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Category: particle physics

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have found evidence of a new particle called the gluino, which might be integral to the nature of our universe. (Photo : Mark Hillary | Flickr)

A team of scientists currently working at the Large Hadron Collier at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced that it has possibly discovered the existence of a particle integral to nature in a statement on Tuesday, Dec. 15, and again on Dec.16.

The two teams working in concert, named Atlas and CMS, presented their findings on the particle from the Large Hadron Collider’s second run (LHC Run 2). The results were based on what the scientists observed during the particle collisions. The previously-hypothesized particle, named the gluino, is theoretically the supersymmetric partner of the gluon (or glue particle, which is comprised entirely of nuclear force). This would mean that the gluino could be pair-produced by colliders like the LHC, and would more or less be described as a heavier version of the Higgs boson, a particle that essentially helps us understand why other particles contain mass and was identified at the LHC at CERN in 2012.

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Interesting; no more rotten fruit. Researchers may actually found a new way to preserve perishable foods. Can you imagine the cost savings to consumers, plus being able to supply more people with fresh fruits and vegetables. World Bank and Health Organizations should be interested in this as well.

It does make me wonder how the research on life extension, etc. can learn from the findings of this experiment.

Researchers have managed to “pluck” a single photon – one particle of light – out of a pulse of light.”

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In a paper published in the journal Nature, researchers at CERN’s ALPHA experiment have shown – to the most accurate degree yet – that particles of antihydrogen have a neutral electrical charge.

According to the Standard Model, which explains how the basic building blocks of matter interact, all antimatter – such as antihydrogen – should have the exact opposite charge to its matter counterpart. For example, in a hydrogen atom a negatively charged electron combines with a positively charged proton to give a net charge of zero. In contrast, an antihydrogen atom should have a positively charged positron combining with a negatively charged antiproton to give a net charge of zero. The Standard Model also says that during the Big Bang equal amounts of antimatter and matter were created. But today this isn’t the case, there is much less antimatter in the universe than matter.

Since physicists know that hydrogen has a neutral charge, by studying the charge of antihydrogen, they hoped to see something different or surprising, which could help scientists to understand why nature has a preference for matter over antimatter. “It’s a very important question: is the universe neutral? Do all the positive charges and negative charges have exactly the opposite sign and to what level can you determine that?” explains Jeffrey Hangst, the spokesperson for the ALPHA experiment at CERN’s Antiproton Decelerator (AD) and the lead scientist on the study. “For normal matter that’s known very precisely: to about one part in 1021, that’s one and 21 zeros, that’s an enormous number, we really know that well. Now we have the first opportunity to study this with antiatoms, with antihydrogen, and that’s what we’re publishing now. We made the best possible study that we can make with trapped antihydrogen.”

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Black holes may sport a luxurious head of “hair” made up of ghostly, zero-energy particles, says a new hypothesis proposed by Stephen Hawking and other physicists.

The new paper, which was published online Jan. 5 in the preprint journal arXiv, proposes that at least some of the information devoured by a black hole is stored in these electric hairs.

Still, the new proposal doesn’t prove that all the information that enters a black hole is preserved.

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Hopefully one day soon we’ll be able to add a fifth cosmic phenomena that can travel faster than the speed of light to the list — humanity.

When Albert Einstein first predicted that light travels the same speed everywhere in our universe, he essentially stamped a speed limit on it: 670,616,629 miles per hour — fast enough to circle the entire Earth eight times every second.

But that’s not the entire story. In fact, it’s just the beginning.

Before Einstein, mass — the atoms that make up you, me, and everything we see — and energy were treated as separate entities. But in 1905, Einstein forever changed the way physicists view the universe.

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Researchers have demonstrated the effects of superposition on the scale of everyday objects.

Of the weird implications of quantum mechanics, superposition may be the hardest for humans to wrap their minds around. In principle, superposition means that the same object can exist in more than one place at the same time.

