Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at Purdue University have discovered new waves with picometer-scale spatial variations of electromagnetic fields that can propagate in semiconductors like silicon. The research team, led by Dr. Zubin Jacob, Elmore Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Physics and Astronomy, published their findings in Physical Review Applied in a paper titled “Picophotonics: Anomalous Atomistic Waves in Silicon.”

“The word microscopic has its origins in the length scale of a micron, which is a million times smaller than a meter. Our work is for light matter interaction within the picoscopic regime which is far smaller, where the discrete arrangement of atomic lattices changes light’s properties in surprising ways,” says Jacob.

These intriguing findings demonstrate that natural media host a variety of rich light-matter interaction phenomena at the atomistic level. The use of picophotonic waves in semiconducting materials may lead researchers to design new, functional optical devices, allowing for applications in quantum technologies.

Femtosecond pulsed lasers—which emit light in ultrafast bursts lasting a millionth of a billionth of a second—are powerful tools used in a range of applications from medicine and manufacturing, to sensing and precision measurements of space and time. Today, these lasers are typically expensive table-top systems, which limits their use in applications that have size and power consumption restrictions.

An on-chip femtosecond pulse source would unlock new applications in quantum and optical computing, astronomy, optical communications and beyond. However, it’s been a challenge to integrate tunable and highly efficient pulsed lasers onto chips.

Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a high-performance, on-chip femtosecond pulse source using a tool that seems straight out of science fiction: a time lens.

Their experiment could help to create a unified theory of quantum gravity.

A team of physicists from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands simulated the event horizon of a black hole in a lab and observed the equivalent of an elusive form of radiation first theorized by Stephen Hawking, a report from Science Alert.

The new discovery could help the scientific community develop a whole new theory that marries the general theory of relativity with the principles of quantum mechanics. John/iStock.

Circa 2021 face_with_colon_three

We are finally testing the ideas that quantum collapse in the brain gives rise to consciousness and that consciousness creates the reality we see from the quantum world.

Researchers use lasers to increase or suppress an ion’s quantum characteristics and generate power at microscopic level.

A trip deep into the far future, to the End of Earth.
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For most of human history, the end of Earth, the Universe, and Time itself were all identical, now we know the world will end in 4 billion years, long before the Universe begins to wind down. Today we will ask how we can extend that, and keep Earth around for far longer.

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Continue reading “Civilizations at the End of Time: Dying Earth” »

Researchers control the speed of sound in an ultracold gas, mimicking features of a curved spacetime and reproducing quantum field behavior predicted in early Universe models.

We think of physical reality as what objectively exists, independent of any observer. But relativity and quantum physics say otherwise.

A new kind of black hole analog could tell us a thing or two about an elusive radiation theoretically emitted by the real thing.

Using a chain of atoms in single-file to simulate the event horizon of a black hole, a team of physicists has observed the equivalent of what we call Hawking radiation – particles born from disturbances in the quantum fluctuations caused by the black hole’s break in spacetime.

This, they say, could help resolve the tension between two currently irreconcilable frameworks for describing the Universe: the general theory of relativity, which describes the behavior of gravity as a continuous field known as spacetime; and quantum mechanics, which describes the behavior of discrete particles using the mathematics of probability.