Computer security systems may one day get a boost from quantum physics, as a result of recent research into a “one-shot” memory unit, whose contents can be read only a single time. The research, by Yi-Kai Liu from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is being presented this week at Princeton’s Innovations in Theoretical […]
In his book The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that as individuals strive to maximize their advantage in life, they inadvertently contribute – as if under the influence of a “hidden hand”- to an aggregate disposition of wealth. Victor Yakovenko, a scientist at the Joint Quantum Institute, thinks that if Smith were a physicist, […]
It could happen tomorrow, it could happen in a billion years, but whenever it is, calculations by physicists at the University of Southern Denmark indicate that the risk of the Universe collapsing is even greater than previously thought. The doomsday scenario that’s been refined by the Danish researchers is known as “The Big Slurp.” The […]
While the notion of physically travelling through time may still be the stuff of science fiction, a new research paper from Louisiana State University shows that it is theoretically possible to copy quantum data from the past. The new work has surprising ramifications for the field of quantum cryptography, which is widely touted as the […]
Building on related research that showed how two entangled black holes could be linked by a wormhole, an MIT physicist has shown that two entangled quarks could also give rise to a wormhole that connects the pair of elementary particles. The new work bolsters the relatively new idea that the laws of gravity holding together […]
Compared to ordinary X-rays, synchrotron X-rays produce much higher quality images with less radiation, but traditional synchrotron X-ray devices are enormous and costly, available at only a few sites around the world. Now, researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) say they have designed a device that uses a compact laser to produce synchrotron X-rays. […]
Photons have long been described as massless particles which don’t interact with each other, but Harvard and MIT scientists have reported the creation of “photonic molecules” that behave as though they have mass. The researchers, from the Harvard-MIT Center for Ultracold Atoms, say that the photonic molecules represent a never-before-seen form of matter that was, […]
A theory which endows dark matter particles with a rare type of electromagnetism has been strengthened by a detailed analysis performed by a pair of physicists at Vanderbilt University. Professor Robert Scherrer and post-doctoral fellow Chiu Man Ho propose that dark matter, an invisible form of matter that makes up 85 percent of the all […]
When a solar flare filled with charged particles erupts from the Sun, the flux-freezing theorem dictates that the magnetic lines of force should flow away in lock-step with the particles – whole and unbroken. But scientists have observed that the magnetic lines of force sometimes break apart and then quickly reconnect in a way that […]
Physicists have found the first direct evidence of exotic pear shaped nuclei in atoms, a discovery that could advance the search for a new fundamental force in nature and explain why the Big Bang created more matter than antimatter. The matter-anti-matter imbalance is one of physics’ great mysteries. It’s not predicted by the Standard Model, […]
