Physics News and Discussions

weatheriscool
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Physicists Use Quantum Mechanics to Pull Energy out of Nothing
For their latest magic trick, physicists have done the quantum equivalent of conjuring energy out of thin air. It’s a feat that seems to fly in the face of physical law and common sense. “You can’t extract energy directly from the vacuum because there’s nothing there to give,” said William Unruh, a theoretical physicist at the University of British Columbia, describing the standard way of thinking. But 15 years ago, Masahiro Hotta, a theoretical physicist at Tohoku University in Japan, proposed that perhaps the vacuum could, in fact, be coaxed into giving something up.

At first, many researchers ignored this work, suspicious that pulling energy from the vacuum was implausible, at best. Those who took a closer look, however, realized that Hotta was suggesting a subtly different quantum stunt. The energy wasn’t free; it had to be unlocked using knowledge purchased with energy in a far-off location. From this perspective, Hotta’s procedure looked less like creation and more like teleportation of energy from one place to another — a strange but less offensive idea.

“That was a real surprise,” said Unruh, who has collaborated with Hotta but has not been involved in energy teleportation research. “It’s a really neat result that he discovered.” Now in the past year, researchers have teleported energy across microscopic distances in two separate quantum devices, vindicating Hotta’s theory. The research leaves little room for doubt that energy teleportation is a genuine quantum phenomenon. “This really does test it,” said Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the research. “You are actually teleporting. You are extracting energy.”
more... https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicis ... -20230222/
weatheriscool
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Scientists Levitate a Glass Nanosphere, Controlling Quantum State for an Object for the First Time
Guardian mag February 27, 2023
https://www.guardianmag.us/2023/02/scie ... phere.html

Quantum mechanics deals with the behavior of the Universe at the super-small scale: atoms and subatomic particles that operate in ways that classical physics can't explain.

In order to explore this tension between the quantum and the classical, scientists are constantly attempting to get larger and larger objects to behave in a quantum-like way.

Back in 2021, a team succeeded with a tiny glass nanosphere that was 100 nanometers in diameter – about a thousand times smaller than the thickness of a human hair.

To our minds that's very, very small, but in terms of quantum physics, it's actually rather huge, made of up to 10 million atoms.

Pushing such a nanosphere into the realm of quantum mechanics was a huge achievement. Using carefully calibrated laser lights, the nanosphere was suspended in its lowest quantum mechanical state, one of extremely limited motion where quantum behavior can start to happen.

"This is the first time that such a method has been used to control the quantum state of a macroscopic object in free space," said Lukas Novotny, a professor of photonics from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, back in July 2021.

To achieve quantum states, movement and energy must be dialed right down. Novotny and his colleagues used a vacuum container cooled down to -269 degrees Celsius (-452 degrees Fahrenheit) before using a feedback system to make further adjustments.
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caltrek
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Yes, Everything in Physics Is Completely Made Up – That’s the Whole Point
Dr. Katie Mack
March 3, 2023

Extract::
(Science Focus) Researching a cosmic mystery like dark matter has its downsides. On the one hand, it’s exciting to be on the road to what might be a profound scientific discovery. On the other hand, it’s hard to convince people it’s worth studying something that’s invisible, untouchable, and apparently made of something entirely unknown.

While the vast majority of physicists find the evidence for dark matter’s existence convincing, some continue to examine alternatives, and the views in the press and the public are significantly more divided. The most common response I get when I talk about dark matter is: “isn’t this just something physicists made up to make the math work out?”

The answer to that might surprise you: yes! In fact, everything in physics is made up to make the math work out

…physics isn’t built around ultimate truth, but rather the constant production and refinement of mathematical approximations. It’s not just because we’ll never have perfect precision in our observations. It’s that, fundamentally, the entire point of physics is to create a model universe in math - a set of equations that remain true when we plug in numbers from observations of physical phenomena.

It may be that in the future, we find some solution that we prefer to a wavefunction and we abandon that concept altogether. But if we do, it will be because the math stopped working out: we’ll have some experimental or observational result that doesn’t add up when we put the data into our current equations. Then, if we’re doing our jobs right, we’ll find a new set of equations that better describe the electron’s behaviour, and we’ll give those equations names and conceptual analogies and textbooks will be written saying “this is what’s really happening.”
Read more here: https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/ever ... et-newtab
Don't mourn, organize.

