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Scientists are celebrating the long-sought discovery of the odderon, a strange phenomenon that appears only rarely when protons collide at high energies, such as inside particle accelerators. Though the odderon was first predicted to exist in the early 1970s, it wasn’t until recently that physicists finally gathered the data they needed at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to confirm a true discovery. The discovery contributes to physicists’ understanding of how all the matter in the universe interacts at the smallest levels. Unlike the famous Higgs boson, which was officially discovered in 2012, the odderon isn’t a particle exactly. Instead, it’s the...

Two professors are calling for abolishing the physics term “quantum supremacy” because it is “uncomfortably reminiscent of ‘white supremacy.'” In an op-ed, titled, “Physicists Need to Be More Careful with How They Name Things” for the Scientific American, St. Anselm College physics professor Ian Durham, University of Bristol math professor Karoline Wiesner, and freelance journalist Daniel Garisto call for doing away with the physics term “quantum supremacy” in an anti-racist measure. The popular term, coined in 2012 by quantum physicist John Preskill, refers to quantum computers outperforming classical ones. It has nothing to do with racism, which the authors of...

A traversable wormhole would be a shortcut through space. (ESO/L. Calçada) =============================================================== In my last post, I talked about the idea of warp drive and whether it might one day be possible. Today I'll talk about another faster-than-light trick: wormholes. Wormholes are an old idea in general relativity. It's based on work by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, who tried to figure out how elementary particles might behave in curved spacetime. Their idea treated particle-antiparticle pairs as two ends of a spacetime tube. This Einstein-Rosen Bridge would look like a black hole on one end, and an anti-black hole,...

Superconductivity is a complete loss of electrical resistance. Superconductors are not merely very good metals: it is a fundamentally different electronic state. In normal metals, electrons move individually, and they collide with defects and vibrations in the lattice. In superconductors, electrons are bound together by an attractive force, which allows them to move together in a correlated way and avoid defects. In a very small number of known superconductors, the onset of superconductivity causes spontaneous electrical currents to flow. These currents are very different from those in a normal metal wire: they are built into the ground state of the...

Pip-squeak particles called neutrinos are dishing out more than scientists had bargained for.A particle detector has spotted a puzzling abundance of the lightweight subatomic particles and their antimatter partners, antineutrinos, physicists report May 30 at arXiv.org. The finding mirrors a neutrino excess found more than two decades ago. And that match has researchers wondering if a new type of particle called a sterile neutrino — one even more shadowy than the famously elusive ordinary neutrinos — might be at large.Such a particle, if it exists, would transform the foundations of particle physics and could help solve cosmic puzzles like the...

Explanation: From where do these neutrinos come? The IceCube Neutrino Observatory near the South Pole of the Earth has begun to detect nearly invisible particles of very high energy. Although these rarely-interacting neutrinos pass through much of the Earth just before being detected, where they started remains a mystery. Pictured here is IceCube's Antarctic lab accompanied by a cartoon depicting long strands of detectors frozen into the crystal clear ice below. Candidate origins for these cosmic neutrinos include the violent surroundings of supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies, and tremendous stellar explosions culminating in gamma ray bursts...

IT TRIGGERED A SUBATOMIC CASCADE — AND COULD HAVE AN AVALANCHE OF IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF PHYSICS.Crash Course Scientists have now confirmed that an unusually powerful particle of antimatter crashed down into Antarctica back in December 2016. The collision seems to have triggered a subatomic cascade effect called Glashow resonance, Live Science reports, which is a theoretical phenomenon that requires more energy to set off than even the most powerful particle accelerators can provide. Scientists didn’t expect to see tangible evidence of Glashow resonance, but now that they have it helps further confirm the Standard Model of subatomic physics....

Scientists have long theorized that supermassive black holes can wander through space—but catching them in the act has proven difficult. Now, researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have identified the clearest case to date of a supermassive black hole in motion. Their results are published today (March 12, 2021) in The Astrophysical Journal. “We don’t expect the majority of supermassive black holes to be moving; they’re usually content to just sit around,” says Dominic Pesce, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics who led the study. “They’re just so heavy that it’s tough to get them...

