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Category: particle physics

A scientist in California has taken steps toward a long-sought gamma ray laser by harnessing positronium bubbles in special liquid helium. Positronium is a volatile, short-lived atom that seems kind of like hydrogen but has a positron—an antiparticle considered opposite to an electron, sometimes even called an antielectron—instead of a proton.

Holding positronium in liquid helium extends its viable stability, a relationship that’s decades old: “Positronium’s long lifetime in liquid helium was first reported in 1957,” says the press release, which links to a paper by physicist Richard A. Ferrell about the “reduced pickoff” positronium experiences when it can form a bubble inside liquid helium.

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It is one of the most astonishing results of physics: when a complex system is left alone, it will return to its initial state with almost perfect precision. Gas particles, for example, chaotically swirling around in a container, will return almost exactly to their starting positions after some time. This “Poincaré Recurrence Theorem” is the foundation of modern chaos theory. For decades, scientists have investigated how this theorem can be applied to the world of quantum physics. Now, researchers at TU Wien (Vienna) have successfully demonstrated a kind of “Poincaré recurrence” in a multi-particle quantum system. The results have been published in the journal Science.

An Old Question, Revisited

At the end of the 19th century, the French scientist Henri Poincaré studied systems which cannot be fully analysed with perfect precision — for example solar systems consisting of many planets and asteroids, or gas particles, which keep bumping into each other. His surprising result: every state which is physically possible will be occupied by the system at some point — at least to a very good degree of approximation. If we just wait long enough, at some point all planets will form a straight line, just by coincidence. The gas particles in a box will create interesting patterns, or go back to the state in which they were when the experiment started.

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A gold wedding band will melt at around 1,000 degrees Celsius and vaporize at about 2,800 degrees, but these changes are just the beginning of what can happen to matter. Crank up the temperature to trillions of degrees, and particles deep inside the atoms start to shift into new, non-atomic configurations. Physicists seek to map out these exotic states — which probably occurred during the Big Bang, and are believed to arise in neutron star collisions and powerful cosmic ray impacts — for the insight they provide into the cosmos’s most intense moments.

Now an experiment in Germany called the High Acceptance DiElectron Spectrometer (HADES) has put a new point on that map.

For decades, experimentalists have used powerful colliders to crush gold and other atoms so tightly that the elementary particles inside their protons and neutrons, called quarks, start to tug on their new neighbors or (in other cases) fly free altogether. But because these phases of so-called “quark matter” are impenetrable to most particles, researchers have studied only their aftermath. Now, though, by detecting particles emitted by the collision’s fireball itself, the HADES collaboration has gotten a more direct glimpse of the kind of quark matter thought to fill the cores of merging neutron stars.

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The governing council of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known internationally as CERN, wants to build a brand new, bigger-than-ever $23.6 billion particle collider. At one time, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) made news for costing a mere $5 billion. Is the escalating cost of these colliders worth it for the research scientists are able to do?

At least one prominent physicist says no. Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, argues in Scientific American that bigger and bigger particle collider schemes have run out of room to make meaningful progress.

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Dust is on the way to the United States this week making the more than 6,000-mile journey from the Sahara Desert.

This might seem to work against typical weather patterns, but dust in the United States from the Sahara happens every year. While it may not be abnormal to see the Saharan dust make its annual journey to the United States, we are expected to see more of it than usual.

Tiny individual dust particles combine to make a large plume so big that it can be picked up on satellite images and even be seen from the International Space Station.

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Trapped Rydberg ions can be the next step towards scaling up quantum computers to sizes where they can be practically usable, a new study in Nature shows.

Different physical systems can be used to make a quantum computer. Trapped ions that form a crystal have led the research field for years, but when the system is scaled up to large ion crystals this method gets very slow. Complex arithmetic operations cannot be performed fast enough before the stored quantum information decays.

A Stockholm University research group may have solved this problem by using giant Rydberg ions, 100 million times larger than normal atoms or ions. These huge ions are highly interactive and, therefore, can exchange quantum information in less than a microsecond.

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With a new nanoparticle that converts light to heat, a team of researchers has found a promising technology for clearing water of pollutants.

Trace amounts of contaminants such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals and perfluorooctanoic acid in drinking water sources have posed significant health risks to humans in recent years. These micropollutants have eluded conventional treatment processes, but certain chemical processes that typically involve ozone, hydrogen peroxide or UV light have proven effective. These processes, however, can be expensive and energy-intensive.

A new nanoparticle created by Yale University engineers as part of an effort for the Rice-based Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT) could lead to technologies that get around those limitations. The particle is described in a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Physicists at the XENON dark matter research facility report an ‘excess’ of 53 events, which may hint at the existence of hypothetical solar axion particles. Other possibilities for the anomalous detection include a surprisingly large magnetic moment for neutrinos, and tritium contamination in the detector.

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The approval is not yet a final go-ahead. But it means CERN can now put substantial effort into designing a collider and researching its feasibility, while pushing to the backburner research and development efforts for alternative designs for LHC follow-ups, such as a linear eletron-positron collider or one that would accelerate muons. “I think it’s a historic day for CERN and particle physics, in Europe and beyond,” CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti told the council after the vote.

European particle-physics lab will pursue a 100-kilometre machine to uncover the Higgs boson’s secrets — but it doesn’t yet have the funds.

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A team of researchers claim to have achieved quantum teleportation using individual electrons.

Quantum teleportation, or quantum entanglement, allows particles to affect each other even if they aren’t physically connected — a phenomenon predicted by famed physicist Albert Einstein.

Rather than a teleportation chamber out of a sci-fi movie, quantum teleportation transports information rather than matter.

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