Lifeboat Foundation

Supersolids, solid materials with superfluid properties (i.e., in which a substance can flow with zero viscosity), have recently become the focus of numerous physics studies. Supersolids are paradoxical phases of matter in which two distinct and somewhat antithetical orders coexist, resulting in a material being both crystal and superfluid.

First predicted at the end of the 1960s, supersolidity has gradually become the focus of a growing number of research studies, sparking debate across different scientific fields. Several years ago, for instance, a team of researchers published controversial results that identified this phase in solid helium, which were later disclaimed by the authors themselves.

A key issue with this study was that it did not account for the complexity of helium and the unreliable observations that it can sometimes produce. In addition, in atoms, interactions are typically very strong and steady, which makes it harder for this phase to occur.

In a classic physics experiment, scientists set up quantum entanglement between sunlight and light generated here on Earth.

The researchers in China, the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom wondered whether any two particles of light, called photons, could show the spooky interactions governed by the rules of quantum mechanics, even if they originated from vastly distant sources. The experiment was mainly curiosity-driven, but it demonstrates that in the future, researchers might be able to use the Sun as a source of light for quantum mechanics-related purposes.

Dead or alive, left-spinning or right-spinning — in the quantum world particles such as the famous analogy of Schrödinger’s cat can be all these things at the same time. An international team, together with experts from Forschungszentrum Jülich, have now succeeded in transforming 20 entangled quantum bits into such a state of superposition. The generation of such atomic Schrödinger cat states is regarded as an important step in the development of quantum computers.

The EOR will also provide an unprecedented test for the current best model of cosmic evolution. Although there is plenty of evidence for dark matter, nobody has identified exactly what it is. Signals from the EOR would help to indicate whether dark matter consists of relatively sluggish, or ‘cold’, particles — the model that is currently favoured — or ‘warm’ ones that are lighter and faster, says Anna Bonaldi, an astrophysicist at the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organisation near Manchester, UK. “The exact nature of dark matter is one of the things at stake,” she says.

Radioastronomers look to hydrogen for insights into the Universe’s first billion years.

A breakthrough in understanding how the quasi-particles known as magnetic monopoles behave could lead to the development of new technologies to replace electric charges.

Researchers at the University of Kent applied a combination of quantum and classic physics to investigate how magnetic atoms interact with each other to form composite objects known as ‘magnetic monopoles’.

Basing the study on materials known as Spin Ices, the team showed how the ‘hop’ of a monopole from one site in the crystal lattice of Spin Ice to the next can be achieved by flipping the direction of a single magnetic atom.

A method for locating seams of gold and other heavy metals is the unlikely spin-off of Swinburne’s involvement in a huge experiment to detect dark matter down a mine in Stawell, Victoria.

Associate Professor Alan Duffy, from Swinburne’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing and a member of the Sodium iodide with Active Background REjection (SABRE) project, said cosmic radiation was effectively creating an X-ray of the Earth between the underground detector and the surface.

In the mine, the SABRE experiment seeks to detect particles of dark matter, something no one has conclusively achieved yet. Any signal from dark matter would be miniscule, and so the SABRE team created a phenomenally sensitive detector, which, it turns out, is also sensitive to a host of cosmic particles that can help us to locate gold.

Two independent research teams recently published studies indicating they’ve successfully teleported a qutrit — possibly within days of each other. Now, both await the scientific process of peer review to see which will ultimately get credit for being the first humans to do so.

But what’s a qutrit? It’s a lot like a qubit, an entangled pair of particles used to carry information in a quantum computing system. Qubits are analogous to bits, the binary units of information used by classical computers like the one you’re reading this on. Where bits can be represented by the numbers zero and one, qubits can be zero, one, or both at the same time. Trits, used in classical ternary systems, add a two into the mix. And qutrits are the quantum version of trits, capable of carrying more information than their qubit counterparts.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have recently developed a metric that can be used to capture the space of collider events based on the earth mover’s distance (EMD), a measure used to evaluate dissimilarity between two multi-dimensional probability distributions. The metric they proposed, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, could enable the development of new powerful tools to analyze and visualize collider data, which do not rely on a choice of observables.

“Our research is motivated by a remarkably simple question: When are two particle collisions similar?” Eric Metodiev, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), protons are smashed together at extremely high energies and each collision produces a complex mosaic of particles. Two collider events can look similar, even if they consist of different numbers and types of particles. This is analogous to how two mosaics can look similar, even if they are made up of different numbers and colors of tiles.”

In their study, Metodiev and his colleagues set out to capture the similarity between collider events in a way that is conceptually useful for particle physics. To do this, they employed a strategy that merges ideas related to optimal transport theory, which is often used to develop cutting-edge image recognition tools, with insights from quantum field theory, a construct that describes fundamental particle interactions.

Many phenomena of the natural world evidence symmetries in their dynamic evolution which help researchers to better understand a system’s inner mechanism. In quantum physics, however, these symmetries are not always achieved. In laboratory experiments with ultracold lithium atoms, researchers from the Center for Quantum Dynamics at Heidelberg University have proven for the first time the theoretically predicted deviation from classical symmetry. Their results were published in the journal Science.

“In the world of classical physics, the energy of an ideal gas rises proportionally with the pressure applied. This is a direct consequence of scale symmetry, and the same relation is true in every scale invariant system. In the world of quantum mechanics, however, the interactions between the quantum particles can become so strong that this classical scale symmetry no longer applies,” explains Associate Professor Dr. Tilman Enss from the Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research group collaborated with Professor Dr. Selim Jochim’s group at the Institute for Physics.

In their experiments, the researchers studied the behaviour of an ultracold, superfluid gas of lithium atoms. When the gas is moved out of its equilibrium state, it starts to repeatedly expand and contract in a “breathing” motion. Unlike classical particles, these quantum particles can bind into pairs and, as a result, the superfluid becomes stiffer the more it is compressed. The group headed by primary authors Dr. Puneet Murthy and Dr. Nicolo Defenu—colleagues of Prof. Jochim and Dr. Enss—observed this deviation from classical scale symmetry and thereby directly verified the quantum nature of this system. The researchers report that this effect gives a better insight into the behaviour of systems with similar properties such as graphene or superconductors, which have no electrical resistance when they are cooled below a certain critical temperature.