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The collaboration has observed a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks” The international LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has observed three never-before-seen particles: a new kind of “pentaquark” and the first-ever pair of “tetraquarks”, which includes a new type of tetraquark. The findings, presented today at a CERN seminar, add three new exotic members to the growing list of new hadrons found at the LHC. They will help physicists better understand how quarks bind together into these composite particles. Quarks are elementary particles and come in six flavours: up, down, charm, strange, top...

Starting Tuesday it will run around the clock for nearly four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts..."We aim to be delivering 1.6 billion proton-proton collisions per second"...This time around the proton beams will be narrowed to less than 10 microns - a human hair is around 70 microns thick - to increase the collision rate...

CERN is set for a series of events starting on July 3, 2022, with the first celebrations of the ten-year anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson particle. On July 5, 2022, there will be collisions at unprecedented energy levels at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC, which is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, is at the center of conspiracy theories surrounding CERN. Scientists have posited that we can use gravity to test for the possibility that other dimensions exist, and the LHC has been critically looked at for this reason. "One way of seeing...

Quantum sensors, which detect the most minute variations in magnetic or electrical fields, have enabled precision measurements in materials science and fundamental physics. But these sensors have only been capable of detecting a few specific frequencies of these fields, limiting their usefulness. Now, researchers at MIT have developed a method to enable such sensors to detect any arbitrary frequency, with no loss of their ability to measure nanometer-scale features. The new method, for which the team has already applied for patent protection, is described in the journal Physical Review X... Quantum sensors can take many forms; they're essentially systems in...

As if cracking open a cosmic Russian nesting doll, astronomers have peered into the center of the Milky Way and discovered what appears to be a miniature spiral galaxy, swirling daintily around a single large star. The star – located about 26,000 light-years from Earth near the dense and dusty galactic center – is about 32 times as massive as the sun and sits within an enormous disk of swirling gas, known as a "protostellar disk". (The disk itself measures about 4,000 astronomical units wide – or 4,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun). Such disks are widespread...

Trapped-ion quantum computers are quantum devices in which trapped ions vibrate together and are fully isolated from the external environment. These computers can be particularly useful for investigating and realizing various quantum physics states. Researchers at NIST/University of Maryland and Duke University have recently used a trapped-ion quantum computer to realize two measurement-induced quantum phases, namely the pure phase and mixed or coding phase during a purification phase transition. Their findings, published in a paper in Nature Physics, contribute to the experimental understanding of many-body quantum systems. To measure the purification phase transition first outlined by Gullans and Huse, the...

It has long been known that there are two types of excitation for electrons, as in addition to their charge they have a property called spin. Spin and charge excitations travel at fixed, but different speeds...However, theorists are unable to calculate what precisely happens beyond only small perturbations, as the interactions are too complex. The Cambridge team has measured these speeds as their energies are varied, and find that a very simple picture emerges...Each type of excitation can have low or high kinetic energy... with the well-known formula E=1/2 mv2, which is a parabola. But for spin and charge the...

Deconstructing whiteness in an introductory physics classroom may seem like a nonsensical goal, but according to a pair of critical whiteness scholars from Seattle Pacific University, this endeavor is actually an important step toward the larger undertaking of freeing students and professors alike from the weighty fetters of whiteness. Funded through a $495,847 National Science Foundation grant, researchers Amy Robertson and W. Tali Hairston aim “to develop a knowledge base that could lead to awareness of how power relations may be embedded in the way physics is taught and learned.” The two record introductory physics classes and interview participants, then...

Nuclear fusion is a widely studied process through which atomic nuclei of a low atomic number fuse together to form a heavier nucleus, while releasing a large amount of energy. Nuclear fusion reactions can be produced using a method known as inertial confinement fusion, which entails the use of powerful lasers to implode a fuel capsule and produce plasma. Researchers...recently showed what happens to this implosion when one applies a strong magnetic field to the fuel capsule used for inertial confinement fusion. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, demonstrates that strong magnetic fields flatten the shape of inertial fusion...

University of Sydney lecturer Manisha Caleb explained in the report: “My colleagues and I (the MeerTRAP team) made the discovery when observing the Vela-X 1 region of the Milky Way about 1,300 light-years away from Earth, using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. “We spotted a strange-looking flash or “pulse” that lasted about 300 milliseconds.” The team scoured through old data from that region of space and found similar signals had been emitted before but had been missed by previous research. The strange pulses were said to be repeating every 76 seconds. The location of the strange object emitting...

In the far future, we could reveal detailed views of distant worlds by turning our home star into a gravitational lens Diagram showing a conceptual imaging technique that uses the sun’s gravitational field to magnify light from exoplanets. This would allow for highly advanced reconstructions of what exoplanets look like. We now know of more than 5,000 exoplanets beyond the solar system. What we really understand about each of these worlds, though, is barely anything at all. Most of them have been seen only indirectly from their shadows as they cross in front of the stars they orbit. The...

In all of physical law, there’s arguably no principle more sacrosanct than the second law of thermodynamics — the notion that entropy, a measure of disorder, will always stay the same or increase. “If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations,” wrote the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington in his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World. “If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found...

Ever since astronomers found that Earth and the Solar System are not unique in the cosmos, humanity has dreamed of the day when we might explore nearby stars and settle extrasolar planets. Unfortunately, the laws of physics impose strict limitations on how fast things can travel in our Universe, otherwise known as Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Per this theory, the speed of light is constant and absolute, and objects approaching it will experience an increase in their inertial mass (thereby requiring more mass to accelerate further). While no object can ever reach or exceed the speed of light, there...

Bell’s theorem states that no theory that incorporates local “hidden” variables can ever reproduce the correlations between measurement outcomes that quantum mechanics predicts. A similar result occurs in the theory of causal inference, where quantum systems likewise defy the rules of classical causal reasoning. The idea behind the causal inference approach is that while a statistical correlation between two variables can arise due to a direct causal relationship between them, the correlation may also contain the contribution of a hidden common cause. [T]he researchers use a causal model (see image) in which the statistics of variable A influence those of...

ASTROPHYSICS A team of University of Copenhagen astrophysicists has arrived at a major result regarding star populations beyond the Milky Way. The result could change our understanding of a wide range of astronomical phenomena, including the formation of black holes, supernovae and why galaxies die. The Andromeda galaxy, our Milky Way's closest neighbor, is the most distant object in the sky that you can see with your unaided eye. For as long as humans have studied the heavens, how stars look in distant galaxies has been a mystery. In a study published today in The Astrophysical Journal, a team of...

[A]n unseen ‘mirror world’ of particles that interacts with our world only via gravity might be the key to solving a major puzzle in cosmology today – the Hubble constant problem. The Hubble constant is the current rate of expansion of the universe. Predictions for this rate — from cosmology’s standard model — are significantly slower than the rate found by our most precise local measurements. This discrepancy is one that many cosmologists have been attempting to solve by changing our current cosmological model. The challenge is to do so without ruining the agreement between standard model predictions and many...

Since 2003, the black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster has been associated with sound. This is because astronomers discovered that pressure waves sent out by the black hole caused ripples in the cluster's hot gas that could be translated into a note—one that humans cannot hear, some 57 octaves below middle C. Now a new sonification brings more notes to this black hole sound machine. This new sonification—that is, the translation of astronomical data into sound—is being released for NASA's Black Hole Week this year. In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before...

In two weeks' time, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is going to present the world with new information about our Milky Way. It's anyone's guess what the announcement will be, but based on what we know of their recent efforts, there's reason to get excited – the results being presented are from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, which was responsible for producing the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019. For years now the EHT project has been studying the heart of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, which is most likely home to a supermassive black hole...

Associate professor Mazhar Ali and his research group at TU Delft have discovered one-way superconductivity without magnetic fields, something that was thought to be impossible ever since its discovery in 1911 – up till now. The discovery, published in Nature, makes use of 2D quantum materials and paves the way towards superconducting computing. Superconductors can make electronics hundreds of times faster, all with zero energy loss. Ali: “If the 20th century was the century of semi-conductors, the 21st can become the century of the superconductor.” During the 20th century many scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, have puzzled over the nature...

Does time exist? The answer to this question may seem obvious: Of course it does! Just look at a calendar or a clock. But developments in physics suggest the non-existence of time is an open possibility, and one that we should take seriously. How can that be, and what would it mean? It'll take a little while to explain, but don't worry: Even if time doesn't exist, our lives will go on as usual. A crisis in physics Physics is in crisis. For the past century or so, we have explained the Universe with two wildly successful physical theories: general...