Physics News and Discussions

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Quantum sensor can detect electromagnetic signals of any frequency
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-quantum-s ... uency.html
by David L. Chandler, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Quantum sensors, which detect the most minute variations in magnetic or electrical fields, have enabled precision measurements in materials science and fundamental physics. But these sensors have only been capable of detecting a few specific frequencies of these fields, limiting their usefulness. Now, researchers at MIT have developed a method to enable such sensors to detect any arbitrary frequency, with no loss of their ability to measure nanometer-scale features.

The new method, for which the team has already applied for patent protection, is described in the journal Physical Review X, in a paper by graduate student Guoqing Wang, professor of nuclear science and engineering and of physics Paola Cappellaro, and four others at MIT and Lincoln Laboratory.

Quantum sensors can take many forms; they're essentially systems in which some particles are in such a delicately balanced state that they are affected by even tiny variations in the fields they are exposed to. These can take the form of neutral atoms, trapped ions, and solid-state spins, and research using such sensors has grown rapidly. For example, physicists use them to investigate exotic states of matter, including so-called time crystals and topological phases, while other researchers use them to characterize practical devices such as experimental quantum memory or computation devices. But many other phenomena of interest span a much broader frequency range than today's quantum sensors can detect.
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Chicago Quantum Exchange takes first steps toward a future that could revolutionize computing and medicine

by Robert McCoppin
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-chicago-q ... onize.html
Flashes of what may become a transformative new technology are coursing through a network of optic fibers under Chicago.

Researchers have created one of the world's largest networks for sharing quantum information—a field of science that depends on paradoxes so strange that Albert Einstein didn't believe them.

The network, which connects the University of Chicago with Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, is a rudimentary version of what scientists hope someday to become the internet of the future. For now, it's opened up to businesses and researchers to test fundamentals of quantum information sharing.

The network was announced this week by the Chicago Quantum Exchange—which also involves Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin.
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Physicists reinvestigate nuclear excitation by electron capture using isomer beam
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-physicist ... pture.html
by Zhang Nannan, Chinese Academy of Sciences
A "dark" environment was created at the Radioactive Ion Beam Line in Lanzhou (RIBLL), China, to look for a faint flash of light as evidence of isomer depletion. Such depletion is required to harness nuclear energy stored in long-lived isomeric states through the process of nuclear excitation by electron capture (NEEC).

However, in this independent experiment, evidence of isomer depletion was not observed. Results were published in Physical Review Letters on June 17, with the NEEC probability measured at less than 2×10-5, thus casting doubt on the first reported experimental observation of NEEC in 2018.

Several million electron volts can be stored in one atomic nucleus. Therefore, long-lived isomers with high excitation energies are considered to be ideal energy storage materials, with high energy density, long storage periods, and excellent stability.

Nevertheless, artificially controlling the energy release process is a great challenge. Scientific consensus expects the rapid release of isomeric energy to be achieved by isomer depletion, that is, by exciting the isomer to an adjacent excited state that decays to the ground state immediately. Scientists have proposed several methods, among which NEEC has attracted particular attention.
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Study identifies a tidal disruption event that coincides with the production of a high-energy neutrino
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-tidal-dis ... ction.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Phys.org
High-energy neutrinos are highly fascinating subatomic particles produced when very fast charged particles collide with other particles or photons. IceCube, a renowned neutrino detector located at the South Pole, has been detecting extragalactic high-energy neutrinos for almost a decade.

While many physicists have examined the observations gathered by the IceCube detector, the origin of most of the high-energy neutrinos it detected has not yet been determined. These neutrinos were detected beyond our galaxy and could result from various cosmological events.

Researchers at Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron DESY, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and other academic institutes in Europe and the U.S. have recently carried out a study focusing on a specific violent cosmological event, which is referred to as AT2019fdr. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, shows that this event could be the origin of a high-energy neutrino.

"Our team has been conducting a systematic study for 3 years, where we used the optical survey telescope of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) to scan the sky region of each new high-energy neutrino that we can observe," Simeon Reusch, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. "Our recent paper examines a possible source for one of these neutrinos, a huge optical outburst in a very distant galaxy, which has been called AT2019fdr."
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Keeping the energy in the room
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-energy-room.html
by Harrison Tasoff, University of California - Santa Barbara

It may seem like technology advances year after year, as if by magic. But behind every incremental improvement and breakthrough revolution is a team of scientists and engineers hard at work.