Ordinarily, superposition is only relevant on the microscopic scale of subatomic particles. Effects on this scale are the key to some possibly groundbreaking technologies, like quantum computing. No one has ever demonstrated quantum effects on the scale of Schrödinger’s cat –the mythical unobserved cat in a box that is both alive and dead at the same time.

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Atoms are the building blocks of all matter on Earth, and the patterns in which they are arranged dictate how strong, conductive or flexible a material will be. Now, scientists at UCLA have used a powerful microscope to image the three-dimensional positions of individual atoms to a precision of 19 trillionths of a meter, which is several times smaller than a hydrogen atom.

Their observations make it possible, for the first time, to infer the macroscopic properties of materials based on their structural arrangements of atoms, which will guide how scientists and engineers build aircraft components, for example. The research, led by Jianwei (John) Miao, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a member of UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute, is published Sept. 21 in the online edition of the journal Nature Materials.

For more than 100 years, researchers have inferred how atoms are arranged in three-dimensional space using a technique called X-ray crystallography, which involves measuring how light waves scatter off of a crystal. However, X-ray crystallography only yields information about the average positions of many billions of atoms in the crystal, and not about individual atoms’ precise coordinates.

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The primary reason hoverboards have become public enemy #1 in recent times is due to their unfortunate tendency to catch fire and explode due to their lithium-ion batteries overheating.

But a new lithium-ion battery developed by scientists in the US could put an end to such dramas. Researchers at Stanford University have made the world’s first lithium-ion battery that shuts off before it overheats, then restarts immediately when its temperature has cooled.

Conventional lithium-ion batteries comprise a pair of electrodes and a liquid or gel electrolyte that carries charged particles between them. However, if the battery’s temperature reaches around 150 degrees Celsius (300 degrees Fahrenheit) as a result of a defect or overcharging, the electrolyte can catch fire and trigger an explosion, as we’ve seen in many sad cases.

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Very interesting. Teleporting and it’s potential use is really worth keeping a closer eye on especially with the progresses that we have seen so far with Quantum. Just 2 weeks ago, scientists were able to prove that one atom was able to co-exist in 2 locations during the same point of time.

Many members of the Stanford community came to an event called “Teleportation” last December. The event featured Tongcang Li, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, who discussed his work in quantum superposition, or having an entity simultaneously exist in two locations.

The event was organized by Anna Chukaeva, a first year student at the Graduate School of Business, and Evgeny Duhovny, a local graphic artist and DJ. The two have begun organizing campus events in conjunction with ArtSoFFT, a local group (not affiliated with Stanford). Driven by a desire to popularize and spread a love of science, the group has begun organizing a series of events at Stanford featuring scientists discussing their work.

“What we were looking [for] was a researcher who has published in the scientific journals — so it’s not just someone who is popularizing it. We wanted a real scientist who is doing work in this field, and who is doing breakthrough technology,” Chukaeva said.

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Too cool.

Nanotechnologists at the University of Twente research institute MESA+ have discovered a new fundamental property of electrical currents in very small metal circuits. They show how electrons can spread out over the circuit like waves and cause interference effects at places where no electrical current is driven. The geometry of the circuit plays a key role in this so called nonlocal effect. The interference is a direct consequence of the quantum mechanical wave character of electrons and the specific geometry of the circuit. For designers of quantum computers, it is an effect to take account of. The results are published in the British journal Scientific Reports.

Interference is a common phenomenon in nature and occurs when one or more propagating waves interact coherently. Interference of sound, light or water waves is well known, but also the carriers of electrical current — electrons — can interfere. It shows that electrons need to be considered as waves as well, at least in nanoscale circuits at extremely low temperatures: a canonical example of the quantum mechanical wave-particle duality.

Gold ring

The researchers from the University of Twente have demonstrated electron interference in a gold ring with a diameter of only 500 nanometers (a nanometer is a million times smaller than a millimeter). One side of the ring was connected to a miniature wire through which an electrical current can be driven. On the other side, the ring was connected to a wire with a voltmeter attached to it. When a current was applied, and a varying magnetic field was sent through the ring, the researchers detected electron interference at the other side of the ring, even though no net current flowed through the ring.

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