Very nice.
Many technologies rely upon nanomaterials that can absorb or release atoms quickly and repeatedly. New work by Jennifer Dionne’s research group provides a first look inside these phase-changing nanoparticles, showing how their shape and crystallinity affect their performance for battery applications.
Turning on Quantum properties onto a cup of coffee. First step; should be interesting in what researchers discover especially around teleporting. Imaging you’re Dominos pizza with a teleport hub and customer orders a pizza. No longer need a self driving car, or drone; with this technology Dominos can teleport your hot fresh pizza to your house immediately after it is out of the oven.
Small objects like electrons and atoms behave according to quantum mechanics, with quantum effects like superposition, entanglement and teleportation. One of the most intriguing questions in modern science is if large objects – like a coffee cup — could also show this behavior. Scientists at the TU Delft have taken the next step towards observing quantum effects at everyday temperatures in large objects. They created a highly reflective membrane, visible to the naked eye, that can vibrate with hardly any energy loss at room temperature. The membrane is a promising candidate to research quantum mechanics in large objects.
The team has reported their results in Physical Review Letters.
Swing
Neutron scattering and computational modeling have revealed unique and unexpected behavior of water molecules under extreme confinement that is unmatched by any known gas, liquid or solid states.
In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory describe a new tunneling state of water molecules confined in hexagonal ultra-small channels — 5 angstrom across — of the mineral beryl. An angstrom is 1/10-billionth of a meter, and individual atoms are typically about 1 angstrom in diameter.
The discovery, made possible with experiments at ORNL’s Spallation Neutron Source and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom, demonstrates features of water under ultra confinement in rocks, soil and cell walls, which scientists predict will be of interest across many disciplines.
Interesting — data compression algorithm can be applied to detect Quantum Entanglement.
The next time you archive some files and compress them, you might think about the process a little differently. Researchers at the National University of Singapore have discovered a common compression algorithm can be used to detect quantum entanglement. What makes this discovery so interesting is that it does not rely on heavily on an assumption that the measured particles are independent and identically distributed.
If you measure the property of a particle and then measure the same property of another particle, in classical mechanics there is no reason for them to match but pure chance. In quantum mechanics though, the two particles can be entangled, such that the results will match each other. This follows from Bell’s theorem, which is applied to test if particles are in fact entangled. The catch is that the theorem is derived for testing pairs of particles, but many pairs have to be measured and the probabilities they are entangled calculated. This is where the researchers’ discovery comes into play because instead of calculating probabilities, the measurements can be fed into the open-source Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) to get their normalized compression difference. Compression algorithms work by finding patterns in data and encoding them more efficiently, and in this case they also find correlations from quantum entanglement.
Using a weird phenomenon in which particles of light seem to travel at faster-than-light speeds, scientists have shown that waves of light can seem to travel backward in time.
The new experiment also shows other bizarre effects of light, such as pairs of images forming and annihilating each other.
Taken together, the results finally prove a century-old prediction made by British scientist and polymath Lord Rayleigh. The phenomenon, called time reversal, could allow researchers to develop ultra-high-speed cameras that can peer around corners and see through walls. [In Images: The World’s 11 Most Beautiful Equations].
Welcome to our imaginary existential nightmare…
Stephen Hawking recently discussed black holes and the often contradictory properties associated with them during a lecture at Harvard. The Harvard Gazette said recently that Hawking specifically explained that, if information is really lost in black holes, then we will have been misunderstanding not only black holes, but the science of determinism, for the last 200 years.
Hawking said that particles that fall into a black hole “can’t just emerge when the black hole disappears.” Instead, “the particles that come out of a black hole seem to be completely random and bear no relation to what fell in. It appears that the information about what fell in is lost, apart from the total amount of mass and the amount of rotation.”
To put that more simply, it’s like someone shooting a basketball into a hoop and, instead of the ball coming out of the basket, something totally different comes out. But that’s not what Hawking is concerned about – he’s more concerned with the fact that the basketball – or information – seems to vanish altogether.
Nice
A group of physicists recently built the smallest engine ever created from just a single atom. Like any other engine it converts heat energy into movement — but it does so on a smaller scale than ever seen before. The atom is trapped in a cone of electromagnetic energy and lasers are used to heat it up and cool it down, which causes the atom to move back and forth in the cone like an engine piston.
The scientists from the University of Mainz in Germany who are behind the invention don’t have a particular use in mind for the engine. But it’s a good illustration of how we are increasingly able to replicate the everyday machines we rely on at a tiny scale. This is opening the way for some exciting possibilities in the future, particularly in the use of nanorobots in medicine, that could be sent into the body to release targeted drugs or even fight diseases such as cancer.
Nanotechnology deals with ultra-small objects equivalent to one billionth of a meter in size, which sounds an impossibly tiny scale at which to build machines. But size is relative to how close you are to an object. We can’t see things at the nanoscale with the naked eye, just as we can’t see the outer planets of the solar system. Yet if we zoom in — with a telescope for the planets or a powerful electron microscope for nano-objects — then we change the frame of reference and things look very different.
This series explores an anomaly CERN scientists announced last December at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where protons are smashed together very close to the speed of light. My first installment explained how two detectors observed results at odds with predictions of the Standard Model. In the jargon of the field, they found a “diphoton excess at 750 GeV.” (My first piece explains what that means.)
This might be a very big deal. The Standard Model, which has withstood all experimental challenges for forty years, is our best theory of the fundamental particles that make up the matter and forces we know about. If the anomaly holds up, we will have come face to face with the Standard Model’s limitations.
But that’s a big “if.” The results are too preliminary for us to say anything for sure right now. Fortunately, CERN restarted the LHC experiments this month and is expected to make another announcement this summer. The new data may show that the anomaly was just statistical noise, but whatever happens, there is much to be learned from these efforts to probe the edges of our understanding. We may learn something about Nature, or we may learn that the existing theory has survived yet another test. In either case, by following how science gets done you can see why it is so exciting—the process as well as the results.
One thing about Quntum; nothing ever stays consistent. Why it’s loved & hated by Cyber Security enthusiasts as well as AI engineers.
When water in a pot is slowly heated to the boil, an exciting duel of energies takes place inside the liquid. On the one hand there is the interaction energy that wants to keep the water molecules together because of their mutual attraction. On the other hand, however, the motional energy, which increases due to heating, tries to separate the molecules. Below the boiling point the interaction energy prevails, but as soon as the motional energy wins the water boils and turns into water vapour. This process is also known as a phase transition. In this scenario the interaction only involves water molecules that are in immediate proximity to one another.
An artificial quantum world of atoms and light: Atoms (red) spontaneously arrange themselves in a checkerboard pattern as a result of the complex interplay between short- and long-range interactions. (Visualizations: ETH Zurich / Tobias Donner)
