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“Harnessing the mysterious property that Albert Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’ is a crucial step toward exploiting quantum quirks for technology such as new kinds of sensors or computers,” the physicists said. “Entanglement is not just some academic curiosity; it’s also something you can harness as a basis for doing useful things with quantum mechanics,” Professor Clerk added. Entangled states are typically extremely fragile — especially so when they involve large objects. So Professor Clerk and his colleague, Dr. Matt Woolley from the University of New South Wales, developed a theoretical proposal for how to keep the motion...

Next time you eat a blueberry (or chocolate chip) muffin consider what happened to the blueberries in the batter as it was baked. The blueberries started off all squished together, but as the muffin expanded they started to move away from each other. If you could sit on one blueberry you would see all the others moving away from you, but the same would be true for any blueberry you chose. In this sense galaxies are a lot like blueberries. Since the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding. The strange fact is that there is no single place from...

The knots in question, the researchers wrote in their paper, were visible enough in images of the light wave data for them to identify the figure eights and toruses. ... To create the knots, the researchers carefully tuned the up-and-down and side-to-side wave motion (the polarization) of two beams of light, partly using technology not unlike that found in polarized sunglasses. The knots formed around "polarization singularities" where the beams intersected, places where the side-to-side and up-and-down wavelengths were exactly equal, and a number of other wavelengths of light looped around them. At those points, light bent in the way...

The problem with string theory, according to some physicists, is that it makes too many universes. It predicts not one but some 10500 versions of spacetime, each with their own laws of physics. But with so many universes on the table, how can the theory explain why ours has the features it does? Now some theorists suggest most—if not all—of those universes are actually forbidden, at least if we want them to have stable dark energy, the supposed force accelerating the expansion of the cosmos. To some, eliminating so many possible universes is not a drawback but a major step...

New findings are fueling an old suspicion that fundamental particles and forces spring from strange eight-part numbers called “octonions.” “Octonions are to physics what the Sirens were to Ulysses,” Decades on, no particles beyond those of the Standard Model have been found. Meanwhile, the strange beauty of the octonions has continued to attract the occasional independent-minded researcher, including Furey, the Canadian grad student who visited Günaydin four years ago. Looking like an interplanetary traveler, with choppy silver bangs that taper to a point between piercing blue eyes, Furey scrawled esoteric symbols on a blackboard, trying to explain to Günaydin that...

Our universe's rate of expansion keeps getting stranger. New data continues to show a discrepancy in how fast the universe expands in nearby realms and more distant locations.  The study's researchers said this "tension" could mean we need to revise our understanding of the physics structuring the universe, which could include exotic elements such as dark matter and dark energy. New measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gaia space telescope together showed that the rate of expansion nearby is 45.6 miles per second per megaparsec. This means that for every 3.3 million light-years a galaxy is farther away from...

Do neutron stars contain exotic matter in the form of dense deconfined quark matter? Scientists performed the first accurate determination of the thermodynamic properties of dense quark matter under violent conditions that occur during neutron star mergers, and suggest a step towards distinguishing between neutron and quark matter cores in neutron stars. The recent detection of gravitational waves emitted by two merging black holes by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations has opened up a new observational window into the cosmos. Future observations of similar mergers between two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole may revolutionize what...

It will let researchers study distant energy sources across the universe in "a completely new way" SCIENTISTS have captured a ghost-like subatomic particle on Earth, helping to solve a mystery baffling scientists for 100 years. The so-called "ghost particle" was trapped by researchers in a giant ice cube at the South Pole. It's actually a high-energy neutrino, and is the first of its type ever detected by scientists. Importantly, researchers believe they've tracked its likely source: a supermassive black hole that emits light and cosmic rays. The black hole is roughly four billion light years away, at the centre of...

Today, workers at the world’s largest atom smasher are breaking ground on a performance-enhancing upgrade that will allow scientists to conduct even bigger and better physics experiments. The upgrade will turn the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland into the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC). The upgrade will allow the machine to collide even more particles, potentially helping physicists see new stuff. “The HL-LHC will enable us to do many things, opening many unexplored areas of research,” Rebeca Gonzalez Suarez, a postdoc research associate at CERN, told Gizmodo in an email. The Large Hadron Collider is essentially two 16-mile-round rings...

Currently, the heaviest element on the periodic table is oganesson, which has an atomic mass of 294 and was officially named in 2016. Like every element on the periodic table, nearly all of oganesson's mass comes from protons and neutrons (types of baryons) that are themselves made of three quarks each. A crucial feature of all known baryonic matter is that its quarks are bound together so tightly by the strong force that they are inseparable. As particles made of bound quarks (such as protons and neutrons) are called hadrons, scientists refer to the ground state of baryonic matter as...