UC Santa Barbara Professor Ben Mazin is developing precision optical sensors for telescopes and observatories. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, he and his team improved the spectra resolution of their superconducting sensor, a major step in their ultimate goal: analyzing the composition of exoplanets.

"We were able to roughly double the spectral resolving power of our detectors," said first author Nicholas Zobrist, a doctoral student in the Mazin Lab.

"This is the largest energy resolution increase we've ever seen," added Mazin. "It opens up a whole new pathway to science goals that we couldn't achieve before."

The Mazin lab works with a type of sensor called an MKID. Most light detectors—like the CMOS sensor in a phone camera—are semiconductors based on silicon. These operate via the photo-electric effect: a photon strikes the sensor, knocking off an electron that can then be detected as a signal suitable for processing by a microprocessor.
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Large Hadron Collider revs up to unprecedented energy level
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-large-had ... ented.html
by Pierre CELERIER
The world's largest and most powerful particle collider started back up in April after a three-year break.

Ten years after it discovered the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is about to start smashing protons together at unprecedented energy levels in its quest to reveal more secrets about how the universe works.

The world's largest and most powerful particle collider started back up in April after a three-year break for upgrades in preparation for its third run.

From Tuesday it will run around the clock for nearly four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced at a press briefing last week.

It will send two beams of protons—particles in the nucleus of an atom—in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light around a 27-kilometer (17-mile) ring buried 100 meters under the Swiss-French border.

The resulting collisions will be recorded and analyzed by thousands of scientists as part of a raft of experiments, including ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb, which will use the enhanced power to probe dark matter, dark energy and other fundamental mysteries.
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ATLAS and CMS release results of most comprehensive studies yet of Higgs boson's properties
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-atlas-cms ... higgs.html
by CERN
Today, exactly ten years after announcing the discovery of the Higgs boson, the international ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) report the results of their most comprehensive studies yet of the properties of this unique particle. The independent studies, described in two papers published today in Nature, show that the particle's properties are remarkably consistent with those of the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. The studies also show that the particle is increasingly becoming a powerful means to search for new, unknown phenomena that—if found—could help shed light on some of the biggest mysteries of physics, such as the nature of the mysterious dark matter present in the universe.

The Higgs boson is the particle manifestation of an all-pervading quantum field, known as the Higgs field, that is fundamental to describe the universe as we know it. Without this field, elementary particles such as the quark constituents of the protons and neutrons of atomic nuclei, as well as the electrons that surround the nuclei, would not have mass, and nor would the heavy particles (W bosons) that carry the charged weak force, which initiates the nuclear reaction that powers the Sun.
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Large Hadron Collider Finds Evidence of 3 Never-Before-Seen Particles
by Alan Boyle
July 6, 2022

Introduction:
(Science Alert) Physicists say they've found evidence in data from Europe's Large Hadron Collider for three never-before-seen combinations of quarks, just as the world's largest particle-smasher is beginning a new round of high-energy experiments.

The three exotic types of particles – which include two four-quark combinations, known as tetraquarks, plus a five-quark unit called a pentaquark – are totally consistent with the Standard Model, the decades-old theory that describes the structure of atoms.

In contrast, scientists hope that the LHC's current run will turn up evidence of physics that goes beyond the Standard Model to explain the nature of mysterious phenomena such as dark matter. Such evidence could point to new arrays of subatomic particles, or even extra dimensions in our Universe.

The LHC had been shut down for three years to upgrade its systems to handle unprecedented energy levels. That shutdown ended in April, and since then, scientists and engineers at the CERN research center on the French-Swiss border have been getting ready for today's resumption of scientific operations.

CERN's control center was abuzz as the LHC began its third run of data collection and analysis.
Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/large-had ... particles
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Study sets new constraints on dark photons using a new dielectric optical haloscope

by Ingrid Fadelli , Phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2022-07-constrain ... tical.html
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Perimeter Institute recently set new constraints on dark photons, which are hypothetical particles and renowned dark matter candidates. Their findings, presented in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, were attained using a new superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD) they developed.

"There's a close collaboration between our research groups at NIST and MIT, run by Dr. Sae Woo Nam and Prof. Karl Berggren, respectively" Jeff Chiles, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. "We work together to advance the technology and applications for ultra-sensitive devices called superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors or SNSPDs. "

Over the past few years, Chiles and his colleagues have been considering potential applications that would benefit from the SNSPD detectors they have been working on, which have virtually no background noise among other advantageous characteristics. They were eventually introduced to a group of theoretical physicists from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada.
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