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Researchers have cooled indium atoms to a temperature close to 1 mK, making indium the first group-III atom to be made ultracold.

At temperatures near to absolute zero, atoms move slower than a three-toed sloth, allowing physicists to gain unprecedented experimental control over these systems. New phases of matter can form when atoms become ultracold and quirky quantum properties can emerge, yet much of the periodic table remains unexplored in the ultracold regime. Now, Travis Nicholson of the National University of Singapore and colleagues have successfully cooled indium to close to 1 mK [1]. Indium is the first “main group-III” atom—a specific group of transition metals on the periodic table—to be cooled to such a low temperature. The demonstration opens the door to studying systems with properties previously unexplored by ultracold physicists.

For their experiments, Nicholson and colleagues used a magneto-optical trap—a standard tool for trapping and cooling atoms. But because this was the first attempt at making indium atoms ultracold, the team had to make their own version of the apparatus rather than using one designed to cool other atoms. “The systems used for this research are highly customized to specific atoms,” Nicholson says. So every part of the setup from designing the laser systems to picking the screws had to be “hashed out by us.” With their custom setup, the group loaded 500,000,000 indium atoms into the trap using a laser beam and then cooled them.

Imagining our everyday life without lasers is difficult. We use lasers in printers, CD players, pointers, measuring devices, etc. What makes lasers so special is that they use coherent waves of light: all the light inside a laser vibrates completely in sync.

Meanwhile, quantum mechanics tells us that particles like atoms should also be considered waves. As a result, we can build ‘atom lasers’ containing coherent waves of matter. But can we make these matter waves last so they may be used in applications? In research that was published in Nature, a team of Amsterdam physicists shows that the answer to this question is affirmative.

The particle-smashing machine has fired up again — sparking fresh hope it can find unusual results.

Circa 2022

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Physicists have found evidence of rare X particles in the quark-gluon plasma produced in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The findings could redefine the kinds of particles that were abundant in the early universe.

😳!

Differing values of the Hubble constant might be reconciled via the dark sector.

Whatever you are doing, whether it is driving a car, going for a jog, or even at your laziest, eating chips and watching TV on the couch, there is an entire suite of molecular machinery inside each of your cells hard at work. That machinery, far too small to see with the naked eye or even with many microscopes, creates energy for the cell, manufactures its proteins, makes copies of its DNA, and much more.

Among those pieces of machinery, and one of the most complex, is something known as the nuclear pore complex (NPC). The NPC, which is made of more than 1,000 individual proteins, is an incredibly discriminating gatekeeper for the cell’s nucleus, the membrane-bound region inside a cell that holds that cell’s genetic material. Anything going in or out of the nucleus has to pass through the NPC on its way.

Nuclear pores stud the surface of the cell’s nucleus, controlling what flows in and out of it. (Image: Valerie Altounian)

Photodetectors, sensors that can detect light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation, are essential components of imaging tools, communication systems, and various other technologies on the market. These sensors work by converting photons (i.e., light particles) into electrical current.

Researchers at Zhejiang University have recently developed a new photodetector that could detect light within a broader bandwidth. Their device, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, could be used to develop new and more advanced imaging technologies.

“Our recent project is based on traditional charge-coupled device (CCD) and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) imaging technologies,” Prof. Yang Xu, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Our novel imaging devices combining CCD’s MOS photogate for high sensitivity and CMOS’s independent pixel structure can significantly benefit monolithic integration, performance, and readout.”

Extremely interested to hear some of your opinions on this. Published in the journal Nature.

Scientists have discovered a new, mysterious particle. Of course, making new discoveries is exciting. But, perhaps the most exciting thing about this particle is that it could be a candidate for dark matter.

Incredibly, the never-before-seen particle was discovered using an experiment small enough to fit on a kitchen counter.

Continue reading “Scientists discovered a never-before-seen particle and it could be dark matter” »

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A collection of 16 qubits has been organized in such a way that they may be able to operate any computation without error. It is an important step toward constructing quantum computers that outperform standard ones.

When completing any task, a quantum computer consisting of charged atoms can detect its own faults. Because conventional computers constantly detect and rectify their own flaws, quantum computers will need to do the same in order to fully outperform them. Nevertheless, quantum effects can cause errors to propagate rapidly through the qubits, or quantum bits, that comprise these devices.

Continue reading “How Can a Quantum Computer Catch its Own Errors in Calculations?” »