Antimatter remains an enigma, but researchers at CERN may soon be able to ascertain some of its key properties thanks to groundbreaking techniques they’ve developed that trap and store antimatter for more than 15 minutes. Reporting their work in Nature Physics, the ALPHA team (an international group of scientists working at CERN) outlined their plans […]
The notion that computers generate heat is familiar to everyone, but a group of physicists have discovered that, under certain conditions, computational processes can have a cooling effect. This seemingly cryptic finding, the details of which appear in Nature, relates to our basic understanding of knowledge and entropy. The researchers, Renato Renner and Vlatko Vedral […]
How a bicycle stays upright while moving has always been something of a mystery to science, with a vague cocktail of gyroscopic effects being the accepted explanation. Now, however, scientists from Cornell University and the Delft University of Technology have determined the complex interplay of design characteristics that make a bike stay upright. The findings, […]
Experiments at Fermilab’s soon-to-be-mothballed Tevatron particle accelerator in the United States have produced collision outcomes that indicate the existence of a new, unknown particle that is not predicted by the fundamental laws of physics. The findings have been posted to Arxiv and have been submitted for publication in the journalPhysical Review Letters. The researchers say […]
Weizmann Institute researchers investigating quantum interactions in biological molecules have shown that DNA is extremely sensitive to particle “spin.” Their experiment shows that DNA can somehow discern and “filter” the electrons moving through it, a finding that could impact both medical science and electronics research. Quantum phenomena are generally associated with extremely small systems, usually […]
If the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) does produce the elusive Higgs boson, then Vanderbilt University physicists speculate that it will also create a second particle, known as the Higgs singlet, that can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past. “Our theory is a long shot,” admitted Vanderbilt Physics […]
Physicists at the University of California – Santa Barbara have put a new slant on the shell game by demonstrating the ability to hide and shuffle “quantum-mechanical peas” – in this case single microwave photons – under and between three microwave resonators acting as quantized shells. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, is the first […]
In what researchers are calling a “dream system,” an exotic new superconductor based on the element ytterbium appears to exist in aquantum critical state naturally; a highly desirable property that could have profound implications for the manufacture of superconductors and electronics. In a paper published in the journal Science, the University of Tokyo and Rutgers […]
Astronomers using the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in orbit above the Earth have detected beams of antimatter produced above terrestrial thunderstorms, a phenomenon never seen before. They believe the antimatter particles were formed in aterrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), a brief burst associated with lightning and produced inside thunderstorms. “These signals are the first direct evidence […]
