Lifeboat Foundation

The problem is that transitions from one s-orbital to another are forbidden, quantum mechanically. There’s no way to emit one photon from an s-orbital and have your electron wind up in a lower energy s-orbital, so the transition we talked about earlier, where you emit a Lyman-series photon, can only occur from the 2 p state to the 1s state.

But there is a special, rare process that can occur: a two-photon transition from the 2s state (or the 3s, or 4s, or even the 3 d orbital) down to the ground (1s) state. It occurs only about 0.000001% as frequently as the Lyman-series transitions, but each occurrence nets us one new neutral hydrogen atom. This quantum mechanical quirk is the primary method of creating neutral hydrogen atoms in the Universe.

If it weren’t for this rare transition, from higher energy spherical orbitals to lower energy spherical orbitals, our Universe would look incredibly different in detail. We would have different numbers and magnitudes of acoustic peaks in the cosmic microwave background, and hence a different set of seed fluctuations for our Universe to build its large-scale structure out of. The ionization history of our Universe would be different; it would take longer for the first stars to form; and the light from the leftover glow of the Big Bang would only take us back to 790,000 years after the Big Bang, rather than the 380,000 years we get today.

Work will aid design of other unusual quantum materials with many potential applications.

MIT physicists and colleagues, including scientists from Berkeley Lab, have discovered the “secret sauce” behind the exotic properties of a new quantum material known as a kagome metal.

Kagome metals have long mystified scientists for their ability to exhibit collective behavior when cooled below room temperature.

A new theoretical study has revealed how sound waves transfer small amounts of mass as they travel. Angelo Esposito, Rafael Krichevsky and Alberto Nicolis at Columbia University in the US have calculated that the transfer occurs even when both quantum and relativistic effects are ignored. Their result implies that current interpretations of the properties of sound waves may need to be rethought.

Physicists still puzzled about how effect can occur in solids.

Quantum computers are getting bigger, but there are still few practical ways to take advantage of their extra computing power. To get over this hurdle, researchers are designing algorithms to ease the transition from classical to quantum computers. In a new study in Nature, researchers unveil an algorithm that reduces the statistical errors, or noise, produced by quantum bits, or qubits, in crunching chemistry equations.

Developed by Columbia chemistry professor David Reichman and postdoc Joonho Lee with researchers at Google Quantum AI, the algorithm uses up to 16 qubits on Sycamore, Google’s 53-qubit computer, to calculate ground state energy, the lowest energy state of a molecule. “These are the largest quantum chemistry calculations that have ever been done on a real quantum device,” Reichman said.

Continue reading “Toward a quantum computer that calculates molecular energy” »

In a Paris lab, researchers have shown for the first time that quantum methods of transmitting information are superior to classical ones.

Researchers in Japan have developed a diamond FET with high hole mobility.

In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking found that an isolated black hole would emit radiation but only when considered quantum mechanics. This is known as black hole evaporation because the black hole shrinks. However, this led to the black hole information paradox.

If the black hole evaporates entirely, physical information would permanently disappear in a black hole. However, this violates a core precept of quantum physics: the information cannot vanish from the Universe.

Continue reading “This Diamond Transistor is Still Raw, But Its Future Looks Bright” »

If the black hole evaporates entirely, physical information would permanently disappear in a black hole. However, this violates a core precept of quantum physics: the information cannot vanish from the Universe.

A new study by an international quartet of physicists suggests that black holes are more complex than originally understood. They have a gravitational field that, at the quantum level, encodes information about how they were formed.

The research team includes Professor Xavier Calmet from the University of Sussex School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Professor Roberto Casadio (INFN, University of Bologna), Professor Stephen Hsu (Michigan State University), along with Ph.D. student Folkert Kuipers (University of Sussex). Their study significantly improves understanding of black holes and resolves a problem that has confounded scientists for nearly half a century; the black hole information paradox.

How can Einstein’s theory of gravity be unified with quantum mechanics? This is a challenge that could give us deep insights into phenomena such as black holes and the birth of the universe. Now, a new article in Nature Communications, written by researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and MIT, USA, presents results that cast new light on important challenges in understanding quantum gravity. Credit: Chalmers University of Technology / Yen Strandqvist.

How can Einstein’s theory of gravity be unified with quantum mechanics? It is a challenge that could give us deep insights into phenomena such as black holes and the birth of the universe. Now, a new article in Nature Communications, written by researchers from Chalmers University of Technology 0, Sweden, and MIT 0, USA, presents results that cast new light on important challenges in understanding quantum gravity.

A grand challenge in modern theoretical physics is to find a ‘unified theory’ that can describe all the laws of nature within a single framework – connecting Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes the universe on a large scale, and quantum mechanics, which describes our world at the atomic level. Such a theory of ‘quantum gravity’ would include both a macroscopic and microscopic description of nature.