamental particles at its disposal.

The universe, they say, was always here (timeless emergentism) and is like one grand thought that makes mini thoughts, called “code-steps or actions”, again sort of a Matryoshka doll.

Quantum Gravity physicist David Chester broke down some recent findings they feel bolster the argument: “While many scientists presume materialism to be true, we believe that quantum physics may provide hints that our reality could be a mental construct. Recent advances in quantum gravity, like seeing spacetime emergent via a hologram, is also a touch that spacetime isn't fundamental. this can be also compatible with ancient Hermetic and Indian philosophy. In a sense, the mental construct of reality creates spacetime to efficiently understand itself by creating a network of subconscious entities that may interact and explore the totality of possibilities.”

 The paper also suggests that the aim of this single looping, self-generating consciousness is to explore and develop meaning through information. They also discuss future prospects, like studying lucid dreams to raised understand simulations and also the idea of developing consciousness that doesn't require matter in any respect.

Quantum computers may be destroyed by high-energy particles from space

 Radiation from space might be an enormous problem for quantum computers because cosmic rays can disturb their fragile inner workings and limit the sorts of calculations they will in the future perform.

Quantum computers are products of quantum bits, or qubits, which are accustomed store and manipulate quantum information. When designing qubits, one of all the foremost important factors is that the coherence time, which is that the amount of your time a qubit can remain during a particular state.

“The longer you've got, the more calculations you'll be able to do, the more complex calculations, and therefore the more reliable those calculations are,” says Brent VanDevender at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington state. “Even some milliseconds isn't really long enough to try and do general-purpose quantum computing.”

He and his colleagues used two qubits to check what proportion of radiation within the environment affects the coherence time of a sort of qubit supported superconductors. Superconductors use pairs of electrons to hold a charge, but previous experiments have shown that those pairs are split apart way more often than expected, which lowers coherence time.

The researchers found that background signal, both from nuclear decay events that happen naturally all told forms of materials and from cosmic rays that penetrate everything, can account for all those extra broken pairs of electrons.

That radiation isn’t an issue for quantum computers yet because there are other sources of noise that are more prevalent, they say, but as quantum computers reclaim over the following decade, it might be a limiting factor. a number of the radiation are often stopped by employing a lead or concrete shield around the computer or placing it underground like physicists do with other experiments that are sensitive to cosmic rays.

However, if quantum computing is to become more widespread, the concept of putting all the computers underground “starts to induce ludicrously and becomes an argument for other forms of qubits”, says VanDevender. Instead, he and his colleagues are working to create qubits that will tolerate some broken electron pairs without losing their coherence.

That could have a surprising benefit for other physics experiments, which have detectors that hunt for radiation caused by matter particles or neutrinos. These often need high sensitivity to broken electron pairs. “If you'll be able to design a qubit that's less sensitive to those broken pairs, you'll almost certainly design a physics detector that's more sensitive,” says Ben Loer, also at PNNL, who worked on the study.

Physicists Finally Observe a Link Between Quantum Criticality And Entanglement

 We know that the realm of natural philosophy is science operating at a mind-bogglingly small scale, thus watching quantum interactions happen is often exciting. Now, physicists have managed to watch billions upon billions of entangled electrons passing through a metal film.

The film may be a mixture of ytterbium, rhodium and silicon, and is what's referred to as a 'strange metal', one that does not act for sure at very low temperatures.

"With strange metals, there's an unusual connection between electrical phenomenon and temperature," explained physicist Silke Bühler-Paschen from Vienna University of Technology in Austria.

"In contrast to simple metals like copper or gold, this doesn't seem to result to the thermal movement of the atoms, but to quantum fluctuations at absolutely the zero temperature."

These fluctuations represent a quantum criticality – that time between quantum states which are the equivalent of transition between liquids, solids and gases in classical physics; the team says this cascade of electrons is that the best evidence yet of a link between quantum criticality and entanglement.

"When we expect about quantum entanglement, we expect about small things," says physicist Qimiao Si, from Rice University. "We don't associate it with macroscopic objects."

"But at a quantum juncture, things are so collective that we've got this opportunity to work out the results of entanglement, even during a metallic film that contains billions of billions of quantum mechanical objects."

The experiments Bühler-Paschen, Si and colleagues ran were incredibly challenging from many levels – from the highly complex materials synthesis required to make the strange metal, to the fragile terahertz spectroscopy required to watch the electrons.

Ultimately, after a painstaking process, the team found what they were looking for: the tell-tale sign of quantum criticality referred to as frequency over temperature scaling.

"Conceptually, it had been really a dream experiment," says Si. "Probe the charge sector at the magnetic quantum crossroads to work out whether it's vital, whether it's dynamical scaling."

The terahertz spectrometer used to measure entanglement. (Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

"If you do not see anything that's collective, that's scaling, the juncture should belong to some textbook style of description. But, if you see something singular, which after all we did, then it's very direct and new evidence for the quantum entanglement nature of quantum criticality."

What all of this high-level physics means may be a lot of potential: potential quantum advancements in computing, communications and more. Scientists have hypothesised a couple of link between quantum entanglement and quantum criticality before, but now it has been observed.

The study of quantum states remains in its very early stages, but it could hold the key to all or any forms of weird science, like high-temperature superconductivity – which is additionally believed to be underpinned by quantum criticality.

Understanding how these quantum phases switch gives us a far better chance of having the ability to regulate them within the future – and although that's still a protracted way off, it just got a touch closer.

"Our findings suggest that the identical underlying physics – quantum criticality – can cause a platform for both quantum information and high-temperature superconductivity," says Si. "When one contemplates that possibility, one cannot help but marvel at the wonder of nature."