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Category: particle physics

Out of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, there’s one in particular, orbiting 25,000 light-years from the galactic core, that affects Earth day by day, moment by moment. That star, of course, is the sun. While the sun’s activity cycle has been tracked for about two and a half centuries, the use of space-based telescopes offers a new and unique perspective of our nearest star.

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), has been in space for more than 22 years — the average length of one completed solar magnetic cycle, according to an image caption from ESA. In the new image, SOHO researchers pulled together 22 images of the sun, taken each spring over the course of a full solar cycle. When the sun is at its most active, strong magnetic fields show up as bright spots in the sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona; black sunspots appear as concentrations of magnetic fields reduce the sun’s surface temperature during active periods as well.

Throughout the sun’s magnetic cycles, the polarity of the sun’s magnetic field gradually flips. This initial phase takes 11 years, and after another 11 years, the magnetic field’s orientation returns to where it began. Monitoring the entire 22-year cycle provided significant data regarding the interaction between the sun’s activity and Earth, improved space-weather forecasting capabilities and more, ESA officials said in the caption. SOHO has revealed much about the sun itself, capturing “sunquakes,” discovering waves traveling through the corona and collecting details about the charged particles it propels into space, called the solar wind.

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Researchers at Griffith University working with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) have unveiled a stunningly accurate technique for scientific measurements which uses a single atom as the sensor, with sensitivity down to 100 zeptoNewtons.

Using highly miniaturised segmented-style Fresnel lenses — the same design used in lighthouses for more than a century — which enable exceptionally high-quality images of a single atom, the scientists have been able to detect position displacements with nanometre precision in three dimensions.

“Our atom is missing one electron, so it’s very sensitive to electrical fields. By measuring the displacement, we’ve built a very sensitive tool for measuring electrical forces.” Dr Erik Streed, of the Centre for Quantum Dynamics, explained.

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Scientists have used the same technology that brought us time crystals to create a room-temperature maser—a microwave laser—that overcomes many of masers’ past problems.

Masers predate lasers. They’re pretty much the same thing, but masers shoot out microwave light instead of visible or infrared light. Lasers have always been more popular, since masers have only worked in short pulses and required incredibly cold temperatures and vacuums to operate. But now, a team of scientists in the United Kingdom has overcome both old and new challenges to debut their continuously emitting, room-temperature maser. Their research was published this week in Nature.

Masers and lasers operate on basically the same principle. Atoms typically have electrons orbiting their nuclei in specific energy levels. Add some energy in the form of, say, a photon, and the electrons jump to higher energy levels. Pump enough of those electrons into the same higher energy level, and you can release a cascade of photons of the same color (or wavelength, in physics speak) whose waves line up.

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Scientists at Rutgers University–New Brunswick and elsewhere are at a crossroads in their 50-year quest to go beyond the Standard Model in physics.

Rutgers Today asked professors Sunil Somalwar and Scott Thomas in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the School of Arts and Sciences to discuss mysteries of the universe. Somalwar’s research focuses on experimental elementary particle physics, or , which involves smashing together at large particle accelerators such as the one at CERN in Switzerland. Thomas’s research focuses on theoretical particle physics.

The duo, who collaborate on experiments, and other Rutgers physicists – including Yuri Gershtein – contributed to the historic 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle responsible for the structure of all matter and a key component of the Standard Model.

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Researchers from the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering are part of a group that has received a multi-million dollar grant from IUs’ Emerging Areas of Research program.

Amr Sabry, a professor of informatics and computing and the chair of the Department of Computer Science, and Alexander Gumennik, assistant professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering, are part of the “Center for Quantum Information Science and Engineering” initiative led by Gerardo Ortiz, a professor of physics in IU’s College of Arts and Sciences. The initiative will focus on harnessing the power of quantum entanglement, which is a theoretical phenomenon in which the quantum state of two or more particles have to be described in reference to one another even if the objects are spatially separated.

“Bringing together a unique group of physicists, computer scientists, and engineers to solve common problems in quantum sensing and computation positions IU at the vanguard of this struggle,” Gumennik said. “I believe that this unique implementation approach, enabling integration of individual quantum devices into a monolithic quantum computing circuit, is capable of taking the quantum information science and engineering to a qualitatively new level.”

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Neutral-particle beams, a concept first tried in the 1980s, may get a fresh look under Michael Griffin.

“Directed energy is more than just big lasers, Griffin said. ”That’s important. High-powered microwave approaches can effect an electronics kill. The same with the neutral particle beam systems we explored briefly in the 1990s” for use in space-based anti-missile systems. Such weapons can be ”useful in a variety of environments” and have the ”advantage of being non-attributable,” meaning that it can be hard to pin an attack with a particle weapon on any particular culprit since it leaves no evidence behind of who or even what did the damage.

Like lasers, neutral-particle beams focus beams of energy that travel in straight lines, unaffected by electromagnetic fields. But instead of light, neutral-particle beams use composed of accelerated subatomic particles traveling at near-light speed, making them easier to work with (though the folks that run CERNs hadron collider may disagree). When its particles touche the surface of a target, they takes on a charge that allows them to penetrate the target’s shell or exterior more deeply.

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Scientists at Imperial College London are attempting to use powerful lasers turn light into matter, potentially proving the 84-year-old theory known as the Breit-Wheeler process. According to this theory, it is technically possible to turn light into matter by smashing two photons to create a positron and an electron. While previous efforts to achieve this feat have required added high-energy particles, the Imperial scientists believe they have discovered a method that does not need additional energy to function. “This would be a pure demonstration of Einstein’s famous equation that relates energy and mass: E=mc2, which tells us how much energy is produced when matter is turned to energy,” explained Imperial Professor Steven Rose. “What we are doing is the same but backwards: turning photon energy into mass, i.e. m=E/c2.”

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March 20 (UPI) — Scientists believe a new material, known as a scintillator, will expand the search for dark matter.

New analysis suggests the scintillator material is sensitive to dark matter particles with less mass than a proton, which should allow scientists to look for dark matter among a previously unexplored mass range.

Weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, describe dark matter particles with a mass greater than that of a proton. Scientists have tried to directly detect WIMPs using a variety of strategies, but with no success.

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Many physicists sidestep the philosophical puzzles altogether, preferring to “shut up and calculate.”

If quantum mechanics can be said to have a capital city it is surely Copenhagen, birthplace of the physicist Niels Bohr (1885−1962) and of the formalism he and others developed to make sense of the subatomic realm. Their approach, the “Copenhagen Interpretation,” is expounded in every textbook. Yet it has been questioned many times, and in “What Is Real?” Adam Becker tells a fascinating if complex story of quantum dissidents. Two of the most important not only displeased Bohr, they also attracted the attention of the FBI.

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