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Category: particle physics – Page 366

Decaying isotopes of hydrogen have just given us the smallest measurement yet of the mass of a neutrino.

By measuring the energy distribution of electrons released during the beta decay of tritium, physicists have determined that the upper limit for the mass of the electron antineutrino is just 0.8 electronvolts. That’s 1.6 × 10–36 kilograms in metric mass, and very, very freaking small in imperial.

Although we still don’t have a precise measurement, narrowing it down brings us closer to understanding these strange particles, the role they play in the Universe, and the impact they could have on our current theories of physics. The achievement was made at the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment (KATRIN) in Germany.

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The Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor in the UK has generated the highest level of sustained energy ever from atom fusion. On December 21st, 2021, the “tokamak” reactor produced 59 megajoules of energy during a five-second fusion pulse. That’s double what it created back in 1997. (Yes, I know energy is not created or destroyed, but you get what I mean!)

The JET reactor is the flagship experimental device of the European Fusion Program, funded by the EU. It’s mainly designed to prove scientists’ modeling efforts, with an eye on future, bigger experiments with a much larger ITER reactor in France, set to start fusion testing in 2025.

JET hit a Q value of 0.33, meaning it produced about a third of the energy put in. The highest Q value achieved so far is 0.7 by the US Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility, but it only hit that figure for 4 billionths of a second. The goal with ITER is to reach a Q factor of 10 or greater. Fun fact: ITER isn’t an acronym but means “the path” in Latin. And now you know.

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Nuclear power may not be as bad as you think. If we used Thorium instead of Uranium, we could greatly decrease dangerous radioactive by-products. There is enough Thorium in the world to meet all our energy needs for over 1,000 years.

In this video I show you how nuclear power plants work, and how Thorium can change the game. I aim to shift your views on nuclear power.

This is how energy is created in a nuclear reactor: When you split some heavier atoms into two lighter atoms, you get a lot of energy. For example, if you hit an isotope of Uranium, Uranium-235 with a neutron at the right speed, it will split into two lighter atoms like barium-141 and krypton-92 & 3 neutrons. These neutrons then split other U-235 atoms, leading to a chain reaction, producing more and more energy.

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The potential of quantum computers to solve problems that are intractable for classical computers has driven advances in hardware fabrication. In practice, the main challenge in realizing quantum computers is that general, many-particle quantum states are highly sensitive to noise, which inevitably causes errors in quantum algorithms. Some noise sources are inherent to the current materials platforms. de Leon et al. review some of the materials challenges for five platforms for quantum computers and propose directions for their solution.

Science, this issue p. eabb2823.

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In a way, entangled particles behave as if they are aware of how the other particle is behaving. Quantum particles, at any point, are in a quantum state of probabilities, where properties like position, momentum, and spin of the particle are not precisely determined until there is some measurement. For entangled particles, the quantum state of each depends on the quantum state of the other; if one particle is measured and changes state, for example, the other particle’s state will change accordingly.

The study aimed to teleport the state of quantum qubits, or “quantum bits,” which are the basic units of quantum computing. According to the study, the researchers set up what is basically a compact network with three nodes: Alice, Charlie, and Bob. In this experiment, Alice sends a qubit to Charlie. Bob has an entangled pair of qubits, and also sends one qubit to Charlie, where it interferes with Alice’s qubit. Charlie projects Alice’s qubit onto an entangled quantum Bell State that transfers the state of Alice’s original qubit to Bob’s remaining qubit.

The breakthrough is notable for a few reasons. Many previous demonstrations of quantum teleportation have proven to be unstable over long distances. For example, in 2016, researchers at the University of Calgary were able to perform quantum teleportation at a distance of six kilometers. This was the world record at the time and was seen as a major achievement.

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The nature of dark matter continues to perplex astronomers. As the search for dark matter particles continues to turn up nothing, it’s tempting to throw out the dark matter model altogether, but indirect evidence for the stuff continues to be strong. So what is it? One team has an idea, and they’ve published the results of their first search.

The conditions of dark matter mean that it can’t be regular matter. Regular matter (atoms, molecules, and the like) easily absorbs and emits light. Even if dark matter were clouds of molecules so cold they emitted almost no light, they would still be visible by the light they absorb. They would appear like dark nebula commonly seen near the galactic plane. But there aren’t nearly enough of them to account for the effects of dark matter we observe. We’ve also ruled out neutrinos. They don’t interact strongly with light, but neutrinos are a form of “hot” dark matter since neutrinos move at nearly the speed of light. We know that most dark matter must be sluggish, and therefore “cold.” So if dark matter is out there, it must be something else.

In this latest work, the authors argue that dark matter could be made of particles known as scalar bosons. All known matter can be placed in two large categories known as fermions and bosons. Which category a particle is in depends on a quantum property known as spin. Fermions such as electrons and quarks have fractional spin such as 1/2 or 3/2. Bosons such as photons have an integer spin such as 1 or 0. Any particle with a spin of 0 is a scalar boson.

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Whether for use in cybersecurity, gaming or scientific simulation, the world needs true random numbers, but generating them is harder than one might think. But a group of Brown University physicists has developed a technique that can potentially generate millions of random digits per second by harnessing the behavior of — tiny magnetic anomalies that arise in certain two-dimensional materials.

Their research, published in Nature Communications, reveals previously unexplored dynamics of single, the researchers say. Discovered around a half-decade ago, have sparked interest in physics as a path toward next-generation computing devices that take advantage of the magnetic properties of particles — a field known as spintronics.

“There has been a lot of research into the global dynamics of, using their movements as a basis for performing computations,” said Gang Xiao, chair of the Department of Physics at Brown and senior author of the research. “But in this work, we show that purely random fluctuations in the size of can be useful as well. In this case, we show that we can use those fluctuations to generate random numbers, potentially as many as 10 million digits per second.”

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