Lifeboat Foundation

Black holes, cosmic power stations, fuel the luminosity of quasars and active galactic nuclei (AGNs) through their intricate interaction of matter, gravity, and magnetic forces. Despite black holes themselves not possessing a magnetic field, the surrounding dense plasma in the accretion disc does. As this plasma orbits the black hole, its charged particles generate an electric current and consequently a magnetic field.

This magnetic field, assumed to be stable due to the unvarying plasma flow, caused scientists to scratch their heads when they found evidence of its directional change. Such a phenomenon, known as a magnetic reversal, is akin to an imaginary pole of a magnet switching from north to south or vice versa. While not uncommon in stars, and even witnessed in the Sun’s 11-year sunspot cycle or Earth’s infrequent magnetic shifts, such an event was thought improbable for supermassive black holes.

In 2018, a computer-aided sky survey detected a startling transformation in a galaxy 239 million light-years away named 1ES 1927+654, which had suddenly become a hundredfold brighter. Swift Observatory soon reported x-ray and ultraviolet light emissions from this region. Initial speculations suggested a tidal disruption event caused by a star venturing too close to the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, disrupting gas flow into the accretion disc, as the reason for this unusual luminosity.

Researchers discovered only relatively recently that black hole jets emit X-rays, and how the jets accelerate particles to this high-energy state is still a mystery. Surprising new findings in Nature Astronomy appear to rule out one leading theory, opening the door to reimagining how particle acceleration works in the jets—and possibly also elsewhere in the universe.

One leading model of how jets generate X-rays expects the jets’ X-ray emissions to remain stable over long time scales (millions of years). However, the new paper found that the X-ray emissions of a statistically significant number of jets varied over just a few years.

“One of the reasons we’re excited about the variability is that there are two main models for how X-rays are produced in these jets, and they’re completely different,” explains lead author Eileen Meyer, an astronomer at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “One model invokes very low-energy electrons and one has very high-energy electrons. And one of those models is completely incompatible with any kind of variability.”

The BEC phenomenon was first predicted by Satyendra Bose and Albert Einstein: when a given number of identical Bose particles approach each other sufficiently closely, and move sufficiently slowly, they will collectively convert to the lowest energy state: a BEC. This occurs when atoms are chilled to very low temperatures. The wavelike nature of atoms allows them to spread out and even overlap. If the density is high enough, and the temperature low enough (mere billionths of degrees above absolute zero), the atoms will behave like the photons in a laser: they will be in a coherent state and constitute a single “super atom.”

JILA’s Carl Wieman (University of Colorado, Boulder) and Eric Cornell (NIST) first started searching for a BEC around 1990 with a combination laser and magnetic cooling apparatus. Wieman pioneered the use of $200 diode lasers (the same type used in CD players) instead of the $150,000 lasers other groups were using. His approach was initially met with skepticism by his colleagues, but when he began to report real progress, several other groups joined the race to achieve the first BEC. Beginning with rubidium gas atoms at room temperature, the JILA team first slowed the rubidium and captured it in a trap created by laser light. This cooled the atoms to about 10 millionths of a degree above absolute zero—still far too hot to produce a BEC.

Once trapped, the lasers are turned off and the atoms are held in place by a magnetic field. The atoms are further cooled in the magnetic trap by selecting the hottest atoms and kicking them out of the trap. Then came the tricky part: trapping a sufficiently high density of atoms at temperatures that were cold enough to produce a BEC. To do this, Wieman and his colleagues had to devise a time-averaged orbiting potential trap (an improvement to the standard magnetic trap).

Take a lattice—a flat section of a grid of uniform cells, like a window screen or a honeycomb—and lay another, similar lattice above it. But instead of trying to line up the edges or the cells of both lattices, give the top grid a twist so that you can see portions of the lower one through it. This new, third pattern is a moiré, and it’s between this type of overlapping arrangement of lattices of tungsten diselenide and tungsten disulfide where UC Santa Barbara physicists found some interesting material behaviors.

“We discovered a new state of matter—a bosonic correlated insulator,” said Richen Xiong, a graduate student researcher in the group of UCSB condensed matter physicist Chenhao Jin, and the lead author of a paper that appears in the journal Science.

According to Xiong, Jin and collaborators from UCSB, Arizona State University and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan, this is the first time such a material—a highly ordered crystal of bosonic particles called excitons—has been created in a “real” (as opposed to synthetic) matter system.

It might not look like much, but this tiny levitating particle could be the key to a new generation.

Outside atomic nuclei, neutrons are unstable particles, with a lifetime of about fifteen minutes. The neutron disintegrates due to the weak nuclear force, leaving behind a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino. The weak nuclear force is one of the four fundamental forces in the universe, along with the strong force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force.

Comparing experimental measurements of neutron decay with theoretical predictions based on the weak nuclear force can reveal as-yet undiscovered interactions. To do so, researchers must achieve extremely high levels of precision. A team of nuclear theorists has uncovered a new, relatively large effect in neutron decay that arises from the interplay of the weak and electromagnetic forces.

This research identified a shift in the strength with which a spinning neutron experiences the weak nuclear force. This has two major implications. First, scientists have known since 1956 that due to the weak force, a system and one built like its mirror image do not behave in the same way. In other words, mirror reflection symmetry is broken. This research affects the search for new interactions, technically known as “right-handed currents,” that, at very short distances of less than one hundred quadrillionths of a centimeter, restore the universe’s mirror-reflection symmetry. Second, this research points to the need to compute electromagnetic effects with higher precision. Doing so will require the use of future high-performance computers.

Physicists at the Universities of Innsbruck in Austria and Paris-Saclay in France have combined all the key functionalities of a long-distance quantum network into a single system for the first time. In a proof-of-principle experiment, they used this system to transfer quantum information via a so-called repeater node over a distance of 50 kilometres – far enough to indicate that the building blocks of practical, large-scale quantum networks may soon be within reach.

Quantum networks have two fundamental components: the quantum systems themselves, known as nodes, and one or more reliable connections between them. Such a network could work by connecting the quantum bits (or qubits) of multiple quantum computers to “share the load” of complex quantum calculations. It could also be used for super-secure quantum communications.

But building a quantum network is no easy task. Such networks often work by transmitting single photons that are entangled; that is, its quantum state is closely linked to the state of another quantum particle. Unfortunately, the signal from a single photon is easily lost over long distances. Carriers of quantum information can also lose their quantum nature in a process known as decoherence. Boosting these signals is therefore essential.

The twentieth century was a truly exciting time in physics.

From 1905 to 1973, we made extraordinary progress probing the mysteries of the universe: special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, the structure of the atom, the structure of the nucleus, enumerating the elementary particles.

Continue reading “Why has there been no progress in physics since 1973?” »

Even space and time if it’s quantum.

What will be the ultimate fate of our universe? There are a number of theories and possibilities, but at present the most likely scenario seems to be that the universe will continue to expand, most mass will eventually find its way into a black hole, and those black holes will slowly evaporate into Hawking Radiation, resulting in what is called the “heat death” of the universe. Don’t worry, this will likely take 1.7×10¹⁰⁶ years, so we got some time.

But what about objects, like stellar remnants, that are not black holes? Will the ultimate fate of the universe still contain some neutron stars and cold white dwarfs that managed to never get sucked up by a black hole? To answer this question we have to back up a bit and talk about Hawking Radiation.

Continue reading “Everything Will Evaporate” »