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A research team led by Academician Du Jiangfeng and Professor Rong Xing from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with Professor Jiao Man from Zhejiang University, has used solid-state spin quantum sensors to examine exotic spin-spin-velocity-dependent interactions (SSIVDs) at short force ranges. Their study reports new experimental findings concerning interactions between electron spins and has been published in Physical Review Letters.

The Standard Model is a very successful theoretical framework in particle physics, describing fundamental particles and four basic interactions. However, the Standard Model still cannot explain some important observational facts in current cosmology, such as dark matter and dark energy.

Some theories suggest that new particles can act as propagators, transmitting new interactions between Standard Model particles. At present, there is a lack of experimental research on new interactions related to velocity between spins, especially in the relatively small range of force distance, where experimental verification is almost non-existent.

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Researchers at UC Berkeley have enhanced the precision of gravity experiments using an atom interferometer combined with an optical lattice, significantly extending the time atoms can be held in free fall. Despite not yet finding deviations from Newton’s gravity, these advancements could potentially reveal new quantum aspects of gravity and test theories about exotic particles like chameleons or symmetrons.

Twenty-six years ago physicists discovered dark energy — a mysterious force pushing the universe apart at an ever-increasing rate. Ever since, scientists have been searching for a new and exotic particle causing the expansion.

Continue reading “Beyond Gravity: UC Berkeley’s Quantum Leap in Dark Energy Research” »

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What would Brian Greene do if he could travel through time, and which future technology is he most excited about?

Continue reading “Brian Greene: The Most Important Question in Science” »

For decades, inflation has been the dominant cosmological scenario, but recently the theory has been subject to competition and critique. Two renowned pioneers of inflation — Alan Guth and Andrei Linde — join Brian Greene to make their strongest case for the inflationary theory.

This program is part of the Big Ideas series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

Continue reading “Epic Expansion: The Case for Inflationary Cosmology” »

Berkeley researchers have developed an ultra-precise instrument that captures atoms in free fall to search for dark energy, the force accelerating the universe’s expansion.

Experiment captures atoms in free fall to look for gravitational anomalies caused by universe’s missing energy

By Robert Sanders

Continue reading “With a new, incredibly precise instrument, Berkeley researchers narrow search for dark energy” »

For the last seven decades, astrophysicists have theorized the existence of “kugelblitze,” black holes caused by extremely high concentrations of light.

These special black holes, they speculated, might be linked to astronomical phenomena such as dark matter, and have even been suggested as the power source of hypothetical spaceship engines in the far future.

However, new theoretical physics research by a team of researchers at the University of Waterloo and Universidad Complutense de Madrid demonstrates that kugelblitze are impossible in our current universe. Their research, titled “No black holes from light,” is published on the arXiv preprint server and is forthcoming in Physical Review Letters.

The universe is a massive place, with galaxies well beyond our own. However, some also hypothesize that there may be more than one universe. The multiverse theory essentially suggests that our universe is just one of many branching and infinite universes. These universes are believed to have appeared just after the Big Bang, and now, scientists may be closer than ever to proving this theory is correct.

The idea of a multiverse existing has gained a lot of following over the past several years—not only in entertainment avenues like the Marvel Cinematic Universe but also in the scientific community, especially since the 1980s when inflation—a period when the universe suddenly expanded—was invented. Inflation is the main explanation for why the universe is so smooth and flat. It also predicts the existence of several independent universes beyond our own.

But inflation isn’t the only route that scientists have looked at to prove the multiverse theory. Others have looked at alternatives called cyclic universes, which basically say the universe is on an unending cycle of ballooning and then compressing. It still focuses on that multiple universe prospect—though it focuses on them appearing at different times.

Note that this does not involve Planck mass fermionic black holes!

A population of massive black holes whose origin is one of the biggest mysteries in modern astronomy has been detected by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors.

According to one hypothesis, these objects may have formed in the very early Universe and may compose dark matter, a mysterious substance filling the Universe. A team of scientists has announced the results of nearly 20-year-long observations indicating that such massive black holes may comprise at most a few percent of dark matter. Therefore, another explanation is needed for gravitational wave sources.

Continue reading “Black Holes and Dark Revelations: Gravitational Waves Provide New Clues to the Composition of Dark Matter” »

A physicist investigating black holes has found that, in an expanding universe, Einstein’s equations require that the rate of the universe’s expansion at the event horizon of every black hole must be a constant, the same for all black holes. In turn this means that the only energy at the event horizon is dark energy, the so-called cosmological constant. The study is published on the arXiv preprint server.

“Otherwise,” said Nikodem Popławski, a Distinguished Lecturer at the University of New Haven, “the pressure of matter and curvature of spacetime would have to be infinite at a horizon, but that is unphysical.”

Black holes are a fascinating topic because they are about the simplest things in the universe: their only properties are mass, electric charge and angular momentum (spin). Yet their simplicity gives rise to a fantastical property—they have an event horizon at a critical distance from the black hole, a nonphysical surface around it, spherical in the simplest cases. Anything closer to the black hole, that is, inside the event horizon, can never escape the black hole.