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Category: particle physics – Page 570

For the first time, researchers have synthesised a strange and unstable triangle-shaped molecule called triangulene, which physicists have been chasing for nearly 70 years.

Triangulene is similar to the ‘wonder material’ graphene in that it’s only one-atom-thick. But instead of sheet of carbon atoms, triangulene is made up of six hexagonal carbon molecules joined along their edges to form a triangle — an unusual arrangement that leaves two unpaired electrons unable form a stable bond. No one has ever been able to synthesise the molecule until now.

The elusive molecule was created by a team of researchers from IBM, using a needle-like microscope tip to manipulate individual atoms into the desired format.

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Nice.

Physicists at the University of Bonn have cleared a further hurdle on the path to creating quantum computers: in a recent study, they present a method with which they can very quickly and precisely sort large numbers of atoms. The work has now been published in Physical Review Letters.

Imagine you are standing in a grocery store buying apple juice. Unfortunately, all of the crates are half empty because other customers have removed individual bottles at random. So you carefully fill your crate bottle by bottle. But wait: The neighboring crate is filled in exactly the opposite way! It has bottles where your crate has gaps. If you could lift these bottles in one hit and place them in your crate, it would be full straight away. You could save yourself a lot of work.

Unfortunately, such solutions don’t (yet) exist for half-empty drinks crates. However, physicists at the University of Bonn want to sort thousands of atoms however they like in the future in this way — and in a matter of seconds. Around the world, scientists are currently looking for methods that enable sorting processes in the microcosm. The proposal by Bonn-based researchers could push the development of future quantum computers a crucial step forward. This allows atoms to interact with each other in a targeted manner in order to be able to exploit quantum-mechanical effects for calculations. In addition, the particles have to be brought into spatial proximity with one another.

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In Brief:

Physicists were able to simulate high-energy experimens thanks to this primitive quantum computer. Prediction of theoretical physics may soon be tested.

Our current computers are not capable of running simulations of high-energy physics experiments. However, quite recently, scientists were able to use a primitive quantum computer in the simulation of the spontaneous creation of particle-antiparticle pairs. This makes it easier for physicists to further investigate the fundamental particles. A research team published their findings in the journal, Nature.

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Playlist: Do We Live in a Simulated Reality?

The Quantum World of Digital Physics: Can a virtual reality be real?

“Quantum physics requires us to abandon the distinction between information and reality.” Anton Zeilinger.

Part 1. Information and Simulated Reality.

Digital physicists suggest that all realities are virtual which means this is as “real ” as it gets.

Digital physics sees everything as information, it provides a different way of describing what is happening at the quantum level. Seeing as the universe appears to be composed of elementary particles whose behavior can be completely described by the quantum switches they undergo that implies that the universe as a whole can be described by bits. Every state is information and every change of state is a change in information. From this it can be said that the history of the universe is in effect a huge and ongoing quantum computation.

Continue reading “The Quantum World of Digital Physics: Can a Virtual Reality be Real?” | >

At school you may have been taught that helium was a noble gas because it was totally unreactive.

But, new research suggests it might not be as virtuous as we first thought.

An international team of scientists has created a stable helium compound which is composed of both helium and sodium atoms, and say their discovery marks a ‘new frontier of chemistry.’

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Interesting read for those interested in inorganic protein (NP) states from a solid to a liquid as the research proves inorganic NPs are in a ‘glassy’ state while transitioning from a solid to a liquid form.

Molecular dynamics simulations of ubiquitin in water/glycerol solutions are used to test the suggestion by Karplus and coworkers that proteins in their biologically active state should exhibit a dynamics similar to ‘surface-melted’ inorganic nanoparticles (NPs). Motivated by recent studies indicating that surface-melted inorganic NPs are in a ‘glassy’ state that is an intermediate dynamical state between a solid and liquid, we probe the validity and significance of this proposed analogy. In particular, atomistic simulations of ubiquitin in solution based on CHARMM36 force field and pre-melted Ni NPs (Voter-Chen Embedded Atom Method potential) indicate a common dynamic heterogeneity, along with other features of glass-forming (GF) liquids such as collective atomic motion in the form of string -like atomic displacements, potential energy fluctuations and particle displacements with long range correlations (‘colored’ or ‘pink’ noise), and particle displacement events having a power law scaling in magnitude, as found in earthquakes. On the other hand, we find the dynamics of ubiquitin to be even more like a polycrystalline material in which the α-helix and β-sheet regions of the protein are similar to crystal grains so that the string -like collective atomic motion is concentrated in regions between the α-helix and β-sheet domains.

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Nice read & video illustration.

Quantum entanglement may appear to be closer to science fiction than anything in our physical reality. But according to the laws of quantum mechanics — a branch of physics that describes the world at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles — quantum entanglement, which Einstein once skeptically viewed as “spooky action at a distance,” is, in fact, real.

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Quantum’s natural selection explored.

There might be no getting around what Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” With an experiment described today in Physical Review Letters — a feat that involved harnessing starlight to control measurements of particles shot between buildings in Vienna — some of the world’s leading cosmologists and quantum physicists are closing the door on an intriguing alternative to “quantum entanglement.”

“Technically, this experiment is truly impressive,” said Nicolas Gisin, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva who has studied this loophole around entanglement.

According to standard quantum theory, particles have no definite states, only relative probabilities of being one thing or another — at least, until they are measured, when they seem to suddenly roll the dice and jump into formation. Stranger still, when two particles interact, they can become “entangled,” shedding their individual probabilities and becoming components of a more complicated probability function that describes both particles together. This function might specify that two entangled photons are polarized in perpendicular directions, with some probability that photon A is vertically polarized and photon B is horizontally polarized, and some chance of the opposite. The two photons can travel light-years apart, but they remain linked: Measure photon A to be vertically polarized, and photon B instantaneously becomes horizontally polarized, even though B’s state was unspecified a moment earlier and no signal has had time to travel between them.

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