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Category: particle physics

New results from the Large Hadron Collider have confirmed it. The mysterious five-quark subatomic particle — the pentaquark, only discovered a few years ago — really is composed of two sets of quarks.

One is a meson, a type of particle that contains a quark and antiquark pair; the other is a three-quark baryon: the subatomic particle that makes up most of the normal matter in the Universe, including protons and electrons.

This confirms that quarks aren’t just chucked together like a loose bag of marbles, but instead are structured more similarly to the way protons and neutrons are bound in an atomic nucleus — what the researchers call a ‘molecular’ state.

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Atomic BECs were first achieved in 1995. Although it has become easier to realize atomic BECs since their discovery, they still require very low temperatures for operation. For most purposes, this is too expensive and impractical. Alternatively, negatively charged quatrons are quasi-particles composed of a hole and three electrons which form a stable BEC when coupled to light in triple quantum layer structures in semiconductor microcavities. This allows for both the greater experimental control found in quantum optics, and the benefits of matter wave systems, such as superconductivity and coherence. Moreover, due to the extremely small effective mass of the quasi-particles, quatrons can be used to achieve superconducting BECs at room temperature.

The Create the Future Design Contest was launched in 2002 by the publishers of NASA Tech Briefs magazine to help stimulate and reward engineering innovation. The annual event has attracted more than 8,000 product design ideas from engineers, entrepreneurs, and students worldwide.

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Researchers have found a way to accelerate antimatter in a 1000x smaller space than current accelerators, boosting the science of exotic particles.

The new could be used to probe more mysteries of , like the properties of the Higgs boson and the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and provide more sensitive testing of aircraft and computer chips.

The method has been modelled using the properties of existing lasers, with experiments planned soon. If proven, the technology could allow many more labs around the world to conduct antimatter acceleration experiments.

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In laser facilities in the UK, Imperial physicists are testing an 84-year-old theory which was once thought impossible to prove.

The theory of the Breit-Wheeler process says it should be possible to turn into matter by smashing two particles of light (photons) together to create an electron and a positron. However, past attempts to do this have required the addition of other high-energy particles.

Physicists from Imperial College London, led by Professor Steven Rose, came up with a way of testing the theory that did not rely on these added extras in 2014, and today an experiment is running in the hope of turning light directly into matter for the first time.

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Yale researchers have figured out how to catch and save Schrödinger’s famous cat, the symbol of quantum superposition and unpredictability, by anticipating its jumps and acting in real time to save it from proverbial doom. In the process, they overturn years of cornerstone dogma in quantum physics.

The discovery enables researchers to set up an early warning system for imminent jumps of artificial atoms containing quantum information. A study announcing the discovery appears in the June 3 online edition of the journal Nature.

Schrödinger’s cat is a well-known paradox used to illustrate the concept of superposition—the ability for two opposite states to exist simultaneously—and unpredictability in . The idea is that a cat is placed in a sealed box with a radioactive source and a poison that will be triggered if an atom of the radioactive substance decays. The superposition theory of quantum physics suggests that until someone opens the box, the cat is both alive and dead, a superposition of states. Opening the box to observe the cat causes it to abruptly change its randomly, forcing it to be either dead or alive.

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When you peer into the night sky, much of what you see is plasma, a soupy amalgam of ultra-hot atomic particles. Studying plasma in the stars and various forms in outer space requires a telescope, but scientists can recreate it in the laboratory to examine it more closely.

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