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Category: particle physics

One mysterious number determines how physics, chemistry and biology work. But controversial experimental hints suggest it’s not one number at all.

By Michael Brooks

IT IS a well-kept secret, but we know the answer to life, the universe and everything. It’s not 42 – it’s 1/137.

This immutable number determines how stars burn, how chemistry happens and even whether atoms exist at all. Physicist Richard Feynman, who knew a thing or two about it, called it “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding”.

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While our choices and beliefs don’t often make sense or fit a pattern on a macro level, at a “quantum” level, they can be predicted with surprising accuracy.

The irrationality of how we think has long plagued psychology. When someone asks us how we are, we usually respond with “fine” or “good.” But if someone followed up about a specific event — “How did you feel about the big meeting with your boss today?” — suddenly, we refine our “good” or “fine” responses on a spectrum from awful to excellent.

In less than a few sentences, we can contradict ourselves: We’re “good” but feel awful about how the meeting went. How then could we be “good” overall? Bias, experience, knowledge, and context all consciously and unconsciously form a confluence that drives every decision we make and emotion we express. Human behavior is not easy to anticipate, and probability theory often fails in its predictions of it.

Enter quantum cognition : A team of researchers has determined that while our choices and beliefs don’t often make sense or fit a pattern on a macro level, at a “quantum” level, they can be predicted with surprising accuracy. In quantum physics, examining a particle’s state changes the state of the particle — so too, the “observation effect” influences how we think about the idea we are considering.

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When radiochemist Jennifer Shusterman and her colleagues got the first results of their experiment, no one expected what they saw: Atoms of a weird version of the element #zirconium had enthusiastically absorbed neutrons.

Zirconium-88 captures neutrons with extreme efficiency, and scientists don’t yet know why.

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How do you separate carbon dioxide from carbon monoxide? One way, showcased by a new study from Kanazawa University, is to use a bowl of vanadium. More precisely, a hollow, spherical cluster of vanadate molecules can discriminate between CO and CO 2, allowing potential uses in CO 2 storage and capture.

At the molecular scale, small objects can fit inside larger ones, just like in the everyday world. The resulting arrangements, known as host-guest interactions, are stabilized by non-covalent forces like electrostatics and hydrogen bonds. Each host will happily take in certain molecules, while shutting out others, depending on the size of its entrance and how much interior space it can offer the guest.

Anion Structures of CH2Cl2(Guest)-Inserted V12 and Guest-Free V12

Anion structures of CH 2 Cl 2 (guest)-inserted V12 (left) and guest-free V12 are shown. Orange and red square pyramids represent VO 5 units with their bases directed to the center of the bowl, and the inverted VO 5 unit. Green and black spheres represent Cl and C, respectively. Hydrogen atoms of CH 2 Cl 2 are omitted for clarity. (Image: Kanazawa University)

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Hacker attacks on everything from social media accounts to government files could be largely prevented by the advent of quantum communication, which would use particles of light called “photons” to secure information rather than a crackable code.

Using light to send information is a game of probability: Transmitting one bit of information can take multiple attempts. The more photons a light source can generate per second, the faster the rate of successful information transmission.

“A source might generate a lot of photons per second, but only a few of them may actually be used to transmit information, which strongly limits the speed of quantum communication,” Bogdanov said.

For faster quantum communication, Purdue researchers modified the way in which a light pulse from a laser beam excites electrons in a man-made “defect,” or local disturbance in a crystal lattice, and then how this defect emits one photon at a time.

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Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has developed and tested a new #Interferometer

January 3, 2019 — By analyzing a pattern formed by the intersection of two beams of light, researchers can capture elusive details regarding the behavior of mysterious phenomena such as gravitational waves. Creating and precisely measuring these interference patterns would not be possible without instruments called interferometers.

For over three decades, scientists have attempted to improve the sensitivity of interferometers to better detect how the number of photons—particles that make up visible light and other forms of electromagnetic energy—leads to changes in light phases. Attempts to achieve this goal are often hampered by optical loss and noise, both of which can decrease the accuracy of interferometer measurements.

But now a team of researchers at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has developed and tested a new interferometer to study the factors that contribute to these conditions, and they have devised solutions to overcome them. Their findings were published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, which promoted their paper to Editors’ Pick status. The editors award this distinction to noteworthy publications compiled in an exclusive list.

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High-energy X-ray beams and a clever experimental setup allowed researchers to watch a high-pressure, high-temperature chemical reaction to determine for the first time what controls formation of two different nanoscale crystalline structures in the metal cobalt. The technique allowed continuous study of cobalt nanoparticles as they grew from clusters including tens of atoms to crystals as large as five nanometers.

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Get ready to get excited about excitons.

Excitons are quirky quasiparticles that exist only in semiconducting and insulating materials. Recently, a team of researchers in Lausanne, Switzerland discovered a way to control how excitons flow. Not only that, they also discovered new properties of the particles which they claim could lead to a new generation of electronic devices with transistors that lose less energy as heat. The results of their study were published this week in the journal Nature Photonics.

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Rice University physicists have created the world’s first laser-cooled neutral plasma, completing a 20-year quest that sets the stage for simulators that re-create exotic states of matter found inside Jupiter and white dwarf stars.

The findings are detailed this week in the journal Science and involve new techniques for cooling clouds of rapidly expanding to temperatures about 50 times colder than deep space.

“We don’t know the practical payoff yet, but every time physicists have laser cooled a new kind of thing, it has opened a whole world of possibilities,” said lead scientist Tom Killian, professor of physics and astronomy at Rice. “Nobody predicted that laser cooling atoms and ions would lead to the world’s most accurate clocks or breakthroughs in quantum computing. We do this because it’s a frontier.”

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