Lifeboat Foundation

So cool and fascinating!!

If it were ever possible to take a flight through the extreme conditions of Neptune’s atmosphere, we might experience the fascinating phenomenon of diamond rain tapping at our window.

According to a new study by an international team of researchers, such a blizzard of bling could be relatively common throughout the Universe.

Continue reading “Diamonds Could Be Raining From The Sky on Far More Planets Than We Realized” »

Electrons that spin to the right and the left at the same time. Particles that change their states together, even though they are separated by enormous distances. Intriguing phenomena like these are completely commonplace in the world of quantum physics. Researchers at the TUM Garching campus are using them to build quantum computers, high-sensitivity sensors and the internet of the future.

“We cool the chip down to only a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero—colder than in outer space,” says Rudolf Gross, Professor of Technical Physics and Scientific Director of the Walther Meissner Institute (WMI) at the Garching research campus. He’s standing in front of a delicate-looking device with gold-colored disks connected by cables: The cooling system for a special chip that utilizes the bizarre laws of quantum physics.

For about twenty years now, researchers at WMI have been working on quantum computers, a technology based on a scientific revolution that occurred 100 years ago when quantum physics introduced a new way of looking at physics. Today it serves as the foundation for a “new era of technology,” as Prof. Gross calls it.

In a new study published in Science today, JILA and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Fellow Jun Ye and his research team have taken a significant step in understanding the intricate and collective light-atom interactions within atomic clocks, the most precise clocks in the universe.

Using a cubic lattice, the researchers measured specific energy shifts within the array of strontium-87 atoms due to dipole-dipole interactions. With a high density of atoms, these mHz-level frequency shifts—known as cooperative Lamb shifts—were spectroscopically studied. These shifts were studied spatially and compared with calculated values using imaging spectroscopy techniques developed in this experiment.

These cooperative Lamb shifts, named because the presence of many identical atoms in a tightly confining space modifies the electromagnetic mode structure around them, are an important factor as the numbers of atoms in clocks continue to grow.

http://www.tedxathens.com/1080p HD mode available. About speaker: Andreas Mershin is a Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms. He leads the L…

When a high-energy photon strikes a proton, secondary particles diverge in a way that indicates that the inside of the proton is maximally entangled. An international team of physicists with the participation of the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow has just demonstrated that maximum entanglement is present in the proton even in those cases where pomerons are involved in the collisions.

Eighteen months ago, it was shown that different parts of the interior of the proton must be maximally quantum entangled with each other. This result, achieved with the participation of Prof. Krzysztof Kutak from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow and Prof. Martin Hentschinski from the Universidad de las Americas Puebla in Mexico, was a consequence of considerations and observations of collisions of high-energy photons with quarks and gluons in protons and supported the hypothesis presented a few years earlier by professors Dimitri Kharzeev and Eugene Levin.

Now, in a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, an international team of physicists has presented a complementary analysis of entanglement for collisions between photons and protons in which secondary particles (hadrons) are produced by a process called diffractive deep inelastic scattering. The main question was: does entanglement also occur among quarks and gluons in these cases, and if so, is it also maximal?

What happens when you expose tellurite glass to femtosecond laser light? That’s the question that Gözden Torun at the Galatea Lab at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, in collaboration with Tokyo Tech scientists, aimed to answer in her thesis work when she made the discovery that may one day turn windows into single material light-harvesting and sensing devices. The results are published in Physical Review Applied.

Interested in how the atoms in the tellurite glass would reorganize when exposed to fast pulses of high energy femtosecond laser light, the scientists stumbled upon the formation of nanoscale tellurium and tellurium oxide crystals, both semiconducting materials etched into the glass, precisely where the glass had been exposed. That was the eureka moment for the scientists, since a semiconducting material exposed to daylight may lead to the generation of electricity.

“Tellurium being semiconducting, based on this finding we wondered if it would be possible to write durable patterns on the tellurite glass surface that could reliably induce electricity when exposed to light, and the answer is yes,” explains Yves Bellouard who runs EPFL’s Galatea Laboratory. “An interesting twist to the technique is that no additional materials are needed in the process. All you need is tellurite glass and a femtosecond laser to make an active photoconductive material.”

In chemistry, structure is everything. Compounds with the same chemical formula can have different properties depending on the arrangement of the molecules they’re made of. And compounds with a different chemical formula but a similar molecular arrangement can have similar properties.

Graphene and a form of boron nitride called hexagonal boron nitride fall into the latter group. Graphene is made up of carbon atoms. Boron nitride, BN, is composed of boron and nitrogen atoms. While their chemical formulas differ, they have a similar structure —so similar that many chemists call hexagonal boron nitride “white graphene.”

Carbon-based graphene has lots of useful properties. It’s thin but strong, and it conducts heat and electricity very well, making it ideal for use in electronics.

Researchers at the University of Augsburg and the University of Vienna have discovered co-existing magnetic skyrmions and antiskyrmions of arbitrary topological charge at room temperature in magnetic Co/Ni multilayer thin films. Their findings have been published in Nature Physics and open up the possibility for a new paradigm in skyrmionics research.

The discovery of novel spin objects with arbitrary topological charge promises to contribute to advances in fundamental and applied research, particularly through their application in information storage devices.

Magnetic skyrmions are localized, stable topological magnetic spin textures resembling a tornado-like whirl in a magnetic material. They can be very small, with diameters in the nanometer range, and behave as particles that can be moved, created, and annihilated, which makes them suitable for ‘abacus’-type applications in information storage and logic devices.

A microquasar’s jets are creating shockwaves that could be creating the strange cosmic rays we see bombarding Earth.