The Higgs field is like an endless ocean through which all matter swims. Some particles are like sponges and sop up mass as they lumber along, while others are as sprightly as tiny minnows and dart right through. … "We know that the Higgs interacts with massive force-carrying particles, like the W boson, because that's how we originally discovered it," said scientist Patty McBride ... "Now we're trying to understand its relationship with fermions." Fermions are particles that click together to form the invisible scaffolding inside atoms. Bosons, on the other hand, are the physical manifestation of forces and perform...

The Next Big Discovery in Astronomy? We Probably Found It Years Ago — But Don't Know It Yet By Eileen Meyer, University of Maryland, Baltimore County | June 3, 2018 08:44am ET MORE An artist's illustration of a black hole "eating" a star.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Earlier this year, astronomers stumbled upon a fascinating finding: Thousands of black holes likely exist near the center of our galaxy. The X-ray images that enabled this discovery weren't from some state-of-the-art new telescope. Nor were...

For almost a century, physicists have wondered whether the most counterintuitive predictions of quantum mechanics (QM) could actually be true. Only in recent years has the technology necessary for answering this question become accessible, enabling a string of experimental results—including startling ones reported in 2007 and 2010, and culminating now with a remarkable test reported in May—that show that key predictions of QM are indeed correct. Taken together, these experiments indicate that the everyday world we perceive does not exist until observed, which in turn suggests—as we shall argue in this essay—a primary role for mind in nature. It is...

The laws of physics have won again, it would appear. For the past few years, researchers at NASA's Eagleworks advanced-propulsion lab have been putting a controversial and potentially revolutionary space engine called the EmDrive to the test. The EmDrive, which was originally developed by British scientist Roger Shawyer in the early 2000s, purportedly generates thrust by bouncing microwaves around inside a conical chamber. Because the engine doesn't require any fuel, it could theoretically make spaceflight far cheaper and more efficient, opening the heavens to exploration The EmDrive really shouldn't work. The engine doesn't blast anything out a nozzle, so Newton's...

The Pressure Inside Every Proton is 10x That Inside Neutron Stars Article written: 20 May , 2018 by Matt Williams Neutron stars are famous for combining a very high-density with a very small radius. As the remnants of massive stars that have undergone gravitational collapse, the interior of a neutron star is compressed to the point where they have similar pressure conditions to atomic nuclei. Basically, they become so dense that they experience the same amount of internal pressure as the equivalent of 2.6 to 4.1 quadrillion Suns!In spite of that, neutron stars have nothing on protons, according to a...

A bright, supermassive black hole. Credit: NASA ______________________________________________________________________________ Astronomers at ANU have found the fastest-growing black hole known in the Universe, describing it as a monster that devours a mass equivalent to our sun every two days. The astronomers have looked back more than 12 billion years to the early dark ages of the Universe, when this supermassive black hole was estimated to be the size of about 20 billion suns with a one per cent growth rate every one million years. "This black hole is growing so rapidly that it's shining thousands of times more brightly than an...

For decades, astrophysicists have pondered the odd movements of galaxies across the cosmos. The visible matter of the universe appears to be tugged around by an invisible counterpart, material that does not interact with surrounding matter in any observable way save gravity: dark matter. Refined measurements have since led scientists to hypothesize that 85 percent of all the matter in the universe is dark matter, while only 15 percent accounts for you, me, the planet, the stars, and everything else we can see. It's a satisfactory explanation for our observations that has one major problem: a dark matter particle has...

New insights into the properties of neutron stars have come from two independent analyses of gravitational waves from the GW170817 neutron-star merger. The work was done by teams led by Farrukh Fattoyev at Indiana University Bloomington and Eemeli Annala at the University of Helsinki. The teams used different methods to calculate the relationship between the radius and mass of neutron stars and came up with the same result. In October 2017 the LIGO and Virgo detectors made the first-ever observation of gravitational waves from two neutron stars as they spiralled into each other and then merged to form a black...

Cracks in the universe: the search for cosmic strings Galaxy-sized filaments of raw energy may be threaded through spacetime, according to some theories. Will we ever find traces of them? Cathal O’Connell takes up the hunt. Share Tweet Tatyun / Getty Images Our universe exploded into being, expanded at a fantastic speed and cooled. Perhaps too quickly. Some physicists believe the rapid cooling might have cracked the fabric of the universe.These hairline fractures may still be threaded through space-time. Dubbed cosmic strings, mathematical models see them as invisible threads of pure energy, thinner than an atom but light-years long. The...

A German mathematician, physicist and astronomer, Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss rose from humble origins to become one of the world’s greatest minds. Born in 1777 in Brunswick, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, Gauss was the only child of poor parents who had received little or no formal education. His mother was illiterate. But when Gauss started school at age seven, he was quickly recognized as a child prodigy who could solve complex math problems in his head. While still a teenager, Gauss became the first person to prove the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity, a math theory to determine...