Lifeboat Foundation

Related: Scientists find ‘ghost particles’ spewing from our Milky Way galaxy in landmark discovery (video)

“Because like-charged objects in a vacuum are expected to repel regardless of whether the sign of the charge they carry is positive or negative, the expectation is that like-charged particles in solution must also monotonically repel,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

Continue reading “Opposites attract? Not in new experiment that finds loophole in fundamental rule of physics” »

A proposed approach to detect Majorana fermions in Kitaev spin liquids by using scanning tunneling microscopy could lead to the unambiguous confirmation of both the spin-liquid state and its Majorana zero modes.

The heliosphere—made of solar wind, solar transients, and the interplanetary magnetic field—acts as our solar system’s personal shield, protecting the planets from galactic cosmic rays. These extremely energetic particles accelerated outwards from events like supernovas and would cause a huge amount of damage if the heliosphere did not mostly absorb them.

For years, C130 fullertubes—molecules made up of 130 carbon atoms—have existed only in theory. Now, leading an international team of scientists, a UdeM doctoral student in physics has successfully shown them in real life—and even managed to capture some in a photograph.

Ever since its discovery, dark matter has remained invisible to scientists despite the launch of multiple ultra-sensitive particle detector experiments around the world over several decades.

Now, physicists at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are proposing a new way to look for dark matter using quantum devices, which might be naturally tuned to detect what researchers call thermalized dark matter.

Most dark matter experiments hunt for galactic dark matter, which rockets into Earth directly from space, but another kind might have been hanging around Earth for years, said SLAC physicist Rebecca Leane, who was an author of the new study.

Entanglement is a widely studied quantum physics phenomenon, in which two particles become linked in such a way that the state of one affects the state of another, irrespective of the distance between them. When studying systems comprised of several strongly interacting particles (i.e., many body systems) in two or more dimensions, numerically predicting the amount of information shared between these particles, a measure known as entanglement entropy (EE), becomes highly challenging.

More than two decades ago, scientists predicted that at ultra-low temperatures, many atoms could undergo ‘quantum superchemistry’ and chemically react as one. They’ve finally shown it’s real.

Iron screws and other so-called ferromagnetic materials are made up of atoms with electrons that act like little magnets. Normally, the orientations of the magnets are aligned within one region of the material but are not aligned from one region to the next. Think of packs of tourists in Times Square pointing to different billboards all around them. But when a magnetic field is applied, the orientations of the magnets, or spins, in the different regions line up and the material becomes fully magnetized. This would be like the packs of tourists all turning to point at the same sign.

A team of scientists from Columbia, Nanjing University, Princeton, and the University of Munster, writing in the journal Nature, have presented the first experimental evidence of collective excitations with spin called chiral graviton modes (CGMs) in a semiconducting material.