-Joe Hill
weatheriscool
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Counterportation': Quantum breakthrough paves way for world-first experimental wormhole
https://phys.org/news/2023-03-counterpo ... first.html
by University of Bristol
One of the first practical applications of the much-hyped but little-used quantum computing technology is now within reach, thanks to a unique approach that sidesteps the major problem of scaling up such prototypes.

The invention, by a University of Bristol physicist, who gave it the name "counterportation," provides the first-ever practical blueprint for creating in the lab a wormhole that verifiably bridges space, as a probe into the inner workings of the universe.

By deploying a novel computing scheme, revealed in the journal Quantum Science and Technology, which harnesses the basic laws of physics, a small object can be reconstituted across space without any particles crossing. Among other things, it provides a "smoking gun" for the existence of a physical reality underpinning our most accurate description of the world.
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Team first to detect neutrinos made by a particle collider
https://phys.org/news/2023-03-team-neut ... lider.html
by University of California, Irvine

In a scientific first, a team led by physicists at the University of California, Irvine has detected neutrinos created by a particle collider. The discovery promises to deepen scientists' understanding of the subatomic particles, which were first spotted in 1956 and play a key role in the process that makes stars burn.

The work could also shed light on cosmic neutrinos that travel large distances and collide with the Earth, providing a window on distant parts of the universe.

It's the latest result from the Forward Search Experiment, or FASER, a particle detector designed and built by an international group of physicists and installed at CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. There, FASER detects particles produced by CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

"We've discovered neutrinos from a brand-new source—particle colliders—where you have two beams of particles smash together at extremely high energy," said UC Irvine particle physicist and FASER Collaboration Co-Spokesman Jonathan Feng, who initiated the project, which involves over 80 researchers at UCI and 21 partner institutions.

Brian Petersen, a particle physicist at CERN, announced the results Sunday on behalf of FASER at the 57th Rencontres de Moriond Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories conference in Italy.
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ATLAS and CMS observe simultaneous production of four top quarks
https://phys.org/news/2023-03-atlas-cms ... uarks.html
by Naomi Dinmore, CERN
Today, at the Moriond conference, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations have both presented the observation of a very rare process: the simultaneous production of four top quarks. They were observed using data from collisions during Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Both experiments' results pass the required five-sigma statistical significance to count as an observation—ATLAS's observation with 6.1 sigma, higher than the expected significance of 4.3 sigma, and CMS's observation with 5.5 sigma, higher than the expected 4.9 sigma—making them the first observations of this process.

The top quark is the heaviest particle in the Standard Model, meaning it is the particle with the strongest ties to the Higgs boson. This makes top quarks ideal for looking for signs of physics beyond the Standard Model.

There are a variety of ways to produce a top quark. Most commonly, they are observed in quark and antiquark pairs, and occasionally on their own. According to Standard Model theory, four top quarks—consisting of two top quark–antiquark pairs—can be produced simultaneously.
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Scientists Levitate a Glass Nanosphere, Controlling Quantum State for an Object for the First Time
Guardian mag February 27, 2023
https://www.guardianmag.us/2023/02/scie ... phere.html


Quantum mechanics deals with the behavior of the Universe at the super-small scale: atoms and subatomic particles that operate in ways that classical physics can't explain.

In order to explore this tension between the quantum and the classical, scientists are constantly attempting to get larger and larger objects to behave in a quantum-like way.

Back in 2021, a team succeeded with a tiny glass nanosphere that was 100 nanometers in diameter – about a thousand times smaller than the thickness of a human hair.

To our minds that's very, very small, but in terms of quantum physics, it's actually rather huge, made of up to 10 million atoms.

Pushing such a nanosphere into the realm of quantum mechanics was a huge achievement. Using carefully calibrated laser lights, the nanosphere was suspended in its lowest quantum mechanical state, one of extremely limited motion where quantum behavior can start to happen.

