Lifeboat Foundation

:oooo circa 2009.

The portrait of Peter Higgs is on display at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics. Photograph: Ken Currie.

It seems that Peter Higgs, despite his known aversion to publicity is turning up everywhere. Of course the potential discovery of the particle in the next few years by either/both of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the Tevatron at Fermilab is bringing a lot more attention to him, and a little to the other theorists, such as Guralnik, Hagen, Kibble, Brout, and Englert, who also developed the ideas behind a mass-giving spontaneously symmetry broken quantum field and its manifestation as a particle, now known as the Higgs boson. (Yep, that sounds scary because it gets technical.)

Continue reading “Higgs turning up everywhere, this time in paint” »

A dipolar force field propulsion system having a alternating electric field source for producing electromotive lines of force which in a first direction and which vary at a selected and having an electric field of a predetermined magnitude, a source of an alternating magnetic field having magnetic lines of force which in a second direction which is at a predetermined angle to the first direction of the electromotive lines of force and which cross and intercept the electromotive line of force at a predetermined location defining a force field region and wherein the of the alternating magnetic field substantially equal to the of the alternating electric field and at a selected in phase angle therewith and wherein the magnetic field has a flux which when multiplied times the selected is less than a known characteristic field ionization limit; a source of neutral particles of matter having a selected dipole characteristic and having a known characteristic field ionization limit which is greater than the magnitude of the electric field and wherein the dipoles of the particles of matter are capable of being driven into cyclic rotation at the selected by the electric field to produce a reactive thrust, a vaporizing stage which vaporizes said particles of matter into a gaseous state at a selected temperature, and a transporting system for transporting the vaporized particles of matter into the force field defined by the crossing electromotive lines of force and the magnetic lines of force.

Sometimes, two dimensions are better than three.

In the three-dimensional world we live in, there are two classes of elementary particles: bosons and fermions. But in two dimensions, theoretical physicists predict, there’s another option: anyons. Now, scientists report new evidence that anyons exist and that they behave unlike any known particle. Using a tiny “collider,” researchers flung presumed anyons at one another to help confirm their identities, physicists report in the April 10 Science.

All known elementary particles can be classified either fermions or bosons. Electrons, for example, are fermions. Bosons include photons, which are particles of light, and the famed Higgs boson, which explains how particles get mass (SN: 7/4/12). The two classes behave differently: Fermions are loners and avoid one another, while bosons can clump together.

Materials scientists at Duke University have shown the first clear example that a material’s transition into a magnet can control instabilities in its crystalline structure that cause it to change from a conductor to an insulator.

If researchers can learn to control this unique connection between physical properties identified in hexagonal iron sulfide, it could enable new technologies such as spintronic computing. The results appear April 13 in the journal Nature Physics.

Commonly known as troilite, hexagonal iron sulfide can be found natively on Earth but is more abundant in meteorites, particularly those originating from the Moon and Mars. Rarely encountered in the Earth’s crust, most troilite on Earth is believed to have originated from space.

:oooo.

Past cosmological and astrophysical observations suggest that over one quarter of the universe’s energy density is made up of a non-conventional type of matter known as dark matter. This type of matter is believed to be composed of particles that do not absorb, emit or reflect light, and thus cannot be observed directly using conventional detection methods.

Researchers worldwide have carried out studies aimed at detecting dark matter in the universe, yet so far, none of them has been successful. Even the preferred candidate for dark matter, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), have not yet been observed experimentally.

Continue reading “Research identifies detection constraints for dark photons” »

O.,o wut!

A key signal for a certain kind of dark matter failed to turn up in a search throughout the Milky Way. Now scientists are disagreeing about what that means.

Nowadays, artificial neural networks have an impact on many areas of our day-to-day lives. They are used for a wide variety of complex tasks, such as driving cars, performing speech recognition (for example, Siri, Cortana, Alexa), suggesting shopping items and trends, or improving visual effects in movies (e.g., animated characters such as Thanos from the movie Infinity War by Marvel).

Traditionally, algorithms are handcrafted to solve complex tasks. This requires experts to spend a significant amount of time to identify the optimal strategies for various situations. Artificial neural networks — inspired by interconnected neurons in the brain — can automatically learn from data a close-to-optimal solution for the given objective. Often, the automated learning or “training” required to obtain these solutions is “supervised” through the use of supplementary information provided by an expert. Other approaches are “unsupervised” and can identify patterns in the data. The mathematical theory behind artificial neural networks has evolved over several decades, yet only recently have we developed our understanding of how to train them efficiently. The required calculations are very similar to those performed by standard video graphics cards (that contain a graphics processing unit or GPU) when rendering three-dimensional scenes in video games.

Circa 2011 essentially a magnet could be a battery and cpu and a gpu with magnonics.

Harvard physicists have expanded the possibilities for quantum engineering of novel materials such as high-temperature superconductors by coaxing ultracold atoms trapped in an optical lattice — a light crystal — to self-organize into a magnet, using only the minute disturbances resulting from quantum mechanics. The research, published in the journal Nature, is the first demonstration of such a “quantum magnet” in an optical lattice.

As modern technology depends more and more on materials with exotic quantum mechanical properties, researchers are coming up against a natural barrier.

Continue reading “The ‘quantum magnet’” »

Synthetic microparticles more intricate than some of the most complicated ones found in nature have been produced by a University of Michigan-led international team. They also investigated how that intricacy arises and devised a way to measure it.

The findings pave the way for more stable fluid-and-particle mixes, such as paints, and new ways to twist light—a prerequisite for holographic projectors.

The particles are composed of twisted spikes arranged into a ball a few microns, or millionths of a meter, across.