Physicists from the University of Pennsylvania, working with colleagues at Arizona State University, are examining the limitations of a framework that aims to unify the laws of physics throughout the universe. There are two great pillars of thought that don’t quite fit together in physics. The St
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A team of researchers have made progress in understanding how some of the Universe’s heaviest particles behave under extreme conditions similar to those that existed just after the Big Bang.
A study published in Physics Reports provides new insights into the fundamental forces that shaped our Universe and continues to guide its evolution today.
The research, conducted by an international team from the University of Barcelona, the Indian Institute of Technology, and Texas A&M University, focuses on particles containing heavy quarks, the building blocks of some of the most massive particles in existence.
Scientists at the U. S. Department of Energy Ames National Laboratory and Iowa State University have discovered an unexpected “quantum echo” in a superconducting material. This discovery provides insight into quantum behaviors that could be used for next-generation quantum sensing and computing technologies.
Superconductors are materials that carry electricity without resistance. Within these superconductors are collective vibrations known as “Higgs modes.” A Higgs mode is a quantum phenomenon that occurs when its electron potential fluctuates in a similar way to a Higgs boson. They appear when a material is undergoing a superconducting phase transition.
Observing these vibrations has been a long-time challenge for scientists because they exist for a very short time. They also have complex interactions with quasiparticles, which are electron-like excitations that emerge from the breakdown of superconductivity.
From punch card-operated looms in the 1800s to modern cellphones, if an object has “on” and “off” states, it can be used to store information.
In a laptop computer, the ones and zeroes that make up the binary language are actually transistors either running at low or high voltage. On a compact disc, the one is a spot where a tiny indented “pit” turns to a flat “land” or vice versa, while a zero represents no change.
Historically, the size of the object cycling through those states has put a limit on the size of the storage device. But now, researchers from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have explored a technique to make the metaphorical ones and zeroes out of crystal defects, each the size of an individual atom, for classical computer memory applications.
UChicago researchers created a ‘quantum-inspired’ revolution in microelectronics, storing classical computer memory in crystal gaps where atoms should be.
Two independent groups optimize diamond-based quantum sensing by using more than 100 such sensors in parallel.
Diamond has long been prized for its beauty, and it holds the record as the hardest known natural material. By introducing nitrogen atoms into its crystal lattice, it can also be transformed into a remarkable quantum sensor. The associated crystal defects are known as nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers, and they imbue such sensors with unprecedented electromagnetic-field sensitivity and excellent spatial resolution [1]. However, experimental platforms designed to exploit these sensors have so far had limited applicability because the sensing speed and resolution are difficult to simultaneously optimize. Now two research teams—one led by Shimon Kolkowitz at the University of California, Berkeley, [2] and the other by Nathalie de Leon at Princeton University [3]—have independently developed a way of manipulating and measuring more than 100 NV centers in parallel (Fig. 1).
Neutrinos are cosmic tricksters, paradoxically hardly there but lethal to stars significantly more massive than the sun.
These elementary particles come in three known “flavors”: electron, muon and tau. Whatever the flavor, neutrinos are notoriously slippery, and much about their properties remains mysterious. It is almost impossible to collide neutrinos with each other in the lab, so it is not known if neutrinos interact with each other according to the standard model of particle physics, or if there are much-speculated “secret” interactions only among neutrinos.
Now a team of researchers from the Network for Neutrinos, Nuclear Astrophysics, and Symmetries (N3AS), including several from UC San Diego, have shown, through theoretical calculations, how collapsing massive stars can act as a “neutrino collider.” Neutrinos steal thermal energy from these stars, forcing them to contract and causing their electrons to move near light speed. This drives the stars to instability and collapse.