Lifeboat Foundation

Experiments conducted in August achieved a record yield of more than 1.3 megajoules.

After decades of inertial confinement fusion research, a record yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ) from fusion reactions was achieved in the laboratory for the first time during an experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) on August 8, 2021. These results mark an 8-fold improvement over experiments conducted in spring 2021 and a 25-fold increase over NIF’s 2018 record yield (Figure 1).

NIF precisely guides, amplifies, reflects, and focuses 192 powerful laser beams into a target about the size of a pencil eraser in a few billionths of a second. NIF generates temperatures in the target of more than 180 million F and pressures of more than 100 billion Earth atmospheres. Those extreme conditions cause hydrogen atoms in the target to fuse and release energy in a controlled thermonuclear reaction.

There’s a lot we still don’t know about dark matter – that mysterious, invisible mass that could make up as much as 85 percent of everything around us – but a new paper outlines a rather unusual hypothesis about the very creation of the stuff.

In short: dark matter creates dark matter. The idea is that at some point in the early stages of the Universe, dark matter particles were able to create more dark matter particles out of particles of regular matter, which would go some way to explaining why there’s now so much of the stuff about.

The new research builds on earlier proposals of a ‘thermal bath’, where regular matter in the form of plasma produced the first bits of dark matter – initial particles which could then have had the power to transform heat bath particles into more dark matter.

Physicists just put Apple’s latest iPhone to shame, taking the most detailed image of atoms to date with a device that magnifies images 100 million times, reports. The researchers, who set the record for the highest resolution microscope in 2018, outdid themselves with a study published last month. Using a method called electron ptychography, in which a beam of electrons is shot at an object and bounced off to create a scan that algorithms use to reverse engineer the above image, were used to visualize the sample. Previously, scientists could only use this method to image objects that were a few atoms thick. But the new study lays out a technique that can image samples 30 to 50 nanometers wide—a more than 10-fold increase in resolution, they report in. The breakthrough could help develop more efficient electronics and batteries, a process that requires visualizing components on the atomic level.

What kinds of ‘particles’ are allowed by nature? The answer lies in the theory of quantum mechanics, which describes the microscopic world.

In a bid to stretch the boundaries of our understanding of the quantum world, UC Santa Barbara researchers have developed a device that could prove the existence of non-Abelian anyons, a quantum particle that has been mathematically predicted to exist in two-dimensional space, but so far not conclusively shown. The existence of these particles would pave the way toward major advances in topological quantum computing.

In a study that appears in the journal Nature, physicist Andrea Young, his graduate student Sasha Zibrov and their colleagues have taken a leap toward finding conclusive evidence for non-Abelian anyons. Using graphene, an atomically thin material derived from graphite (a form of carbon), they developed an extremely low-defect, highly tunable device in which non-Abelian anyons should be much more accessible. First, a little background: In our three-dimensional universe, elementary particles can be either fermions or bosons: think electrons (fermions) or the Higgs (a boson).

A team of researchers led by an Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) faculty member performed the first-ever simulation of baryons—fundamental quantum particles—on a quantum computer.

With their results, the team has taken a step towards more complex quantum simulations that will allow scientists to study neutron stars, learn more about the earliest moments of the universe, and realize the revolutionary potential of quantum computers.

Continue reading “Researchers achieve first quantum simulation of baryons” »

All known atomic nuclei and therefore almost all visible matter consists of protons and neutrons, yet many of the properties of these omnipresent natural building blocks remain unknown. As an uncharged particle, the neutron in particular resists many types of measurement and 90 years after its discovery there are still many unanswered questions regarding its size and lifetime, among other things.

The neutron consists of three quarks which whirl around inside it, held together by gluons. Physicists use electromagnetic form factors to describe this dynamic inner structure of the neutron. These form factors represent an average distribution of electric charge and magnetization within the neutron and can be determined by means of experimentation.

Blank space on the form factor map filled with precise data.

When sound was first incorporated into movies in the 1920s, it opened up new possibilities for filmmakers such as music and spoken dialogue. Physicists may be on the verge of a similar revolution, thanks to a new device developed at Stanford University that promises to bring an audio dimension to previously silent quantum science experiments.

In particular, it could bring sound to a common quantum science setup known as an optical lattice, which uses a crisscrossing mesh of laser beams to arrange atoms in an orderly manner resembling a crystal. This tool is commonly used to study the fundamental characteristics of solids and other phases of matter that have repeating geometries. A shortcoming of these lattices, however, is that they are silent.

“Without sound or vibration, we miss a crucial degree of freedom that exists in real materials,” said Benjamin Lev, associate professor of applied physics and of physics, who set his sights on this issue when he first came to Stanford in 2011. “It’s like making soup and forgetting the salt; it really takes the flavor out of the quantum ‘soup.’”.

In a first for particle physics, the CMS collaboration has observed three J/ψ particles emerging from a single collision between two protons.

It’s a triple treat. By sifting through data from particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the CMS collaboration has seen not one, not two but three J/ψ particles emerging from a single collision between two protons. In addition to being a first for particle physics, the observation opens a new window into how quarks and gluons are distributed inside the proton.

The J/ψ particle is a special particle. It was the first particle containing a charm quark to be discovered, winning Burton Richter and Samuel Ting a Nobel prize in physics and helping to establish the quark model of composite particles called hadrons.

A new phase of matter, thought to be understandable only using quantum physics, can be studied with far simpler classical methods.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge used computer modeling to study potential new phases of matter known as prethermal discrete time crystals (DTCs). It was thought that the properties of prethermal DTCs were reliant on quantum physics: the strange laws ruling particles at the subatomic scale. However, the researchers found that a simpler approach, based on classical physics, can be used to understand these mysterious phenomena.

Understanding these new phases of matter is a step forward towards the control of complex many-body systems, a long-standing goal with various potential applications, such as simulations of complex quantum networks. The results are reported in two joint papers in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review B.