A new study shows that extreme black holes could break the famous “no-hair” theorem, and in a way that we could detect. According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, black holes have only three observable properties: mass, spin and charge. Additional properties, or “hair,” do not exist. Andriy_A / Shutterstock Identical twins have nothing on black holes. Twins may grow from the same genetic blueprints, but they can differ in a thousand ways — from temperament to hairstyle. Black holes, according to Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, can have just three characteristics — mass, spin and charge. If those values...

Observations of galactic rotation curves give one of the strongest lines of evidence pointing towards the existence of dark matter, a non-baryonic form of matter that makes up an estimated 85% of the matter in the observable Universe. Current assessments of galactic rotation curves are based upon a framework of Newtonian accounts of gravity, a new article suggests that if this is substituted with a general relativity-based model, the need to recourse to dark matter is relieved, replaced by the effects of gravitomagnetism.

On December 6, 2016, a high-energy particle called an electron antineutrino hurtled to Earth from outer space at close to the speed of light carrying 6.3 petaelectronvolts (PeV) of energy. Deep inside the ice sheet at the South Pole, it smashed into an electron and produced a particle that quickly decayed into a shower of secondary particles. The interaction was captured by a massive telescope buried in the Antarctic glacier, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. IceCube had seen a Glashow resonance event, a phenomenon predicted by Nobel laureate physicist Sheldon Glashow in 1960. With this detection, scientists provided another confirmation of...

Physicists studying collisions of gold ions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory, are embarking on a journey through the phases of nuclear matter—the stuff that makes up the nuclei of all the visible matter in our universe. A new analysis of collisions conducted at different energies shows tantalizing signs of a critical point—a change in the way that quarks and gluons, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, transform from one phase to another. The findings, just published by RHIC's...

America's STEM classrooms are devolving — wasting valuable class time with toys, barely applicable coding games, and victim-mentality nonsense.If you ask any administrator about the future of education, he’ll likely mention the blending of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics: STEM. Indeed, it’s so attractive to schools, billions of dollars are spent every year by corporations, startups, and the U.S. federal government in an 1850s-style “gold rush” of gadgetry and glittering lights. To stand out from the competition and get into classrooms, curriculum developers, policymakers, and advocacy groups have begun to scam the education market by forsaking common-sense STEM principles in...

SPARC could be the first fusion reactor to produce net energy—10 years before ITER and in a machine 10 times smaller. A startup chasing the dream of plentiful, safe, carbon-free electricity from fusion, the energy source of the Sun, has settled on a site, timetable, and key technology for building its compact reactor. Flush with more than $200 million from investors, including Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy, 3-year-old Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced today that later this year it will start to build its first test reactor, dubbed SPARC, in a new facility in Devens, Massachusetts, not far from its current...

The researchers' lab-grown black hole was made of a flowing gas of approximately 8,000 rubidium atoms cooled to nearly absolute zero and held in place by a laser beam. They created a mysterious state of matter, known as a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC), which allows thousands of atoms to act together in unison as though they were a single atom. Using a second laser beam, the team created a cliff of potential energy, which caused the gas to flow like water rushing down a waterfall, thereby creating an event horizon where one half of the gas was flowing faster than the...

by Technion - Israel Institute of Technology Credit: CC0 Public Domain Using AI and computer automation, Technion researchers have developed a 'conjecture generator' that creates mathematical conjectures, which are considered to be the starting point for developing mathematical theorems. They have already used it to generate a number of previously unknown formulas. The study, which was published in the journal Nature, was carried out by undergraduates from different faculties under the tutelage of Assistant Professor Ido Kaminer of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Technion. The project deals with one of the most fundamental elements...

There are supermassive black holes. There are ultramassive black holes. How large can these strange objects grow? Well, there could be something even bigger than ultramassive: stupendously large black holes, according to the latest research. Such hypothetical black holes - larger than 100 billion times the mass of the Sun - have been explored in a new paper which names them SLABs, an acronym that stands for "Stupendously LArge Black holeS". "We already know that black holes exist over a vast range of masses, with a supermassive black hole of 4 million solar masses residing at the centre of our...

Researchers used the ALMA telescope array in Chile to discover the quasar A quasar is a type of supermassive black hole that is releasing a lot of energy This object was discovered when the universe was just 670 million years old The discovery can help researchers better understand how these objects form Its age and size brings into doubt theories they were formed from collapsed star clusters, with researchers suggesting they instead feast on cold hydrogen gas =========================================================== The most distant supermassive black hole known to science has been detected by astronomers - and it is more than 13 billion...

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...