Lifeboat Foundation

Far from being empty, the vacuum of space could be brimming with mysterious virtual particles. We now have a machine powerful enough to tear it apart and see.

By Jon Cartwright

IMAGINE a place far from here, deep in the emptiness of space. This point is light years from Earth, vastly distant from any nebula, star or lonely atom. We have many words for what you would find in such a place: a void, a vacuum, a lacuna. In fact, this nothingness is a sea of activity.

Continue reading “What’s inside nothing? This laser will rip it up to find out” »

An old thought experiment now appears in a new light. In 1935 Erwin Schrödinger formulated a thought experiment designed to capture the paradoxical nature of quantum physics. A group of researchers led by Gerhard Rempe, Director of the Department of Quantum Dynamics at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, has now realized an optical version of Schrödinger’s thought experiment in the laboratory. In this instance, pulses of laser light play the role of the cat. The insights gained from the project open up new prospects for enhanced control of optical states, that can in the future be used for quantum communications.

Aeronautics giant Airbus today announced that it is creating a global competition to encourage developers to find ways quantum computing can be applied to aircraft design.

Quantum computing is one of many next-generation computing architectures being explored as engineers worry that traditional computing is reaching its physical limits.

Computers today process information using bits, either 0s or 1s, stored in electrical circuits made up of transistors. Quantum computers harness the power of quantum systems, such as atoms that can simultaneously exist in multiple states and can be used as “quantum bits” or “qubits.” These can theoretically handle far more complex calculations.

Continue reading “Airbus wants to reinvent aircraft design with quantum computing challenge” »

TAE Technologies has also looked at building a nuclear fusion rocket. Nextbigfuture had covered TAE Technologies recent announcement that they will have a commercial nuclear fusion rocket by 2023.

The AIP Conference Proceedings 2004 – Colliding Beam Fusion Reactor Space Propulsion System

The Colliding Beam Fusion Reactor (CBFR( requires approximately 50 MW of injected power for steady-state operation. The H-B11 CBFR would generate approximately 77 MW of nuclear (particle) power, half of which is recovered in the direct-energy converter with 90% efficiency. An additional 11.5 MW are needed to sustain the reactor which is provided by the thermo-electric converter and Brayton-heat engine. The principal source of heat in the CBFR-SPS is due to Bremstrahlung radiation. The thermo-electric converter recovers approximately 20% of the radiation, or 4.6 MW, transferring approximately 18.2 MW to the closed-cycle, Brayton-heat engine.

Continue reading “If TAE Technologies Succeeds With Commercial Fusion Then a Fusion Rocket Will Follow” »

Elon Musk’s company could accelerate traffic *and* physics research.

CERN has revealed plans for a gigantic successor of the giant atom smasher LHC, the biggest machine ever built. Particle physicists will never stop to ask for ever larger big bang machines. But where are the limits for the ordinary society concerning costs and existential risks?

CERN boffins are already conducting a mega experiment at the LHC, a 27km circular particle collider, at the cost of several billion Euros to study conditions of matter as it existed fractions of a second after the big bang and to find the smallest particle possible – but the question is how could they ever know? Now, they pretend to be a little bit upset because they could not find any particles beyond the standard model, which means something they would not expect. To achieve that, particle physicists would like to build an even larger “Future Circular Collider” (FCC) near Geneva, where CERN enjoys extraterritorial status, with a ring of 100km – for about 24 billion Euros.

Experts point out that this research could be as limitless as the universe itself. The UK’s former Chief Scientific Advisor, Prof Sir David King told BBC: “We have to draw a line somewhere otherwise we end up with a collider that is so large that it goes around the equator. And if it doesn’t end there perhaps there will be a request for one that goes to the Moon and back.”

“There is always going to be more deep physics to be conducted with larger and larger colliders. My question is to what extent will the knowledge that we already have be extended to benefit humanity?”

Continue reading “Why it is dangerous to build ever larger big bang machines” »

Back in the first moment of the universe, everything was hot and dense and in perfect balance. There weren’t any particles as we’d understand them, much less any stars or even the vacuum that permeates space today. The whole of space was filled with homogeneous, formless, compressed stuff.

Then, something slipped. All that monotonous stability became unstable. Matter won out over its weird cousin, antimatter, and came to dominate the whole of space. Clouds of that matter formed and collapsed into stars, which became organized into galaxies. Everything that we know about started to exist.

So, what happened to tip the universe out of its formless state? [How Quantum Entanglement Works (Infographic)].

Today the collaboration for the LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of two new particles in the baryon family. The particles, known as the Xi_b’^- and Xi_b*^-, were predicted to exist by the quark model but had never been seen before. A related particle, the Xi_b*, was found by the CMS experiment at CERN in 2012. The LHCb collaboration submitted a paper reporting the finding to Physical Review Letters.

Like the well-known protons that the LHC accelerates, the new particles are baryons made from three quarks bound together by the strong force. The types of quarks are different, though: the new X_ib particles both contain one beauty (b), one strange (s), and one down (d) quark. Thanks to the heavyweight b quarks, they are more than six times as massive as the proton. But the particles are more than just the sum of their parts: their mass also depends on how they are configured. Each of the quarks has an attribute called “spin”. In the Xi_b’^- state, the spins of the two lighter quarks point in the opposite direction to the b quark, whereas in the Xi_b*^- state they are aligned.

“Nature was kind and gave us two particles for the price of one,” said Matthew Charles of the CNRS’s LPNHE laboratory at Paris VI University. “The Xi_b’^- is very close in mass to the sum of its decay products: if it had been just a little lighter, we wouldn’t have seen it at all using the decay signature that we were looking for.”

Continue reading “LHCb observes two new baryon particles” »

Electronegativity is one of the most well-known models for explaining why chemical reactions occur. Now, Martin Rahm from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, has redefined the concept with a new, more comprehensive scale. His work, undertaken with colleagues including a Nobel Prize-winner, has been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The theory of electronegativity is used to describe how strongly different atoms attract electrons. By using electronegativity scales, one can predict the approximate charge distribution in different molecules and materials, without needing to resort to complex quantum mechanical calculations or spectroscopic studies. This is vital for understanding all kinds of materials, as well as for designing new ones. Used daily by chemists and materials researchers all over the world, the concept originates from Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius’ research in the 19th century and is widely taught at high-school level.

Now, Martin Rahm, Assistant Professor in Physical Chemistry at Chalmers University of Technology, has developed a brand-new scale of electronegativity.

Continue reading “New scale for electronegativity rewrites the chemistry textbook” »