Researchers have captured the signal of neutrinos from a nuclear reactor using a water-filled neutrino detector, a first for such a device.
Category: particle physics – Page 145
Microwaves unlock power of uncontrollable diamond qubits in quantum leap
Microwaves can control and stabilize diamond qubits, addressing their main challenge:
Researchers from Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have devised a method to precisely control diamond qubits using microwaves.
In case you’re wondering what is a diamond qubit, here’s a simple explanation —When a tin atom replaces a carbon atom in a diamond lattice, it leads to the creation of tin vacancy (SnV) centers.
The SnV centers are defects with exceptional optical and electronic properties, and therefore they can be used as qubits. Since these qubits result from defects in diamond lattices, they are called diamond qubits.
Is India at risk? NASA predicts strongest solar storm in seven years will hit Earth; Here’s what you should know!
Solar storms, characterized by sudden explosions of particles, energy, and magnetic fields from the Sun, can create disruptions in Earth’s magnetosphere. As told to NDTV, Dr. Annapurni Subramanian, Director of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, stated, “The (solar) flare which occurred a few days ago is similar in terms of strength to the one which occurred in May.” These flares are known to produce geomagnetic storms that can result in radio blackouts and power outages on Earth.
Recent NDTV reports highlight a series of powerful solar flares emitted by the Sun, including an X7.1 flare on October 1 and an even stronger X9.0 flare on October 3. NASA captured these flares using its Solar Dynamics Observatory, emphasizing their potential to disrupt communication systems. NOAA classified the X9.0 flare as an R3-strength flare, indicating a “strong” potential for radio blackouts.
Antimatter Could Be the Key to Solving the Universe’s Biggest Mysteries
The hunt for dark matter has long been one of the most compelling challenges in physics, with new candidates emerging from cutting-edge research in cosmic-ray propagation and particle detection.
Two new studies highlight the enigmatic nature of antimatter, revealing its potential role in both understanding the universe’s origins and unlocking the secrets of particle physics.
Neutron Star Collisions: Unmasking the Ghosts of Gravity
Scientists are using advanced simulations to explore the aftermath of neutron star collisions, where remnants might form and avoid collapsing into black holes.
This research not only sheds light on the dynamics and cooling of these remnants through neutrino emissions but also provides crucial insights into the behavior of nuclear matter under extreme conditions. The findings contribute to our understanding of astronomical events and the conditions that may or may not lead to black hole formation.
Mysterious aftermath of neutron star collisions.
Hosting the Universe in a Quantum Computer: Scientists Simulate Cosmological Particle Creation
The foundation of this simulation, as described by the team, is a well-known cosmological model that describes the universe as expanding uniformly over time. The researchers modeled how a quantum field, initially in a vacuum state (meaning no particles are present), responds to this expansion. As spacetime stretches, the field’s oscillations mix in a process that can create particles where none previously existed. This phenomenon is captured by a transformation that relates the field’s behavior before and after the universe expands, showing how vibrations at different momenta become entangled, leading to particle creation.
To understand how many particles are generated, the researchers used a mathematical tool called the Bogoliubov transformation. This approach describes how the field’s vacuum state evolves into a state where particles can be detected. As the expansion rate increases, more particles are produced, aligning with predictions from quantum field theory. By running this simulation on IBM quantum computers, the team was able to estimate the number of particles created and observe how the quantum field behaves during the universe’s expansion, offering a new way to explore complex cosmological phenomena.
According to the team, the most notable result of the study was the ability to estimate the number of particles created as a function of the expansion rate of the universe. By running their quantum circuit on both simulators and IBM’s 127-qubit Eagle quantum processor, the researchers demonstrated that they could successfully simulate particle creation in a cosmological context. While the results were noisy—particularly for low expansion rates—the error mitigation techniques used helped bring the outcomes closer to theoretical predictions.
Unlocking Efficiency: How Ultra-Smooth Surfaces Improve Particle Accelerators
A new toolkit helps monitor and improve the efficiency of superconducting radiofrequency cavities in particle accelerators by ensuring smoother inner surfaces and analyzing impurities in niobium cavities.
Superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) cavities are essential to the function of advanced particle accelerators. They are a key part of the systems that power the electromagnetic fields that accelerate subatomic particles. The efficiency of these cavities is influenced by the cleanliness, shape, and smoothness of their inner surfaces.
Enhancing SRF Cavities with New Toolkits.
Space Emerging from Quantum Mechanics
Planck length and Planck time and quantum foam.
Space Emerging from Quantum.
The other day I was amused to find a quote from Einstein, in 1936, about how hard it would be to quantize gravity: “like an attempt to breathe in empty space.” Eight decades later, I think we can still agree that it’s hard.
So here is a possibility worth considering: rather than quantizing gravity, maybe we should try to gravitize quantum mechanics. Or, more accurately but less evocatively, “find gravity inside quantum mechanics.” Rather than starting with some essentially classical view of gravity and “quantizing” it, we might imagine starting with a quantum view of reality from the start, and find the ordinary three-dimensional space in which we live somehow emerging from quantum information. That’s the project that ChunJun (Charles) Cao, Spyridon (Spiros) Michalakis, and I take a few tentative steps toward in a new paper.
We human beings, even those who have been studying quantum mechanics for a long time, still think in terms of a classical concepts. Positions, momenta, particles, fields, space itself. Quantum mechanics tells a different story. The quantum state of the universe is not a collection of things distributed through space, but something called a wave function. The wave function gives us a way of calculating the outcomes of measurements: whenever we measure an observable quantity like the position or momentum or spin of a particle, the wave function has a value for every possible outcome, and the probability of obtaining that outcome is given by the wave function squared. Indeed, that’s typically how we construct wave functions in practice. Start with some classical-sounding notion like “the position of a particle” or “the amplitude of a field,” and to each possible value we attach a complex number.
