Lifeboat Foundation

WASHINGTON — Researchers have developed a new laser that makes it possible to measure electron transition energies in small atoms and molecules with unprecedented precision. The instrument will help scientists test one of the bedrock theories of modern physics to new limits, and may help resolve an unexplained discrepancy in measurements of the size of the proton.

The team will present their work during the Frontiers in Optics (FiO) / Laser Science (LS) conference in Rochester, New York, USA on 17 −21 October 2016.

“Our target is the best tested theory there is: quantum electrodynamics,” said Kjeld Eikema, a physicist at Vrije University, The Netherlands, who led the team that built the laser. Quantum electrodynamics, or QED, was developed in the 1940s to make sense of small unexplained deviations in the measured structure of atomic hydrogen. The theory describes how light and matter interact, including the effect of ghostly ‘virtual particles.’ Its predictions have been rigorously tested and are remarkably accurate, but like extremely dedicated quality control officers, physicists keep ordering new tests, hoping to find new insights lurking in the experimentally hard-to-reach regions where the theory may yet break down.

Continue reading “New Laser Provides Ultra-Precise Tool for Scientists Probing the Secrets of the Universe” »

A black hole is a physicist’s playground: A place where some of the most bizarre and fundamental concepts in physics can be observed and tested. However, there is currently no way to directly observe black holes in action; these bodies of matter don’t emit the sort of radiation, like light or X-rays, that telescopes are equipped to detect. Fortunately, physicists have figured out ways to imitate the conditions of a black hole in the lab—and in creating analogues of black holes, they are beginning to unravel some the most fascinating puzzles in physics.

Jeff Steinhauer, a researcher in the Physics Department of Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, recently caught the attention of the physics community when he announced that he had used an analogue black hole to confirm Stephen Hawking’s 1974 theory that black holes emit electromagnetic radiation, known as Hawking radiation. Hawking predicted that this radiation would be caused by the spontaneous creation of a particle-antiparticle pair at the event horizon, the point at the edge of a black hole beyond which nothing—not even light—can escape. Under the terms of Hawking’s theory, as one of the particles crosses the event horizon and is captured by the black hole, the other would be ejected into space. Steinhauer’s experiment was the first to exhibit the sort of spontaneous fluctuations that support Hawking’s calculations.

Physicists have cautioned that this experiment still doesn’t confirm the existence of Hawking radiation in astronomical black holes, as Steinhauer’s black hole isn’t exactly the same as one we might observe in space. It’s not yet physically possible to create the intense gravitational fields that form black holes. Instead, the analogue imitates a black hole’s ability to absorb light waves by using sound.

Continue reading “Benchtop Black Holes Help Physicists Glimpse the Quantum Universe” »

In early 2016 University Professor of Applied Physics Stephen Arnold earned a patent for his system for finding the size of one or more individual particles (such as nanoparticles) in real time using a microsphere’s whispering gallery modes.

Arnold and his team at Tandon’s MicroParticle PhotoPhysics Laboratory for BioPhotonics (MP3L) had generated excitement throughout the scientific community in 2012, when they created an ultra-sensitive biosensor capable of identifying the smallest single virus particles in solution.

Their technique was a major advance in a series of experiments to devise a diagnostic method sensitive enough to detect and a single virus particle in a doctor’s office or field clinic, without the need for special assay preparations or conditions. Normally, such assessment required the virus to be measured in the vacuum environment of an electron microscope, which added time, complexity and considerable cost.

Continue reading “Whispering gallery-mode biosensors are worth shouting about” »

Now, if we could just get the US to launch our own Quantum Satellite in space.

Recent research has taken quantum entanglement out of the theoretical realm of physics, and placed into the one of verified phenomena. An experiment devised by the Griffith University’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics, led by Professor Howard Wiseman and his team of researchers at the university of Tokyo, recently published a paper in the journal Nature Communications confirming what Einstein did not believe to be real: the non-local collapse of a particle’s wave function. (source)(source), and this is just one example of many.

Continue reading “Quantum Entanglement & Space Travel” »

Hmmmm; I suggest that “Kate” needs to follow up with the research teams at the University of Sydney, MIT, ORNL, and University of China who have already proven and shared insights and techniques to stabilize QC, make it scalable (as we are already seeing Google leverage), and trace particles throughout entanglement. I really do not like ready articles that misleads the public because the author was lazy in not doing their own research and homework on their topics.

