Classical Chaos Occurs In The Quantum World, Scientists Find

This image shows the kind of pictures Jessen’s team produces with tomography. The top two spheres are from a selected experimental snapshot taken after 40 cycles of changing the direction of the axis of spin of a cesium atom, the quantum “spinning top.” The two spheres below are theoretical models that agree remarkably with the experimental results. (Credit: Image courtesy of Poul Jessen)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 8, 2009) — Chaotic behavior is the rule, not the exception, in the world we experience through our senses, the world governed by the laws of classical physics.

Even tiny, easily overlooked events can completely change the behavior of a complex system, to the point where there is no apparent order to most natural systems we deal with in everyday life.

Read more ....

Superheavy Element 114 Confirmed: A Stepping Stone To The 'Island Of Stability'

Members of the group that confirmed the production of element 114 in front of the Berkeley Gas-filled Separator at the 88-Inch Cyclotron, from left: Jan Dvorak, Zuzana Dvorakova, Paul Ellison, Irena Dragojevic, Heino Nitsche, Mitch Andre Garcia, and Ken Gregorich. Not pictured is Liv Stavestra. (Credit: Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab Creative Services Office)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 25, 2009) — Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have been able to confirm the production of the superheavy element 114, ten years after a group in Russia, at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, first claimed to have made it. The search for 114 has long been a key part of the quest for nuclear science’s hoped-for Island of Stability.

Read more ....

Hunting Hidden Dimensions

From U.S. News And World Report:

Black holes, giant and tiny, may reveal new realms of space.

In many ways, black holes are science's answer to science fiction. As strange as anything from a novelist's imagination, black holes warp the fabric of spacetime and imprison light and matter in a gravitational death grip. Their bizarre properties make black holes ideal candidates for fictional villainy. But now black holes are up for a different role: heroes helping physicists assess the real-world existence of another science fiction favorite—hidden extra dimensions of space.

Read more ....

Blueprint for a Quantum Electric Motor

From Technology Review:

Place a couple of cold atoms in an alternating magnetic field and you've got a quantum version of an electric motor.

How small can you make an electric motor? Today, Alexey Ponomarev from the University of Augsburg in Germany and a couple of pals describe how to do it with just two atoms. Yep, an electric motor made of just two ultracold atoms.

Read more ....

Last Days of Big American Physics: One More Triumph, Or Just Another Heartbreak?

From The Wire Science:

BATAVIA, Illinois — High-energy particle physicists around the world are collectively holding their breath waiting for the Large Hadron Collider to come online and start unlocking the most elusive secrets of the universe. It’s as if time is standing still until their shiny new toy is ready to play with.

But not at Fermilab. Here, physicists are in the scientific equivalent of an all-out sprint, still clinging to the ever-thinning hope that before the LHC ramps up to full power, their own 28-year old particle collider, the Tevatron, will catch the coveted Higgs boson, a theoretical particle that is at the heart of the Standard Model of physics.

Read more ....

Entangled Light, Quantum Money

Photo: Two Nodes of a quantum network that Caltech researchers created by halting entangled photons within two ensembles of cesium atoms housed in an ultrahigh-vacuum system. Temporarily storing entanglement provides a basis for quantum data storage, which might be useful for various applications, including quantum cryptography.
Credit: Nara Cavalcanti

From Technology Review:

A breakthrough explores the challenges--and suggests the financial possibilities--of creating quantum networks.

In recent years, the Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger has bounced entangled photons off orbiting satellites and made 60-atom fullerene molecules exist in quantum superposition--essentially, as a smear of all their possible positions and energy states across local space-time. Now he hopes to try the same stunt with bacteria hundreds of times larger. Meanwhile, Hans Mooij of the Delft University of Technology, with Seth Lloyd, who directs MIT's Center for Extreme Quantum Information Theory, has created quantum states (which occur when particles or systems of particles are superpositioned) on scales far above the quantum level by constructing a superconducting loop, visible to the human eye, that carries a supercurrent whose electrons run simultaneously clockwise and counterclockwise, thereby serving as a quantum computing circuit.

Read more ....

Rewriting General Relativity? Putting A New Model Of Quantum Gravity Under The Microscope

Scientists are trying to figure out to what extent a new theory of quantum gravity will reproduce general relativity -- the theory that currently explains, to very high accuracy, how masses curve spacetime and create the influence of gravity. (Credit: Image copyright American Physical Society / Illustration: Carin Cain)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 26, 2009) — Does an exciting but controversial new model of quantum gravity reproduce Einstein's theory of general relativity?

Scientists at Texas A&M University in the US explore this question in a paper appearing in Physical Review Letters and highlighted with a Viewpoint in the August 24th issue of Physics.

Read more ....

Dark Energy – How Would You Explain It?

The concept of dark energy was created by cosmologists to fit Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity into reality Photo: AP

From The Telegraph:

I firmly believe that it should be possible to explain every scientific theory, experiment or concept in simple language that can be understood by a layperson.

However some subjects are so complicated they appear to defy simplification.

Dark energy, which made the news this week, is one such subject. Even the Oxford Dictionary of Science admitted that its nature is not known.

Has anyone come across a simple explanation?

Read more ....

Experiments Push Quantum Mechanics To Higher Levels

John Martinis and Matthew Neeley are researchers at University of California - Santa Barbara. (Credit: George Foulsham, Office of Public Affairs, UCSB)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 13, 2009) — Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have devised a new type of superconducting circuit that behaves quantum mechanically – but has up to five levels of energy instead of the usual two. The findings are published in the August 7 issue of Science.

These circuits act like artificial atoms in that they can only gain or lose energy in packets, or quanta, by jumping between discrete energy levels. "In our previous work, we focused on systems with just two energy levels, 'qubits,' because they are the quantum analog of 'bits,' which have two states, on and off," said Matthew Neeley, first author and a graduate student at UCSB.

Read more ....

Integral Disproves Dark Matter Origin For Mystery Radiation

Combining more than 4 years of observations, the inner Galaxy has been mapped in the 511 keV positron annihilation line with unprecedented detail as shown above using the SPI spectrometer. For the first time, positron annihilation is found to be asymmetric in the inner Galactic disk. Consistent with earlier findings, the annihilation emission is brightest around the Galactic centre. In the sky maps, the Galactic centre is at the origin and the Galactic disk runs along the equator. (Credit: ESA/ INTEGRAL/ MPE (G. Weidenspointner et al.))

From Space Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 2, 2009) — A team of researchers working with data from ESA’s Integral gamma-ray observatory has disproved theories that some form of dark matter explains mysterious radiation in the Milky Way.

That this radiation exists has been known since the 1970s, and several theories have been proposed to explain it. Integral’s unprecedented spectral and spatial resolution showed that it strongly peaks towards the centre of the Galaxy, with an asymmetry along the Galactic disc.

Read more ....

Testing Relativity, Black Holes And Strange Attractors In The Laboratory

Through the optical-mechanical analogy, metamaterials and other advanced optical materials can be used to study such celestial phenomena as black holes, strange attractors and gravitational lenses. Here an air-GaInAsP metamaterial mimics a photon-sphere, one of the key black hole phenomena in its interactions with light. (Credit: Xiang Zhang)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 22, 2009) — Even Albert Einstein might have been impressed. His theory of general relativity, which describes how the gravity of a massive object, such as a star, can curve space and time, has been successfully used to predict such astronomical observations as the bending of starlight by the sun, small shifts in the orbit of the planet Mercury and the phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Now, however, it may soon be possible to study the effects of general relativity in bench-top laboratory experiments.

Read more ....

Work Begins On World's Deepest Underground Lab

From Yahoo News/AP:

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – Far below the Black Hills of South Dakota, crews are building the world's deepest underground science lab at a depth equivalent to more than six Empire State buildings — a place uniquely suited to scientists' quest for mysterious particles known as dark matter.

Scientists, politicians and other officials gathered Monday for a groundbreaking of sorts at a lab 4,850 foot below the surface of an old gold mine that was once the site of Nobel Prize-winning physics research.

Read more ....

Planck: The Future Of Probing The Past

Photo: The Planck satellite will enable us to find out what happened just fractions of a second after the big bang (Image: Plnck / LBNL / SSC)

From The New Scientist:

WE ARE poised to peer further back in time than ever before. Next week, cosmology's biggest experiment in nearly a decade is due to blast into space. The European Space Agency's Planck satellite will enable us to find out what happened just fractions of a second after the big bang, when the universe is thought to have blown up to cosmic proportions from a speck of space-time.

The probe, which is fuelled and ready for launch in French Guiana, will examine in exquisite detail the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the relic radiation of the big bang. It is "like a surgical instrument", says Andrei Linde of Stanford University.

Read more ....

World First For Strange Molecule

From The BBC:

A molecule that until now existed only in theory has finally been made.

