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Category: physics – Page 205

Cosmic Birefringence from Planck Data Release 4

We search for the signature of parity-violating physics in the cosmic microwave background, called cosmic birefringence, using the Planck data release 4. We initially find a birefringence angle of β=0.30±0.11 (68% C.L.) for nearly full-sky data. The values of β decrease as we enlarge the Galactic mask, which can be interpreted as the effect of polarized foreground emission. Two independent ways to model this effect are used to mitigate the systematic impact on β for differen… See more.

We search for the signature of parity-violating physics in the cosmic.

Microwave background, called cosmic birefringence, using the Planck data.
release 4. We initially find a birefringence angle of $\beta=0.30\pm0.11$ (68%

C.L.) for nearly full-sky data. The values of $\beta$ decrease as we enlarge.

The Galactic mask, which can be interpreted as the effect of polarized.
foreground emission. Two independent ways to model this effect are used to.
mitigate the systematic impact on $\beta$ for different sky fractions. We.
choose not to assign cosmological significance to the measured value of $\beta$

Until we improve our knowledge of the foreground polarization.

Continue reading “Cosmic Birefringence from Planck Data Release 4” | >

Humans Didn’t Invent Mathematics, It’s What the World Is Made Of

Many people think that mathematics is a human invention. To this way of thinking, mathematics is like a language: it may describe real things in the world, but it doesn’t “exist” outside the minds of the people who use it.

But the Pythagorean school of thought in ancient Greece held a different view. Its proponents believed reality is fundamentally mathematical. More than 2,000 years later, philosophers and physicists are starting to take this idea seriously.

As I argue in a new paper, mathematics is an essential component of nature that gives structure to the physical world.

How To Build The Universe in a Computer

This series is absolutely fantastic. Especially for Transhumanist non-astrophysicists like me!

Thank you to Wren for supporting PBS. To learn more, go to https://wren.co/start/spacetime.

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE

Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord!
https://www.patreon.com/pbsspacetime.

We routinely simulate the universe on all of its scales, from planets to large fractions of the cosmos. Today we’re going to see how it’s possible to build a universe in a computer — and see whether there’s a limit to what we can simulate.

Continue reading “How To Build The Universe in a Computer” | >

There are 40 billion billions of black holes in the universe

How many black holes are out there in the Universe? This is one of the most relevant and pressing questions in modern astrophysics and cosmology. The intriguing issue has recently been addressed by the SISSA Ph.D. student Alex Sicilia, supervised by Prof. Andrea Lapi and Dr. Lumen Boco, together with other collaborators from SISSA and from other national and international institutions. In a first paper of a series just published in The Astrophysical Journal, the authors have investigated the demographics of stellar mass black holes, which are black holes with masses between a few to some hundred solar masses, that originated at the end of the life of massive stars. According to the new research, a remarkable amount around 1% of the overall ordinary (baryonic) matter of the Universe is locked up in stellar mass black holes. Astonishingly, the researchers have found that the number of black holes within the observable Universe (a sphere of diameter around 90 billions light years) at present time is about 40 trillions, 40 billion billions (i.e., about 40 × 1018, i.e. 4 followed by 19 zeros!).

A new method to calculate the number of black holes

As the authors of the research explain: This important result has been obtained thanks to an original approach which combines the state-of-the-art stellar and binary evolution code SEVN developed by SISSA researcher Dr. Mario Spera to empirical prescriptions for relevant physical properties of galaxies, especially the rate of star formation, the amount of stellar mass and the metallicity of the interstellar medium (which are all important elements to define the number and the masses of stellar black holes). Exploiting these crucial ingredients in a self-consistent approach, thanks to their new computation approach, the researchers have then derived the number of stellar black holes and their mass distribution across the whole history of the Universe.

Light-matter interactions simulated on the world’s fastest supercomputer

Light-matter interactions form the basis of many important technologies, including lasers, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and atomic clocks. However, usual computational approaches for modeling such interactions have limited usefulness and capability. Now, researchers from Japan have developed a technique that overcomes these limitations.

In a study published this month in The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications, a research team led by the University of Tsukuba describes a highly efficient method for simulating light-matter interactions at the atomic scale.

What makes these interactions so difficult to simulate? One reason is that phenomena associated with the interactions encompass many areas of physics, involving both the propagation of light waves and the dynamics of electrons and ions in matter. Another reason is that such phenomena can cover a wide range of length and time scales.

The Biggest Bang” — Physicists Create Tunable Superconductivity in Twisted Graphene “Nanosandwich

SciTechDaily.

Structure may reveal conditions needed for high-temperature superconductivity.

When two sheets of graphene are stacked atop each other at just the right angle, the layered structure morphs into an unconventional superconductor, allowing electric currents to pass through without resistance or wasted energy.

This “magic-angle” transformation in bilayer graphene was observed for the first time in 2018 in the group of Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT.