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Conventional wisdom would say that blocking a hole would prevent light from going through it, but Princeton University engineers have discovered the opposite to be true. A research team has found that placing a metal cap over a small hole in a metal film does not stop the light at all, but rather enhances its transmission. In an example of the extraordinary twists of physics that can occur at very small scales, electrical engineer Stephen Chou and colleagues made an array of tiny holes in a thin metal film, then blocked each hole with an opaque metal cap. When they...

New high-precision tests carried out by the OPERA collaboration in Italy broadly confirm its claim, made in September, to have detected neutrinos travelling at faster than the speed of light. The collaboration today submitted its results to a journal, but some members continue to insist that further checks are needed before the result can be considered sound. OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus) measures the properties of neutrinos that are sent through the Earth from the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and arrive in its detector located under the Gran Sasso mountain in central Italy. On 22 September,...

The world's largest atom smasher, designed as a portal to a new view of physics, has produced its first peek at the unexpected: bits of matter that don't mirror the behavior of their antimatter counterparts. The discovery, if confirmed, could rewrite the known laws of particle physics and help explain why our universe is made mostly of matter and not antimatter. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, the 17-mile (27 km) circular particle accelerator underground near Geneva, Switzerland, have been colliding protons at high speeds to create explosions of energy. From this energy many subatomic particles are produced. Now researchers...

A second experiment at the European facility that reported subatomic particles zooming faster than the speed of light -- stunning the world of physics -- has reached the same result, scientists said late Thursday. The "positive outcome of the [second] test makes us more confident in the result," said Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, in a statement released late Thursday. Ferroni is one of 160 physicists involved in the international collaboration known as OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion Tracking Apparatus) that performed the experiment. While the second experiment "has made an important test of consistency...

At the heart of the weirdness for which the field of quantum mechanics is famous is the wavefunction, a powerful but mysterious entity that is used to determine the probabilities that quantum particles will have certain properties. Now, a preprint posted online on 14 November1 reopens the question of what the wavefunction represents — with an answer that could rock quantum theory to its core. Whereas many physicists have generally interpreted the wavefunction as a statistical tool that reflects our ignorance of the particles being measured, the authors of the latest paper argue that, instead, it is physically real. “I...

PRESS RELEASE: Scientists at Chalmers have succeeded in creating light from vacuum – observing an effect first predicted over 40 years ago. The results have been published in the journal Nature. In an innovative experiment, the scientists have managed to capture some of the photons that are constantly appearing and disappearing in the vacuum. The experiment is based on one of the most counterintuitive, yet, one of the most important principles in quantum mechanics: that vacuum is by no means empty nothingness. In fact, the vacuum is full of various particles that are continuously fluctuating in and out of existence....

The team behind the finding in September that neutrinos may travel faster than light has carried out an improved version of their experiment - and found the same result.If confirmed by other experiments, the find could undermine one of the basic principles of modern physics. Critics of the first report had said that the long bunches of neutrinos used could introduce an error into the test. The new work, posted to the Arxiv repository, used much shorter bunches. It has been submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, but has not yet been reviewed by the scientific community. The...

Top boffins at the Large Hadron Collider – mightiest particle-punisher and largest machine of any kind ever assembled by humanity – say that they may have uncovered a vital clue explaining one of the greatest mysteries of physics: namely, how is it that matter itself can exist? This is a mystery because the so-called Standard Model of physics calls for ordinary matter and antimatter to decay in very similar ways. Theory also says that equal amounts of antimatter and regular-type matter (such as that making up the Sun, the Earth, all the life upon it including us etc) should have...

A laser powerful enough to tear apart the fabric of space could be built in Britain as part major new scientific project that aims to answer some of the most fundamental questions about our universe. Due to follow in the footsteps of the Large Hadron Collider, the latest "big science" experiment being proposed by physicists will see the world's most powerful laser being constructed. Capable of producing a beam of light so intense that it would be equivalent to the power received by the Earth from the sun focused onto a speck smaller than a tip of a pin, scientists...

Caption: This computer-generated image shows the different layers of the Earth: The outer solid crust, the viscous upper and lower mantle, the liquid outer core, and the solid inner core. Credit: ESRF Usage Restrictions: None ESRF inaugurates unique new X-ray facilityGrenoble -- Scientists will soon be exploring matter at temperatures and pressures so extreme it can only be produced for microseconds using powerful pulsed lasers. Matter in such states is present in the Earth's liquid iron core, 2500 kilometres beneath the surface, and also in elusive "warm dense matter" inside large planets like Jupiter. A new X-ray beamline ID24 at...

