Southwest Research Institute has invested in research to enhance the capabilities of spacecraft instruments. Consequently, they have developed more effective conversion surfaces for the detection and analysis of low-energy particles in outer space.
Led by Dr. Jianliang Lin of Mechanical Engineering and Dr. Justyna Sokół of the Space Science Division, the project could potentially change our understanding of space physics and exploration.
🔗 Top quark and top antiquark entanglement 🔗
The CMS experiment has just reported the observation and confirms the existence of #entanglement between the top #quark and its #Antiparticle beyond reasonable doubt.
The CMS experiment has just reported the observation of quantum entanglement between a top quark and a top antiquark, simultaneously produced at the LHC.
In quantum mechanics, a system is said to be entangled if its quantum state cannot be described as a simple superposition of the states of its constituents. If two particles are entangled, we cannot describe one of them independently of the other, even if the particles are separated by a very large distance. When we measure the quantum state of one of the two particles, we instantly know the state of the other. The information is not transmitted via any physical channel; it is encoded in the correlated two-particle system.
Quantum information is a field of physics that was born with the work of John Bell, a CERN physicist, in the mid 1960’s. Soon after, Aspect, Clouser, and other physicists did important pioneering experimental work to test “Bell’s theorem”, and in 2007 Zeilinger’s team convincingly demonstrated the existence of entanglement between two photons, too far away from each other for the information to travel between them at the speed of light. This breakthrough brought Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”. Quantum entanglement was mostly examined for states of photons and electrons until 2023, when ATLAS reported the observation of entanglement in the top quark-antiquark system.
Even a cave that’s been closed to the public for three decades can’t escape the reach of microplastic particles.
A research team, led by Professor Joonki Suh in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Graduate School of Semiconductor Materials and Devices Engineering at UNIST, has made a significant breakthrough in thin film deposition technology. By employing an innovative atomic layer deposition (ALD) process, Professor Seo successfully achieved regular arrangement of tellurium (Te) atoms at low temperatures as low as 50 degrees Celsius.
The ALD method is a cutting-edge thin film process that enables precise stacking of semiconductor materials at the atomic layer level on three-dimensional structures—even at low process temperatures. However, traditional application to next-generation semiconductors requires high processing temperatures above 250 degrees Celsius and additional heat treatment exceeding 450 degrees Celsius.
In this research, the UNIST team applied ALD to monoelemental van der Waals tellurium—a material under extensive investigation for its potential applications in electronic devices and thermoelectric materials.
Related: Scientists find ‘ghost particles’ spewing from our Milky Way galaxy in landmark discovery (video)
“Because like-charged objects in a vacuum are expected to repel regardless of whether the sign of the charge they carry is positive or negative, the expectation is that like-charged particles in solution must also monotonically repel,” the researchers wrote in the paper.
To test the assumption, the researchers placed charged silica microparticles (measuring just 0.0002 inch, or 5 micrometers, wide — a fraction of the width of a human hair) inside water or one of two types of alcohol. By tracking the charges with a microscope, the team established that, inside water, the positively charged particles pushed themselves away from each other in accordance with Coulomb’s law.
A proposed approach to detect Majorana fermions in Kitaev spin liquids by using scanning tunneling microscopy could lead to the unambiguous confirmation of both the spin-liquid state and its Majorana zero modes.
The heliosphere—made of solar wind, solar transients, and the interplanetary magnetic field—acts as our solar system’s personal shield, protecting the planets from galactic cosmic rays. These extremely energetic particles accelerated outwards from events like supernovas and would cause a huge amount of damage if the heliosphere did not mostly absorb them.
For years, C130 fullertubes—molecules made up of 130 carbon atoms—have existed only in theory. Now, leading an international team of scientists, a UdeM doctoral student in physics has successfully shown them in real life—and even managed to capture some in a photograph.
Ever since its discovery, dark matter has remained invisible to scientists despite the launch of multiple ultra-sensitive particle detector experiments around the world over several decades.
Now, physicists at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are proposing a new way to look for dark matter using quantum devices, which might be naturally tuned to detect what researchers call thermalized dark matter.
Most dark matter experiments hunt for galactic dark matter, which rockets into Earth directly from space, but another kind might have been hanging around Earth for years, said SLAC physicist Rebecca Leane, who was an author of the new study.
Entanglement is a widely studied quantum physics phenomenon, in which two particles become linked in such a way that the state of one affects the state of another, irrespective of the distance between them. When studying systems comprised of several strongly interacting particles (i.e., many body systems) in two or more dimensions, numerically predicting the amount of information shared between these particles, a measure known as entanglement entropy (EE), becomes highly challenging.