Known as a Rydberg molecule, it is formed through an elusive and extremely weak chemical bond between two atoms.

The new type of bonding, reported in Nature, occurs because one of the two atoms in the molecule has an electron very far from its nucleus or centre.

It reinforces fundamental quantum theories, developed by Nobel prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi, about how electrons behave and interact.

Read more ....

Discover Interview The Man Who Found Quarks And Made Sense Of The Universe

From Discover Magazine:

Murray Gell-Mann had a smash success with particles, notorious dustups with Feynman, and a missed opportunity with Einstein.

It is no accident that the quark—the building block of protons and neutrons and, by extension, of you and everything around you—has such a strange and charming name. The physicist who discovered it, Murray Gell-Mann, loves words as much as he loves physics. He is known to correct a stranger’s pronunciation of his or her own last name (which doesn’t always go over well) and is more than happy to give names to objects or ideas that do not have one yet. Thus came the word quark for his most famous discovery. It sounds like “kwork” and got its spelling from a whimsical poem in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. This highly scientific term is clever and jokey and gruff all at once, much like the man who coined it.

Read more ....

Next-Gen Atom Smashers: Smaller, Cheaper and Super Powerful

From Wired News:

Size matters in particle physics: The bigger the machine, the more violently physicists can smash atoms together and break open the deepest mysteries of the subatomic world. But a revolutionary new technology could eventually render some gargantuan particle accelerators passé.

Using simulations, a team of German and Russian physicists have pioneered a new technique for particle acceleration, called proton-driven plasma-wakefield acceleration (PWFA). The technique may one day allow machines a fraction of the size of today's accelerators to create the highest-energy particles ever.

Read more ....

Mysterious Dark Matter Possibly Detected

The Resurs DK-1 spacecraft, which houses the PAMELA experiment, during a test before its June 2006 launch. Credit: Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics

From Live Science:

When dark matter is destroyed, it leaves behind a burst of exotic particles, according to theory. Now scientists have found a possible signature of these remains. The discovery could help prove the existence of dark matter and reveal what it's made of.

No one knows what dark matter is, but scientists think it exists because there is not enough gravity from visible matter to explain how galaxies rotate.

Read more ....

Discover Interview The Man Who Found Quarks And Made Sense Of The Universe

From The Discover Magazine:

Murray Gell-Mann had a smash success with particles, notorious dustups with Feynman, and a missed opportunity with Einstein.

It is no accident that the quark—the building block of protons and neutrons and, by extension, of you and everything around you—has such a strange and charming name. The physicist who discovered it, Murray Gell-Mann, loves words as much as he loves physics. He is known to correct a stranger’s pronunciation of his or her own last name (which doesn’t always go over well) and is more than happy to give names to objects or ideas that do not have one yet. Thus came the word quark for his most famous discovery. It sounds like “kwork” and got its spelling from a whimsical poem in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. This highly scientific term is clever and jokey and gruff all at once, much like the man who coined it.

Read more ....

Strange Particle Created; May Rewrite How Matter's Made

A particle detector as big as a three-story house records the "debris" emerging from high-energy proton-antiproton collisions in the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Data from such detectors revealed an unexpected new subatomic particle that may break all known rules governing how matter is created, scientists said in March 2009. Image courtesy Fermilab

From National Geographic:

An unexpected new subatomic particle has been discovered in Illinois's Fermilab atom smasher, scientists announced this week.

The new particle may break all known rules for creating matter, say the researchers who created the oddity.

Y(4140)—as the new particle has been dubbed—couldn't have formed through either of the two known models for matter creation. Researchers aren't even sure what Y(4140) is made of.

It's long been accepted that six different "flavors" of particles called quarks combine to form larger subatomic particles.

In one method, a quark pairs with one of its opposites, an antiquark, to create a type of matter called a meson. In the second method, three quarks gather to form baryons, such as protons and neutrons.

Read more ....

Metamaterial Revolution: The New Science of Making Anything Disappear

A metamaterial sends rays of light cascading around a ball, rendering it invisible,
in this schematic. David Schurg

From Discover:

Engineers are working with metamaterials to create super-microscopes, optical computers, and yes, invisibility cloaks

Xiang Zhang remembers the day he recognized that something extraordinary was happening around him. It was in 2000, at a workshop organized by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to explore a tantalizing idea: that radical new kinds of engineered materials might enable us to extend our control over matter in seemingly magical ways.

Read more ....