Lifeboat Foundation

2015

After an oil spill, the number one priority is finding a way to contain and remove the oil. Boat operators sometimes deploy physical booms to trap the oil so that it can be siphoned or burned off of the water’s surface. But, because oil in water is tricky to contain, other methods for corraling it call for adding manmade chemicals to the water.

In a technique called dispersion, chemicals and wave action break down the oil into smaller particles, which then disperse and slowly biodegrade over a large area. Then, there is chemical herding. To clean up an oil spill with a chemical herder, crews spray a compound around the perimeter of the spill. The compound stays on the surface and causes the oil to thicken. Once it’s thick enough, it can be burned off. Chemical herding requires calm water, which makes it unreliable in some spills, but, unlike mechanical removal or dispersion, it gets all the oil. The technique has been around since the 1970s, but, until now, the chemicals used to herd the oil, called soap surfectants, didn’t break down over time. After the oil burned off, they’d still be in the ecosystem.

Continue reading “Scientists Find a Natural Way to Clean Up Oil Spills, With a Plant-Based Molecule” »

Matter waves constitute a crucial feature of quantum mechanics, in which particles have wave properties in addition to particle characteristics. This wave-particle duality was postulated in 1924 by the French physicist Louis de Broglie. The existence of the wave property of matter has been successfully demonstrated in a number of experiments with electrons and neutrons, as well as with more complex matter, up to large molecules.

For antimatter, the wave-particle duality has also been proven through diffraction experiments. However, researchers of the QUPLAS collaboration have now established wave behavior in a single positron (antiparticle to the electron) interference experiment. The results are reported in Science Advances.

The QUPLAS scientific collaboration includes researchers from the University of Bern and from the University and Politecnico of Milano. To demonstrate the wave duality of single positrons, they performed measurements with a setup similar to the so-called double-slit experiment. This setup was suggested by physicists including Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman; it is often used in quantum theory to demonstrate the wave nature of particles.

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A proposed experiment to swap fundamental properties between photons carries profound implications for our understanding of reality itself.

• By Anil Ananthaswamy on May 6, 2019

A photodetector converts light into an electrical signal, causing the light to be lost. Researchers led by Tracy Northup at the University of Innsbruck have now built a quantum sensor that can measure light particles non-destructively. It can be used to further investigate the quantum properties of light.

Physicist Tracy Northup is currently researching the development of quantum internet at the University of Innsbruck. The American citizen builds interfaces with which quantum information can be transferred from matter to light and vice versa. Over such interfaces, it is anticipated that quantum computers all over the world will be able to communicate with each other via fiber optic lines in the future. In their research, Northup and her team at the Department of Experimental Physics have now demonstrated a method with which visible light can be measured non-destructively. The development follows the work of Serge Haroche, who characterized the quantum properties of microwave fields with the help of neutral atoms in the 1990s and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2012.

In work led by postdoc Moonjoo Lee and Ph.D. student Konstantin Friebe, the researchers place an ionized calcium atom between two hollow mirrors through which visible laser light is guided. “The ion has only a weak influence on the light,” explains Tracy Northup. “Quantum measurements of the ion allow us to make statistical predictions about the number of light particles in the chamber.” The physicists were supported in their interpretation of the measurement results by the research group led by Helmut Ritsch, a Innsbruck quantum optician from the Department of Theoretical Physics. “One can speak in this context of a quantum sensor for light particles”, sums up Northup, who has held an Ingeborg Hochmair professorship at the University of Innsbruck since 2017. One application of the new method would be to generate special tailored light fields by feeding the measurement results back into the system via a feedback loop, thus establishing the desired states.

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Quantum communication is a strange beast, but one of the weirdest proposed forms of it is called counterfactual communication — a type of quantum communication where no particles travel between two recipients.

Theoretical physicists have long proposed that such a form of communication would be possible, but in 2017, for the first time, researchers were able to experimentally achieve it — transferring a black and white bitmap image from one location to another without sending any physical particles.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Finally Achieved Direct Counterfactual Quantum Communication” »

Scientists around the world are testing ways to further boost the power of particle accelerators while drastically shrinking their size.

10/18/18

Our best model of particle physics explains only about 5 percent of the universe.

Continue reading “The potential of plasma wakefield acceleration” »

Circa 2016

Entanglement is an extremely strong correlation that can exist between quantum systems. These correlations are so strong that two or more entangled particles have to be described with reference to each other, even though the individual objects may be spatially separated.

Continue reading “Quantum Entanglement harvesting in a vacuum” »

Not everything about glass is clear. How its atoms are arranged and behave, in particular, is startlingly opaque.

The problem is that glass is an amorphous solid, a class of materials that lies in the mysterious realm between solid and liquid. Glassy materials also include polymers, or commonly used plastics. While it might appear to be stable and static, glass’ atoms are constantly shuffling in a frustratingly futile search for equilibrium. This shifty behavior has made the physics of glass nearly impossible for researchers to pin down.

Now a multi-institutional team including Northwestern University, North Dakota State University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has designed an algorithm with the goal of giving polymeric glasses a little more clarity. The algorithm makes it possible for researchers to create coarse-grained models to design materials with dynamic properties and predict their continually changing behaviors. Called the “energy renormalization algorithm,” it is the first to accurately predict glass’ mechanical behavior at different temperatures and could result in the fast discovery of new materials, designed with optimal properties.

Continue reading “New approach predicts glass’ always-evolving behaviors at different temperatures” »

…and break the laws of physics.