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Researchers at Columbia Engineering report today that they have developed the first nanomaterial that demonstrates "photon avalanching," a process that is unrivaled in its combination of extreme nonlinear optical behavior and efficiency. The realization of photon avalanching in nanoparticle form opens up a host of sought-after applications, from real-time super-resolution optical microscopy, precise temperature and environmental sensing, and infrared light detection, to optical analog-to-digital conversion and quantum sensing. Avalanching processes—where a cascade of events is triggered by series of small perturbations—are found in a wide range of phenomena beyond snow slides, including the popping of champagne bubbles, nuclear explosions, lasing,...

The largest black holes in the universe... sit at the centers of almost every galaxy in the cosmos. Even the Milky Way has one, a monster at 4 million solar masses, designated as Sagittarius A*. ...[A]s far as we know, the only way to form black holes is through the deaths of massive stars. When they die, they leave behind a black hole a few times more massive than the sun. To get to supergiant status, they have to merge with other black holes and/or consume as much gas as possible, bulking up all those millions of solar masses... Either...

Quantum teleportation is a "disembodied" transfer of quantum states from one location to another. The quantum teleportation of a qubit is achieved using quantum entanglement, in which two or more particles are inextricably linked to each other. If an entangled pair of particles is shared between two separate locations, no matter the distance between them, the encoded information is teleported. In a paper published in PRX Quantum, the team presents for the first time a demonstration of a sustained, long-distance teleportation of qubits made of photons (particles of light) with fidelity greater than 90%. The qubits were teleported over a...

Like all stars, our Sun is powered by the fusion of hydrogen into heavier elements. Nuclear fusion is not only what makes stars shine, it is also a primary source of the chemical elements that make the world around us. Much of our understanding of stellar fusion comes from theoretical models of atomic nuclei, but for our closest star, we also have another source: neutrinos created in the Sun’s core.Whenever atomic nuclei undergo fusion, they produce not only high energy gamma rays but also neutrinos. While the gamma rays heat the Sun’s interior over thousands of years, neutrinos zip out...

Theory was first postulated in 1930s. Scientists this week announced the landmark detection of elusive particles generated from the fusion of hydrogen in the Sun, confirming a nearly-100-year-old theory about the ways in which many stars generate energy. In a paper published in Nature, a team of researchers called the Borexino Collaboration reported detecting the presence of neutrinos produced during the carbon–nitrogen–oxygen cycle of fusion deep within the Sun. The scientists stated that the energy produced in the CNO cycle represents just a small fraction of the total energy output of our Sun, but “in massive stars, this is the...

The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research(KSTAR), a superconducting fusion device also known as the Korean artificial sun, set the new world record as it succeeded in maintaining the high temperature plasma for 20 seconds with an ion temperature over 100 million degrees. To re-create fusion reactions that occur in the sun on Earth, hydrogen isotopes must be placed inside a fusion device like KSTAR to create a plasma state where ions and electrons are separated, and ions must be heated and maintained at high temperatures. So far, there have been other fusion devices that have briefly managed plasma at temperatures...

Black holes are regions of infinite density, known as a singularity. And according to mainstream physics, each of these cosmic matter munchers is fringed by an event horizon –- a boundary where once you fall in, you never come out. But what if some black holes are naked — completely lacking such frontiers? As far as we can tell, singularities are always wrapped in event horizons, but a more detailed look at the math of general relativity suggests that doesn't have to be the case. If such naked black holes dot the universe, new research reveals how we might be...

Embrace the flow, says a duo of mechanical engineers at North Carolina State University—the flow of energy, that is. The mantra you might normally hear from your yoga instructor could be an entirely new way of looking at the universe. 🌌The universe is badass. Let's explore it together. The two theorists, Larry Silverberg and Jeffrey Eischen, suggest that fragments of energy, rather than waves or particles, may be the fundamental building blocks of the universe. The bedrock of their theory is the foundational idea that energy is always flowing through space and time. The authors suggest thinking of energy as...

String theorists are making the case for flipping physics on its head.What if string theorists have been right all along, and black holes are just balls of yarn? These celestial rat kings, scientists say, represent a place where a huge bunch of fundamental strings have tangled together and can’t be extricated. This sounds far out, but we don’t understand a great deal about how black holes work to begin with. Positing a tangled string idea instead doesn’t even require much more of an ideological buy-in. Space.com’s Paul Sutter explains the big mental “tangle” with black holes: “Black holes appear in...

Since 2015, a mysterious purple light in the sky has baffled NASA. The space agency has dubbed the strange light ‘Steve’, but despite having an ordinary name, the light is extremely complex. Now, NASA has shared a stunning photo of Steve and the Milky Way, snapped over Childs Lake, Canada in 2017. The beautiful image was shot by photographer Krista Trinder, and has been featured as NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day. NASA said: “What's creating these long glowing streaks in the sky? No one is sure. “Known as Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancements (STEVEs), these luminous light-purple sky ribbons...

NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU) ===================================================================== Supernovas may have affected the Earth’s climate in the last 40,000 years. Tree-ring data suggests supernovas caused spikes in radiocarbon. Could the next nearby supernova cause a collapse of civilization? ====================================================================== Dendrochronology is a fancy word for tree-ring dating, where the age of a tree can be determined by the number of growth rings across its trunk. But there’s a lot more to learn from looking at a tree’s rings than simply its age. Like fingerprints, tree rings give scientists clues to what the world was like when a tree was alive....

Explanation: Over fifty gravitational wave events have now been detected. These events mark the distant, violent collisions of two black holes, a black hole and a neutron star, or two neutron stars. Most of the 50 events were detected in 2019 by the LIGO gravitational wave detectors in the USA and the VIRGO detector in Europe. In the featured illustration summarizing the masses of the first 50 events, blue dots indicate higher-mass black holes while orange dots denote lower-mass neutron stars. Astrophysicists are currently uncertain, though, about the nature of events marked in white involving masses that appear to be...

Schematic depiction of the asymmetric supercapacitor with the porous COF as the negative electrode shown on the left. Credit: KAUST, Osama Shekhah ========================================================================= Carefully designed covalent organic frameworks could make supercapacitor electrodes that have a greater ability to store electric charge. A porous organic material created at KAUST could significantly improve energy storage and delivery by supercapacitors, which are devices that are able to deliver quick and powerful bursts of energy. Supercapacitors use technology that is significantly different from the reversible chemical reactions used in rechargeable batteries. They store electrical energy by building up a separation of positive and electric...

......................................And that led to a remarkable twist in the story. Because the radiation is highly entangled with the black hole it came from, the quantum computer, too, becomes highly entangled with the hole. Within the simulation, the entanglement translates into a geometric link between the simulated black hole and the original. Put simply, the two are connected by a wormhole. “There’s the physical black hole and then there’s the simulated one in the quantum computer, and there can be a replica wormhole connecting those,” said Douglas Stanford, a theoretical physicist at Stanford and a member of the West Coast team....

For more than two decades, astronomers have been systematically tracing mystery sources of high-energy gamma rays to their sources. One, however, remained stubborn - the brightest unidentified source of gamma rays in the Milky Way. It seemed to be coming from a binary system 2,740 light-years away, but only one of the stars could be found. Now, astronomers have solved the mystery and pinned down that second star by searching gamma-ray data obtained between 2008 and 2018. Together, the two stars constitute one of the weirdest binary systems we've ever seen. "The binary star system and the neutron star at...

To measure small differences in time, you need a really tiny clock, and researchers in Germany have discovered the smallest known clock: a single hydrogen molecule. Using the travel of light across the length of that molecule, those scientists have measured the smallest interval of time ever: 247 zeptoseconds. Don’t know what a “zepto” is? Read on… When a bit of light, called a photon, hits an atom with enough energy, it can kick the electron out of that atom and send it flying. When we carefully set up this situation in a laboratory, we can measure the electron shooting...

The directional coupler with a visible atomic structure is depicted. Spin wave jumps from one nanowire conduit to another nanowire at the point where the conduits are getting closer one to another. Credit: Niels Paul Bethe =========================================================================== Researchers led by Technische Universität Kaiserslautern (TUK) and the University of Vienna successfully constructed a basic building block of computer circuits using magnons to convey information, in place of electrons. The 'magnonic half-adder' described in Nature Electronics, requires just three nanowires, and far less energy than the latest computer chips. A team of physicists are marking a milestone in the quest for smaller...

A phenomenon of quantum mechanics known as superposition can impact timekeeping in high-precision clocks, according to a theoretical study from Dartmouth College, Saint Anselm College and Santa Clara University. Research describing the effect shows that superposition—the ability of an atom to exist in more than one state at the same time—leads to a correction in atomic clocks known as "quantum time dilation." The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, takes into account quantum effects beyond Albert Einstein's theory of relativity to make a new prediction about the nature of time. In the early 1900s, Albert Einstein presented a revolutionary...

As pointed out by Dr. Thomas Horn and “Into the Multiverse” host Josh Peck in the internationally-acclaimed books On The Path Of The Immortals (FREE IN OFFER HERE) and Abaddon Ascending, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) first started up on September 10, 2008, director for research and scientific computing at CERN, Sergio Bertolucci, provoked a whirlwind of speculation with his enigmatic remark that the LHC might open a door to another dimension. During a regular briefing at CERN headquarters, he told reporters, “Out of this door might come something, or we might send something through it.”[i] The notion of...

Fusion power is the technology that is 30 years away, and always will be, according to skeptics, at least. Despite its difficult transition into a reliable power source, the nuclear reactions that power the sun have a wide variety of uses in other fields. The concept fusion drive, called a direct fusion drive (or DFD), is in development at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). Though still under development, the engine itself exploits many of the advantages of aneutronic fusion, most notably an extremely high power-to-weight ratio. The fuel for a DFD drive can vary slightly in mass and contains...