A laser powerful enough to tear apart the fabric of space could be built in Britain. The major scientific project will follow in the footsteps of the Large Hadron Collider and will answer questions about the universe. The laser will be capable of producing a beam of light so intense that it will be similar to the light the earth receives from the sun but focused on a speck smaller than a pin prick. Scientists say it will be so powerful they will be able to boil the very fabric of space and create a vacuum. A vacuum fizzles with...

An independent experiment confirms that subatomic particles have wrong energy spectrum for superluminal travel. The claim that neutrinos can travel faster than light has been given a knock by an independent experiment. On 17 October, the Imaging Cosmic and Rare Underground Signals (ICARUS) collaboration submitted a paper1 to the preprint server arXiv.org, in which it offered a rebuttal of claims2 to have clocked subatomic particles called neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. The original results were published on 22 September by the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus (OPERA) experiment. Both experiments are based at Gran Sasso National Laboratory...

When quantum mechanics meets general relativityThe unification of quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity is one of the most exciting and still open questions in modern physics. General relativity, the joint theory of gravity, space and time gives predictions that become clearly evident on a cosmic scale of stars and galaxies. Quantum effects, on the other hand, are fragile and are typically observed on small scales, e.g. when considering single particles and atoms. That is why it is very hard to test the interplay between quantum mechanics and general relativity. Now theoretical physicists led by Prof. ÄŒaslav Brukner at the...

A video created by researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel has the Internet buzzing. Though rather simple, it just looks really cool, hence all the attention. It’s a demonstration of quantum locking, though to non-science buffs, it looks more like science fiction come to life. In the video a disc, obviously frozen due to the vapor rising from its surface hovers over a surface. This is nothing new of course, everyone’s seen it in science class. What is new is that when the demonstrator turns the disc, it stays hovered at that angle. This is in contrast to the...

Sarah Benson last encountered college mathematics 20 years ago in an undergraduate algebra class. Her sole experience teaching math came in the second grade, when the first graders needed help with their minuses. And yet Ms. Benson, with a Ph.D. in art history and a master's degree in comparative literature, stood at the chalkboard drawing parallelograms, constructing angles and otherwise dismembering Euclid's Proposition 32 the way a biology professor might treat a water frog. Her students cared little about her inexperience. As for her employers, they did not mind, either: they had asked her to teach formal geometry expressly because...

Many research groups have reported excess heat from deuterated palladium using many different experimental techniques. Recently, the Navy's SPAWAR laboratory published experimental results that document the production of nuclear particles, thereby suggesting that nuclear reactions are occurring. However, these observed particle tracks are at levels that are much smaller than would be expected if this excess heat resulted from conventional nuclear fusion. These excess heat reports often vastly exceed that which would likely be produced by chemical reactions or by structural phase transitions in the palladium. On May 29, 2009, the University of Missouri hosted a seminar titled, "Excess Heat...

Explanation: What would it look like to travel near the speed of light? Strange visual effects would appear as documented in the above relativistically-accurate animation. First of all, relativistic aberration would cause objects to appear to bunch up in front you. Next, the Doppler shift would cause the colors of forward objects to shift toward the blue, while things behind you would shift toward the red. Similarly, the world in front of you would seem to move unusually fast, while the world behind you would appear to slow down. Objects to the sides will appear rotated, possibly enabling surfaces normally...

Carbon is the fourth-most-abundant element in the universe and takes on a wide variety of forms, called allotropes, including diamond and graphite. Scientists at Carnegie's Geophysical Laboratory are part of a team that has discovered a new form of carbon, which is capable of withstanding extreme pressure stresses that were previously observed only in diamond. This breakthrough discovery will be published in Physical Review Letters. The team was led by Stanford's Wendy L. Mao and her graduate student Yu Lin and includes Carnegie's Ho-kwang (Dave) Mao, Li Zhang, Paul Chow, Yuming Xiao, Maria Baldini, and Jinfu Shu. The experiment started...

If you have a phone or tablet that runs Google Android, you should check out the new LHSee app, released by the University of Oxford and available in the Android Market. Funded by the Science & Technology Facilities Council, the LHSee app delivers data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN directly to your handheld device. LHSee, released last week and currently in version 1.0, requires Android 2.2 and up and will need full Internet access. The new app is already a hit — it has a 4.5 star rating and 123 reviews in the Android Market. ATLAS is a particle...

Researchers from Boston-area Fractal Antenna Systems, Inc., report additional measurements that confirm its claims of a working ‘invisibility cloak’. In March, 2009, the firm’s research group disclosed the first invention of the invisibility cloak. It had unprecedented ability to work ‘wideband’ and render an object invisible to microwaves. The wideband aspect also demonstrated a path for making invisibility cloaks in the full spectrum of visible light. A previous invisibility cloak effort by Duke University-based researchers had shown some degree of cloaking , but over a narrow frequency band. That cloaking also rendered the object partially detectable/visible by the presence of...