Lifeboat Foundation

Back in 2018, a tank of the purest water, buried under kilometers of rock in Ontario, Canada, flashed as barely detectable particle slammed through its molecules.

It was the first time that water has been used to detect a particle known as an antineutrino, which originated from a nuclear reactor more than 240 kilometers (150 miles) away. This incredible breakthrough promises neutrino experiments and monitoring technology that use inexpensive, easily acquirable and safe materials.

As some of the most abundant particles in the Universe, neutrinos are odd little things with a lot of potential for revealing deeper insights into the Universe. Unfortunately they are almost massless, carry no charge, and barely interact with other particles at all. They mostly stream through space and rock alike, as though all matter was incorporeal. There’s a reason they’re known as ghost particles.

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Ultimate in miniaturization.

For the first time, Stanford researchers have found a way to create and stabilize an extremely rare form of gold that has lost two negatively charged electrons, denoted Au²⁺. The material stabilizing this elusive version of the valued element is a halide perovskite—a class of crystalline materials that holds great promise for various applications including more-efficient solar cells, light sources, and electronics components.

Surprisingly, the Au²⁺ perovskite is also quick and simple to make using off-the-shelf ingredients at room temperature.

“It was a real surprise that we were able to synthesize a stable material containing Au²⁺ —I didn’t even believe it at first,” said Hemamala Karunadasa, associate professor of chemistry at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and senior author of the study published Aug. 28 in Nature Chemistry. “Creating this first-of-its-kind Au²⁺ perovskite is exciting. The gold atoms in the perovskite bear strong similarities to the copper atoms in high-temperature superconductors, and heavy atoms with unpaired electrons, like Au²⁺, show cool magnetic effects not seen in lighter atoms.”

More than 400 years ago, Galileo showed that many everyday phenomena—such as a ball rolling down an incline or a chandelier gently swinging from a church ceiling—obey precise mathematical laws. For this insight, he is often hailed as the founder of modern science. But Galileo recognized that not everything was amenable to a quantitative approach. Such things as colors, tastes and smells “are no more than mere names,” Galileo declared, for “they reside only in consciousness.” These qualities aren’t really out there in the world, he asserted, but exist only in the minds of creatures that perceive them. “Hence if the living creature were removed,” he wrote, “all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.”

Since Galileo’s time the physical sciences have leaped forward, explaining the workings of the tiniest quarks to the largest galaxy clusters. But explaining things that reside “only in consciousness”—the red of a sunset, say, or the bitter taste of a lemon—has proven far more difficult. Neuroscientists have identified a number of neural correlates of consciousness —brain states associated with specific mental states—but have not explained how matter forms minds in the first place. As philosopher David Chalmers asked: “How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?” He famously dubbed this quandary the “hard problem” of consciousness.

Continue reading “Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?” »

A hypertriton is a tritium nucleus in which a neutron is replaced by a so-called Lambda hyperon. This type of hypernucleus was first discovered in the 1950s has since been the key focus of numerous studies.

The ALICE collaboration, a large research group that studies the collisions of nuclei inside CERN’s large hadron collider (LHC) in Switzerland, recently measured the lifetime of a hypertriton with remarkable precision. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, is a further step forward toward understanding the unique properties of these fascinating nuclear complexes.

“As the first and lightest hypernucleus (i.e., a nucleus that includes a baryon with at least one strange quark) ever identified, the hypertriton holds a special place in nuclear physics,” Maximiliano Puccio, part of the ALICE collaboration, told Phys.org.

An international research team has taken a decisive step toward a new generation of atomic clocks. At the European XFEL X-ray laser, the researchers have created a much more precise pulse generator based on the element scandium, which enables an accuracy of one second in 300 billion years—that is about a thousand times more precise than the current standard atomic clock based on cesium. The team presents its success in the journal Nature.

Atomic clocks are currently the world’s most accurate timekeepers. These clocks have used electrons in the atomic shell of chemical elements, such as cesium, as a pulse generator in order to define the time. These electrons can be raised to a higher energy level with microwaves of a known frequency. In the process, they absorb the microwave radiation.

An atomic clock shines microwaves at cesium atoms and regulates the frequency of the radiation such that the absorption of the microwaves is maximized; experts call this a resonance. The quartz oscillator that generates the microwaves can be kept so stable with the help of resonance that cesium clocks will be accurate to within one second within 300 million years.

A research group led by Professor Kenji Ohmori at the Institute for Molecular Science, National Institutes of Natural Sciences are using an artificial crystal of 30,000 atoms aligned in a cubic array with a spacing of 0.5 micron, cooled to near absolute zero temperature. By manipulating the atoms with a special laser light that blinks for 10 picoseconds, they succeeded in executing quantum simulation of a model of magnetic materials.

Their novel “ultrafast quantum computer” scheme demonstrated last year was applied to quantum simulation. Their achievement shows that their novel “ultrafast quantum simulator” is an epoch-making platform, as it can avoid the issue of external noise, one of the biggest concerns for quantum simulators. The “ultrafast quantum simulator” is expected to contribute to the design of functional materials and the resolution of social problems.

Their results were published online in Physical Review Letters.

BBC News

The elusive substance holds the key to discovering how the Universe was formed.

Gravitational acceleration of anti-matter is close to that of matter on Earth and scientists are now working to measure it accurately.

Experiments conducted by the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) collaboration at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, have shown that antihydrogen particles, too are pulled downward by gravity and do not levitate as some physicists suggest a press release said.

Antihydrogen is the simplest antimatter particle that we know exists. The opposite of hydrogen contains antimatter components such as an antiproton, a negatively charged proton, and a positron, a positively charged electron.