Today I’d like to speak about quantum computers and to share my ideas of their purpose in the nearest future. As you know, applying the laws of quantum mechanics it’s actually possible to create a new type of computing machine, enabling to solve some of the issues, being currently unable to resolve even upon the use of the most powerful machines. As a result, the speed of major complex computations will significantly increase, for instance, the messages sent via quantum coupling lines will be impossible to capture or to copy. Sounds quite fantastic, isn’t it? Furthermore, today we already have working prototypes of future quantum computers. So, let’s consider this topic more precisely.

Continue reading “Will Quantum Computers Transform The Next Century?” »

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have shown for the first time that transistors fashioned out of carbon nanotubes are actually twice as efficient as regular silicon varieties. This comes after decades of research regarding how carbon nanotubes can be used to design the next generation of computers. Speaking about the breakthrough, recently published in the Science Advances journal, Michael Arnold, a member of the team, said:

Making carbon nanotube transistors that are better than silicon transistors is a big milestone. This achievement has been a dream of nanotechnology for the last 20 years.

Continue reading “Carbon Nanotube Transistors Twice As Efficient As Silicon, Study Shows” »

(Phys.org)—Although the Large Hadron Collider’s enormous 13 TeV energy is more than sufficient to detect many particles that theorists have predicted to exist, no new particles have been discovered since the Higgs boson in 2012. While the absence of new particles is informative in itself, many physicists are still yearning for some hint of “new physics,” or physics beyond the standard model.

In a new paper published in Physical Review Letters, physicists Yu-Sheng Liu, David McKeen, and Gerald A. Miller at the University of Washington in Seattle have hypothesized the existence of a new particle that looks very enticing because it could simultaneously solve two important problems: the proton radius puzzle and a discrepancy in muon anomalous magnetic moment measurements that differ significantly from standard model predictions.

“The new particle can account for two seemingly unrelated problems,” Miller told Phys.org. “We also point out several experiments that can further test our hypothesis.”

Continue reading “Hypothetical new particle could solve two major problems in particle physics” »

There are many theoretical models to explain such aspects of high energy physics as dark matter, theory of inflation, bariosynthesis, the Higgs mechanism, etc. The discovery of universal expansion is accelerating, precise measurements of characteristics of the cosmic microwave background, and indirect confirmations of the existence of dark matter have significantly advanced observational and theoretical cosmology. The connection between cosmological processes in the early universe and physics of elementary particles is getting clearer. Theories with additional compact measurements (multidimensional gravity) have contributed to the explanation of a series of phenomena in cosmology and the physics of elementary particles including inflation, baryon asymmetry, black holes and dark matter. Multidimensional gravity may become one of the basics of fundamental theoretical physics.

The development of colliders led to the discovery of a number of new particles, which was a great confirmation of the Standard Model ℠ of particle physics. The real SM triumph was the discovery of the Higgs boson in LHC experiments in CERN. However, despite the success of SM in high-energy physics, there is a series of questions and problems that can’t be explained by it—for example, baryon asymmetry, the origin of the Higgs field, the production of the early quasars, etc.

A theoretical direction, which is based on the idea of multidimensional gravity, is being developed at the MEPhI Department № 40 under the supervision of Professor S.G. Rubin. For the past several years, interesting results have been obtained on the basis of this research. In a thesis by Alexey Grobov titled “Effects of extra spaces in particle physics and cosmology,” multidimensional gravitational models contribute to better understanding of connections between astrophysics and microphysics phenomena.

Continue reading “Scientists study effects of extra space dimensions in particle physics and cosmology” »

A new tool to battle colon cancer.

Edible ginger-derived nano-lipids created from a specific population of ginger nanoparticles show promise for effectively targeting and delivering chemotherapeutic drugs used to treat colon cancer, according to a study by researchers at the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University, the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Wenzhou Medical University and Southwest University in China.

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer among men and women in the United States, and the second-leading cause of cancer-related deaths among men and women worldwide. The incidence of colorectal cancer has increased over the last few years, with about one million new cases diagnosed annually. Non-targeted chemotherapy is the most common therapeutic strategy available for colon cancer patients, but this treatment method is unable to distinguish between cancerous and healthy cells, leading to poor therapeutic effects on tumor cells and severe toxic side effects on healthy cells. Enabling chemotherapeutic drugs to target cancer cells would be a major development in the treatment of colon cancer.

Continue reading “Nano-lipid Particles From Edible Ginger Could Improve Drug Delivery for Colon Cancer, Study Finds” »