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Archive for the ‘particle physics’ category: Page 189

Apr 14, 2022

Quantum approximate optimization algorithm can be implemented using Rydberg atoms

Posted by in categories: computing, information science, particle physics, quantum physics

Existing quantum devices can actually do things that we cannot compute with classical computers. The question is only can we harness this computational power that is apparently there,” van Bijnen says. “Maybe doing arbitrary computational problems is a bit much to ask, so we are now looking at whether we can match problems well to available quantum hardware.” Many current experiments involving Rydberg atoms would likely not require any radical changes in instrumentation that is already being used, he adds.

Apr 13, 2022

Particle physics could be rewritten after shock W boson measurement

Posted by in category: particle physics

A new measurement of a fundamental particle called the W boson appears to defy the standard model of particle physics, our current understanding of how the basic building blocks of the universe interact. The result, which was a decade in the making, will be heavily scrutinised, but if it holds true, it could lead to entirely new theories of physics.

“It would be the biggest discovery since, well, since the start of the standard model 60 years ago,” says Martijn Mulders at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, who has written a commentary on the result for the journal Science.

The standard model describes three distinct forces: electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. Particles called bosons serve as mediators for these forces between particles of matter. The weak force, which is responsible for radioactive decay, uses the W boson as one of its messengers.

Apr 12, 2022

Towards The Cybernetic Theory of Mind | Part V of Consciousness: Evolution of the Mind Documentary

Posted by in categories: education, evolution, information science, neuroscience, particle physics, quantum physics

Watch the full documentary on TUBI (free w/ads):
https://tubitv.com/movies/613341/consciousness-evolution-of-the-mind.

IMDb-accredited film, rated TV-PG
Director: Alex Vikoulov.
Narrator: Forrest Hansen.
Copyright © 2021 Ecstadelic Media Group, Burlingame, California, USA

Continue reading “Towards The Cybernetic Theory of Mind | Part V of Consciousness: Evolution of the Mind Documentary” »

Apr 11, 2022

No small measure: Probing the mechanics of gold contacts at the nanoscale

Posted by in categories: nanotechnology, particle physics, quantum physics

Miniaturization lies at the heart of countless technological advances. It is undeniable that as devices and their building blocks get smaller, we manage to unlock new functionalities and come up with unprecedented applications. However, with more and more scientists delving into materials with structures on the atomic scale, the gaps in our current understanding of nanomaterial physics are becoming more prominent.

For instance, the nanomaterial’s surface represents one such knowledge gap. This is because the influence of surface quantum effects becomes much more apparent when the surface-to-volume ratio of a material is high. In nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), a current hot topic in research, the physical properties of the nanomaterials greatly differ from their bulk counterparts when their size is reduced to a few atoms. A solid understanding of the mechanical properties of nanowires and nanocontacts—integral components of NEMS—is essential for advancing this technology. But, measuring them has proven a challenging task.

Against this backdrop, a research team from Japan recently achieved an unprecedented feat when they managed to precisely measure the elastic modulus of gold nanocontacts stretched down to a few atoms. The study, published in Physical Review Letters, was led by Prof. Yoshifumi Oshima of Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST). The rest of the team included post-doctoral research fellow Jiaqi Zhang and Professor Masahiko Tomitori from JAIST, and Professor Toyoko Arai of Kanazawa University.

Apr 10, 2022

Dark matter could be a cosmic relic from extra dimensions

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

But these particles would interact only weakly with ordinary matter, and only via the force of gravity. This description is eerily similar to what we know about dark matter, which does not interact with light yet has a gravitational influence felt everywhere in the universe. This gravitational influence, for instance, is what prevents galaxies from flying apart.

“The main advantage of massive gravitons as dark matter particles is that they only interact gravitationally, hence they can escape attempts to detect their presence,” Cacciapaglia said.

In contrast, other proposed dark matter candidates — such as weakly interacting massive particles, axions and neutrinos — might also be felt by their very subtle interactions with other forces and fields.

Apr 9, 2022

Scientists managed to take pure energy and create matter — and new physics

Posted by in category: particle physics

On his 143rd birthday, Inverse celebrates the world’s most iconic physicist — and interrogates the myth of his genius. Welcome to Einstein Week.

Brandenburg is a member of the STAR collaboration, a group of more than 700 scientists from 15 countries who use BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC (pronounced “Rick”), to smash gold nuclei together at 99.995 percent the speed-of-light.

For this experiment, the researchers were more interested in the near misses than the hits. Ultra-high-energy photons encircle the gold nuclei like an aura, and auras collide as nuclei zoom past one another. When photons (particles of light; massless, pure energy) collide, they generate an electron and a positron, its antimatter counterpart — both particles that have a mass. This is known as the Breit-Wheeler Process.

Apr 9, 2022

Fermilab Says Particle Is Heavy Enough to Break the Standard Model

Posted by in categories: cosmology, information science, particle physics, quantum physics

If the W’s excess heft relative to the standard theoretical prediction can be independently confirmed, the finding would imply the existence of undiscovered particles or forces and would bring about the first major rewriting of the laws of quantum physics in half a century.

“This would be a complete change in how we see the world,” potentially even rivaling the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson in significance, said Sven Heinemeyer, a physicist at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid who is not part of CDF. “The Higgs fit well into the previously known picture. This one would be a completely new area to be entered.”

The finding comes at a time when the physics community hungers for flaws in the Standard Model of particle physics, the long-reigning set of equations capturing all known particles and forces. The Standard Model is known to be incomplete, leaving various grand mysteries unsolved, such as the nature of dark matter. The CDF collaboration’s strong track record makes their new result a credible threat to the Standard Model.

Apr 9, 2022

Why Scientists Are So Worried About the W Boson Right Now: ‘Something Is Amiss’

Posted by in category: particle physics

And that something could totally change one of the universe’s most fundamental frameworks.

Apr 8, 2022

Researchers at MIT and IBM Propose an Efficient Machine Learning Method That Uses Graph Grammar to Generate New Molecules

Posted by in categories: biological, chemistry, particle physics, robotics/AI

Chemical engineers and materials scientists are continuously looking for the following groundbreaking material, chemical, or medication. The emergence of machine-learning technologies has accelerated the discovery process, which may typically take years. Ideally, the objective is to train a machine-learning model on a few known chemical samples and then let it build as many manufacturable molecules of the same class with predictable physical attributes as feasible. You can develop new molecules with ideal characteristics if you have all of these components and the know-how to synthesize them.

However, current approaches need large datasets for training models. Many class-specific chemical databases only contain a few example compounds, restricting their capacity to generalize and construct biological molecules that might be generated in the real world.

This issue was addressed by a team of researchers from MIT and IBM by employing a generative graph model to create new synthesizable compounds within the same training data’s chemical class. The research was presented in a research paper. They model the production of atoms and chemical bonds as a graph and create a graph grammar — a linguistic analog of systems and structures for word ordering — that provides a set of rules for constructing compounds like monomers and polymers.

Apr 8, 2022

CDF collaboration at Fermilab announces most precise ever measurement of W boson mass to be in tension with the Standard Model

Posted by in categories: nuclear energy, particle physics

The discovery changes our understanding of everything. The world of physics may have been turned on its head.


“While this is an intriguing result, the measurement needs to be confirmed by another experiment before it can be interpreted fully,” said Fermilab Deputy Director Joe Lykken.

The W boson is a messenger particle of the weak nuclear force. It is responsible for the nuclear processes that make the sun shine and particles decay. Using high-energy particle collisions produced by the Tevatron collider at Fermilab, the CDF collaboration collected huge amounts of data containing W bosons from 1985 to 2011.

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