"This is the first time that such a method has been used to control the quantum state of a macroscopic object in free space," said Lukas Novotny, a professor of photonics from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, back in July 2021.
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A robust quantum memory that stores information in a trapped-ion quantum network
https://phys.org/news/2023-03-robust-qu ... twork.html
by Ingrid Fadelli , Phys.org
Researchers at University of Oxford have recently created a quantum memory within a trapped-ion quantum network node. Their unique memory design, introduced in a paper in Physical Review Letters, has been found to be extremely robust, meaning that it could store information for long periods of time despite ongoing network activity.

"We are building a network of quantum computers, which use trapped ions to store and process quantum information," Peter Drmota, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. "To connect quantum processing devices, we use single photons emitted from a single atomic ion and utilize quantum entanglement between this ion and the photons."

Trapped ions, charged atomic particles that are confined in space using electromagnetic fields, are a commonly used platform for realizing quantum computations. Photons (i.e., the particles of light), on the other hand, are generally used to transmit quantum information between distant nodes. Drmota and his colleagues have been exploring the possibility of combining trapped ions with photons, to create more powerful quantum technologies.

"Until now, we have implemented a reliable way of interfacing strontium ions and photons, and used this to generate high-quality remote entanglement between two distant network nodes," Drmota said. "On the other hand, high-fidelity quantum logic and long-lasting memories have been developed for calcium ions. In this experiment, we combine these capabilities for the first time, and show that it is possible to create high-quality entanglement between a strontium ion and a photon and thereafter store this entanglement in a nearby calcium ion."

Integrating a quantum memory into a network node is a challenging task, as the criteria that need to be fulfilled for such a system to work are higher than those required for the creation of a standalone quantum processor. Most notably, the developed memory would need to be robust against concurrent network activity.
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Experiment finds gluon mass in the proton
https://phys.org/news/2023-03-gluon-mass-proton.html
by Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
Nuclear physicists may have finally pinpointed where in the proton a large fraction of its mass resides. A recent experiment carried out at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility has revealed the radius of the proton's mass that is generated by the strong force as it glues together the proton's building block quarks. The result was recently published in Nature.

One of the biggest mysteries of the proton is the origin of its mass. It turns out that the proton's measured mass doesn't just come from its physical building blocks, its three so-called valence quarks.

"If you add up the Standard Model masses of the quarks in a proton, you only get a small fraction of the proton's mass," explained experiment co-spokesperson Sylvester Joosten, an experimental physicist at DOE's Argonne National Laboratory.

Over the last few decades, nuclear physicists have tentatively pieced together that the proton's mass comes from several sources. First, it gets some mass from the masses of its quarks, and some more from their movements. Next, it gets mass from the strong force energy that glues those quarks together, with this force manifesting as "gluons." Lastly, it gets mass from the dynamic interactions of the proton's quarks and gluons.

This new measurement may have finally shed some light on the mass that is generated by the proton's gluons by pinpointing the location of the matter generated by these gluons. The radius of this core of matter was found to reside at the center of the proton. The result also seems to indicate that this core has a different size than the proton's well-measured charge radius, a quantity that is often used as a proxy for the proton's size.

"The radius of this mass structure is smaller than the charge radius, and so it kind of gives us a sense of the hierarchy of the mass versus the charge structure of the nucleon," said experiment co-spokesperson Mark Jones, Jefferson Lab's Halls A&C leader.
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Absolute Zero Is Attainable? Scientists Have Found a Quantum Formulation for the Third Law of Thermodynamics

https://scitechdaily.com/absolute-zero- ... odynamics/
By Vienna University of Technology April 6, 2023
Quantum Complexity Absolute Zero

Erasing data perfectly and attaining the lowest possible temperature may appear unrelated, but they share a strong connection. Researchers at TU Wien have discovered a quantum formulation for the third law of thermodynamics.

The temperature of absolute zero, which is the lowest temperature possible, is -273.15 degrees Celsius. However, it is impossible to reach this temperature as objects can only get close to it. This concept is known as the third law of thermodynamics.

A group of researchers at TU Wien (Vienna) has recently explored the compatibility of the third law of thermodynamics with the principles of quantum physics. They successfully formulated a “quantum version” of this law, which posits that reaching absolute zero is theoretically possible. However, any viable method for achieving this requires three components: energy, time, and complexity. Absolute zero can only be attained if one of these elements is available in infinite supply.
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