Every second, trillions of neutrinos travel through your body unnoticed. Neutrinos are among the most abundant particles in the universe, but they are difficult to study because they very rarely interact with matter.
By Lori Dajose
15 Apr 2016
Today, people of all backgrounds can contribute to solving serious scientific problems by playing computer games. A Danish research group has extended the limits of quantum physics calculations and simultaneously blurred the boundaries between man and machine further. We are still superior – in some ways. Written by Rasmus Rørbæk
A team of researchers at Princeton University has predicted the existence of a new state of matter in which current flows only through a set of surface channels that resemble an hourglass. These channels are created through the action of a newly theorized particle, dubbed the “hourglass fermion,” which arises due to a special property of the material. The tuning of this property can sequentially create and destroy the hourglass fermions, suggesting a range of potential applications such as efficient transistor switching.
A group of scientists from ITMO University in Saint Petersburg, Russia has developed a novel approach to the construction of quantum communication systems for secure data exchange.
Neutrinos were discovered more than 60 years ago; however, scientists are yet to discover some of their fundamental properties, such as their mass (for which only the upper limit is known; this is around 3.6 x 10-36 kg), or whether neutrinos and antineutrinos are in fact the same particle.
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.
Insights from pure mathematics are lending new insights to material physics, which could aid in development of new devices and sensors. Now an international team of physicists has discovered that applying a magnetic field to a non-magnetic metal made it conduct 70% more electricity, even though basic physics principles would have predicted the opposite.
Physicists from the University of Oregon have merged sound and light to regulate electron states existing in an atom-like system. This new tool can help move towards quantum-computing systems.
Harnessing the power of the sun and creating light-harvesting or light-sensing devices requires a material that both absorbs light efficiently and converts the energy to highly mobile electrical current. Finding the ideal mix of properties in a single material is a challenge, so scientists have been experimenting with ways to combine different materials to create "hybrids" with enhanced features.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used neutrons to uncover novel behavior in materials that holds promise for quantum computing. The findings, published in Nature Materials, provide evidence for long-sought phenomena in a two-dimensional magnet.
Objects of the quantum world are of a concealed and cold-blooded nature: they usually behave in a quantum manner only when they are significantly cooled and isolated from the environment. Experiments carried out by chemists and physicists from Warsaw have destroyed this simple picture. It turns out that not only does one of the most interesting quantum effects occur at room temperature and higher, but it plays a dominant role in the course of chemical reactions in solutions!
Research by the UPV/EHU-University of the Basque Country and DIPC-Donostia International Physics Center has concluded that the quantum effects explain why hydrogen sulphide is a superconductor at record-breaking temperatures
Quantum computers are largely hypothetical devices that could perform some calculations much more rapidly than conventional computers can. They exploit a property called superposition, which describes a quantum particle's counterintuitive ability to, in some sense, inhabit more than one physical state at the same time.
A team of researchers from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo have used a room-temperature diamond quantum memory to transform the bandwidth and color of super-fast single photons.
Summary: New results from NANOGrav – the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves – establish astrophysically significant limits in the search for low-frequency gravitational waves. This result provides insight into how often galaxies merge and how those merging galaxies evolve over time. To obtain this result, scientists required an exquisitely precise, nine-year pulsar-monitoring campaign conducted by two of the most sensitive radio telescopes on Earth, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.