Scientists have built atom-sized pores that act like living ion channels, opening the door to next-generation nanotech.
Category: particle physics – Page 7
Microwave quantum network shows resilience against heat-related disturbances
Quantum communication systems are emerging solutions to transmit information between devices in a network leveraging quantum mechanical phenomena, such as entanglement. Entanglement is a quantum effect that entails a link between two or more particles that share a unified state even at a distance, so that measuring one instantly affects the other.
Like most quantum systems, quantum communication networks are typically highly sensitive to changes and disturbances in the environment, also referred to as noise. Random changes in temperature, as well as random energy caused by heat (i.e., thermal noise), can disrupt the connections in a quantum network, making the reliable transfer of quantum states challenging.
Researchers in Shenzhen, China have demonstrated a quantum network that relies on microwave photons, low-energy light particles and a superconducting transmission line. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, introduces a promising approach to reduce thermal noise in this network, enabling the reliable transmission of quantum states between distant devices.
Scientists discover new heavy proton-like particle at CERN
Scientists from the University of Manchester have played a leading role in the discovery of a new subatomic particle at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The particle, known as the Ξcc ⁺ (Xi‑cc‑plus), is a new type of heavy proton-like particle containing two charm quarks and one down quark.
The result is the first particle discovery made using the upgraded LHCb detector, a major international project involving more than 1,000 scientists across 20 countries. The UK made the largest national contribution to the upgrade, with significant leadership from Manchester.
The newly observed Ξcc ⁺ is a heavier relative of the proton, which was famously discovered in Manchester by Ernest Rutherford and colleagues in 1917–1919. The proton contains two up quarks and a down quark. Details of the Ξcc ⁺ discovery were presented at the Rencontres de Moriond Electroweak conference.
CERN Discovers New Particle After Upgrading Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider has discovered a new particle, the 80th identified so far by the world’s most powerful particle smasher, Europe’s CERN physics laboratory announced Tuesday.
The new particle has been named “Xi-cc-plus”
Scientists hope the particle – which is similar to a proton but four times heavier – will reveal more about the strange behaviour of quantum mechanics.
💡 We talk about the past as if it’s gone forever — erased, unreachable, finished
But according to Richard Feynman and the laws of physics, that intuition is deeply misleading.
At the fundamental level, the equations that describe reality don’t care which way time flows. The same mathematics behind Quantum Electrodynamics — the most precisely tested theory in science — work just as well forward in time as they do backward.
In this video, we explore why the past may not be as “gone” as it feels.
🎥 *In this video, we explore:*
→ Why the laws of physics don’t distinguish past from future
→ How particles can be treated as moving backward in time in calculations
→ What time symmetry really means — and what it doesn’t
→ Why our experience of time is not fundamental
→ How Feynman explained time without mysticism.
This isn’t philosophy or speculation.
This is how physicists actually calculate the universe.
📚 *Based on the work of:*
Nanoengineered spintronic device can store data in four different ways
Over the past decades, electronics engineers have been trying to develop increasingly smaller devices that can store information reliably, even when they are not powered on. A promising type of non-volatile memory device is spintronics, solid-state systems that store and process information leveraging the spin (i.e., an intrinsic form of angular momentum) of electrons.
Researchers at University of Maryland and other institutes recently introduced a new spintronic device based on nanoscale structures based on materials that exhibit ferromagnetism (i.e., a permanent yet switchable magnetic order) and ferroelectricity (i.e., a permanent yet switchable electric polarization). This device, presented in a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, can switch between four stable resistance states and could thus serve as a multistate memory.
The system that was nanoengineered by the researchers combines two different types of devices, known as magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) and ferroelectric tunnel junctions (FTJs). An MTJ consists of two magnetic thin films separated by an insulating thin film, while an FTJ is composed of two different metal electrode layers separated by a thin ferroelectric film. Both these types of devices have proved to be promising information storage solutions.
Perovskite crystals can host qubits, challenging long-held assumptions
For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that the properties of the perovskite family of materials can be used to create so-called quantum bits. The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, pave the way for more affordable materials in future quantum computers.
According to the researchers from Linköping University, Sweden, behind the study, few within the field believed it would be possible. The reason is that the atoms in perovskite materials should, in theory, interact so strongly that the qubit would collapse before the calculation could be completed. However, the experiments conducted by the Linköping team show that it works.
“Our findings open up an entirely new research field,” says Yuttapoom Puttisong, associate professor at Linköping University.
