“If you were Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, and you carried a tiny green Jedi master on your back through the jungles of Dagobah for long enough, you could eventually raise your submerged X-wing out of the swamp just by using the Force.”
I remember the time when states of matter were pretty simple: Solid, liquid and gas. Then came plasma state, supercritical fluid, Bose –Einstein condensate and more. Now this list of states of matter has grown by one more, with the surprising discovery of a new state dubbed “dropletons” that shows some similarity to liquids but occur under very unlike circumstances.
The discovery of new state of matter occurred when a team of scientists at the University of Colorado Joint Institute for Lab Astrophysics were concentrating laser light on gallium arsenide (GaAs) to generate excitons.
Excitons are made when a photon strikes a material, mostly a semiconductor. If an electron is knocked loose, or excited, it leaves what is labelled as “electron hole” behind. If the forces of other charges at very close distance keep the electron close enough to the hole in order to feel an attraction, a certain state forms called as an Exciton. Excitons are also called quasiparticles because the holes and electrons act together as if they were like a single particle.
The U.S. military doesn’t just build big, scary tanks and giant warplanes; it’s also interested in teeny, tiny stuff. The Pentagon’s latest research project aims to improve today’s technologies by shrinking them down to microscopic size.
The recently launched Atoms to Product (A2P) program aims to develop atom-size materials to build state-of-the-art military and consumer products. These tiny manufacturing methods would work at scales 100,000 times smaller than those currently being used to build new technologies, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
The tiny, high-tech materials of the future could be used to build things like hummingbird-size drones and super-accurate (and super-small) atomic clocks — two projects already spearheaded by DARPA. [Humanoid Robots to Flying Cars: 10 Coolest DARPA Projects].
The dimensionless aspect, since it has no dimensions, is outside of space and time. This is the key aspect to existence: an aspect outside of space and time perpetually interacting dialectically with an aspect inside space and time. All of the weird and wonderful phenomena of the universe are the products of this ultimate dichotomy.
Does this sound crazy? Then consider the evidence provided by black holes.
The R = 0 Universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
In probability theory, the multi-armed bandit problem (sometimes called the K- or N-armed bandit problem) is a problem in which a gambler at a row of slot machines (sometimes known as “one-armed bandits”) has to decide which machines to play, how many times to play each machine and in which order to play them. When played, each machine provides a random reward from a distribution specific to that machine. The objective of the gambler is to maximize the sum of rewards earned through a sequence of lever pulls.
(Phys.org)—A combined team of researchers from France and Japan has created a decision-making device that is based on basic properties of quantum mechanics. In their paper published in Scientific Reports (and uploaded to the arXiv preprint server), the team describes the idea behind their device and how it works.
Continue reading “Single photon decision-maker solves multi-armed bandit problem” »
One of the most confounding implications of quantum physics is that light can behave as both a particle (photon) and a wave, depending on the nature of the observation. This is called wave-particle duality, and it has been extremely difficult to picture, let alone observe in both stages simultaneously. 
Now, physicists publishing in Nature Communications report that they have been able to capture a photograph of wave/particle duality ‘in action’, so to speak. This TED video explains the nature of the effect:
Right now, the most powerful physics machine ever constructed by man is running at maximum power after a major upgrade that took two years to complete.
And recently, two different experiments reported that they may have discovered a particle that behaves in ways that cannot be explained with any existing physical laws, as Scientific American reports.
Shown below is one of four major detectors that are crucial to the machine’s purpose:
A glitch. Or maybe a need to revise the Standard Model and add some new particles!
Not statistically robust, but present in three different experiments.
China is set to complete the installation of the world’s longest quantum communication network stretching 2,000km (1,240miles) from Beijing to Shanghai by 2016, say scientists leading the project. Quantum communications technology is considered to be “unhackable” and allows data to be transferred at the speed of light.
By 2030, the Chinese network would be extended worldwide, the South China Morning Post reported. It would make the country the first major power to publish a detailed schedule to put the technology into extensive, large-scale use.
The development of quantum communications technology has accelerated in the last five years. The technology works by two people sharing a message which is encrypted by a secret key made up of quantum particles, such as polarized photons. If a third person tries to intercept the photons by copying the secret key as it travels through the network, then the eavesdropper will be revealed by virtue of the laws of quantum mechanics – which dictate that the act of interfering with the network affects the behaviour of the key in an unpredictable manner.
A new experiment provides the most robust proof that quantum mechanics doesn’t follow the rules we take for granted in everyday life.
The dimensionless aspect, since it has no dimensions, is outside of space and time. This is the key aspect to existence: an aspect outside of space and time perpetually interacting dialectically with an aspect inside space and time. All of the weird and wonderful phenomena of the universe are the products of this ultimate dichotomy.
