Lifeboat Foundation

According to quantum mechanics, a vacuum isn’t empty at all. It’s actually filled with quantum energy and particles that blink in and out of existence for a fleeting moment — strange signals that are known as quantum fluctuations.

For decades, there had only ever been indirect evidence of these fluctuations, but back in 2015, researchers claimed to have detected the theoretical fluctuations directly. And now the same team says they’ve gone a step further, having manipulated the vacuum itself, and detecting the changes in these strange signals in the void.

We’re entering the territory of high-level physics here, but what’s really important in this experiment is that, if these results are confirmed, the researchers might have just unlocked a way to observe, probe, and test the quantum realm without interfering with it.

Continue reading “Physicists Say They’ve Manipulated ‘Pure Nothingness’ and Observed the Fallout” »

Cool; and at −273.16°C in fact.

Nothing can be chilled below absolute zero, or −273.15°C, because at this temperature all molecular motion stops completely. Per Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle the forces of real particle velocities will always be above zero. It’s a fundamental limit that can’t seem to be broken, and that’s fine, but what bothers scientists, however, are other limits that keep them from cooling things near absolute zero.

Physicists at Princeton University have revealed a device they’ve created that will allow a single electron to transfer its quantum information to a photon. This is a revolutionary breakthrough for the team as it gets them one step closer to producing the ultimate quantum computer. The device is the result of five years worth of research and could accelerate the world of quantum computing no end.

In Brief A multicomponent virus is divided into a number of different pieces. In this respect, each one is packaged separately into a viral particle. One particle of each type is needed for cell infection. And there’s a new one impacting animals.

A new type of virus has been identified, and it’s so weird, it’s challenging long-held notions of what it takes for a virus to infect and proliferate in an animal host.

Conventional wisdom states that if a single virus manages to insert its genes into a cell, the host becomes infected. But what if you chopped up that virus, and tried stuffing the pieces into an animal cell separately? It wouldn’t work, right?

Continue reading “A Newly Discovered ‘Bizarre’ Virus is Breaking the Rules of Infection” »

In Brief

• Just a few micrometers in diameter, this quasicrystal is the third to be found in this particular meteorite, but it differs from the other two in both structure and chemical composition.
• While many applications have been discovered for synthetic quasicrystals, the rarity of naturally occurring ones has made them difficult to study.

A team led by Luca Bindi, a geologist from the University of Florence, has found an ultra-rare quasicrystal just a few micrometres wide in a meteorite that landed in Russia five years ago. The discovery has been detailed in Scientific Reports.

Two other quasicrystals have already been discovered in this particular meteorite, but the latest is different from its predecessors in both structure and chemical composition. This new quasicrystal is composed of aluminum, copper, and iron atoms structured in an arrangement very similar to the pentagon-based pattern of a soccer ball, a first of its kind in nature.

Continue reading “An Ultra-Rare Crystal Is Found in a Meteorite, Revealing a Bizarre Form of Matter” »

Nice.

A sophisticated cooling technique — using lasers to cool individual atoms — was demonstrated at the National Institute of Standards in Technology in 1978, and is now used in a wide array of precise applications, such as atomic clocks. Using the same principle, NIST physicists have now “cooled a mechanical object to a temperature lower than previously thought possible,” passing the so-called “quantum limit” which imposes limits on accuracy for quantum scale measurements.

Described in a paper titled “Sideband cooling beyond the quantum backaction limit with squeezed light,” published Thursday in the journal Nature, the technique could theoretically be used to cool objects to absolute zero, when matter exhibits almost no energy or motion.

Continue reading “New Cooling Technique Could Aid Development Of Quantum Computers” »

Novel structures exhibit highly directional emission and provide a template for site-controlled quantum dots and self-aligned nanophotonic cavities.

Semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) are thought to be a promising candidate for a single-quantum emitter in on-chip systems because of their well-developed growth and fabrication techniques. Semiconductor QDs, however, have a number of inherent limitations that need to be overcome before they can be used in practical applications. For example, QDs in semiconductors are strongly affected by elements (e.g., phonons) in the surrounding environment, which results in short nonradiative decay times and rapid dephasing processes. Despite the high intrinsic radiative decay rates of semiconductor QDs compared with those of other single-quantum emitters (such as atoms and ions), the radiative decay rate needs to be further increased so that these fast nonradiative and dephasing processes can be overcome. Furthermore, the collection efficiency of the light that is emitted from conventional QDs embedded in a high-index planar substrate is typically low (about 4%).

Continue reading “Semiconductor nanopyramids for building high-yield quantum photonic devices” »

The University of Queensland Australia has done subsequent studies on time travel, its possibility aspects, and components. According to in-depth studies from the University, time travel is a possibility. The scientists used single particles of light photons to simulate quantum particles that travel through time. The study indicated that modern physics has strange aspects that were explained by Professor Timothy Ralph. Quantum particles are made up of fuzzy or uncertain components that make it possible for them to wiggle around and thus avoid inconsistent time travel situations. Therefore, nature behaves differently making the impossible possible.

Scientist Carl Sagan said many times that “we are star stuff,” from the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, and the iron in our blood.

It is well known that most of the essential elements of life are truly made in the stars. Called the “CHNOPS elements” – carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur – these are the building blocks of all life on Earth. Astronomers have now measured of all of the CHNOPS elements in 150,000 stars across the Milky Way, the first time such a large number of stars have been analyzed for these elements.

“For the first time, we can now study the distribution of elements across our Galaxy,” says Sten Hasselquist of New Mexico State University. “The elements we measure include the atoms that make up 97% of the mass of the human body.”