Lifeboat Foundation

Graphene is a two-dimensional wonder material that has been suggested for a wide range of applications in energy, technology, construction, and more since it was first isolated from graphite in 2004.

This single layer of carbon atoms is tough yet flexible, light but with high resistance, with graphene calculated to be 200 times more resistant than steel and five times lighter than aluminum.

Graphene may sound perfect, but it very literally is not. Isolated samples of this 2D allotrope aren’t perfectly flat, with its surface rippled. Graphene can also feature structural defects that can, in some cases, be deleterious to its function and, in other instances, can be essential to its chosen application. That means that the controlled implementation of defects could enable fine-tuning of the desired properties of two-dimensional crystals of graphene.

Looking only at their subatomic particles, most materials can be placed into one of two categories.

Metals—like copper and iron—have free-flowing electrons that allow them to conduct electricity, while insulators —like glass and rubbe r— keep their electrons tightly bound and therefore do not conduct electricity.

Insulators can turn into metals when hit with an intense electric field, offering tantalizing possibilities for microelectronics and supercomputing, but the physics behind this phenomenon called resistive switching is not well understood.

For decades, scientists have been probing the potential of two-dimensional materials to transform our world. 2D materials are only a single layer of atoms thick. Within them, subatomic particles like electrons can only move in two dimensions. This simple restriction can trigger unusual electron behavior, imbuing the materials with “exotic” properties like bizarre forms of magnetism, superconductivity and other collective behaviors among electrons—all of which could be useful in computing, communication, energy and other fields.

But researchers have generally assumed that these exotic 2D properties exist only in single-layer sheets, or short stacks. The so-called “bulk” versions of these materials—with their more complex 3D atomic structures—should behave differently.

Or so they thought.

A team of scientists studied the single-system version of multipartite Bell nonlocality, and observed the highest degree of quantum contextuality in a single system. Their work was published in Physical Review Letters.

Physical Review Letters (PRL) is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Physical Society. It is one of the most prestigious and influential journals in physics, with a high impact factor and a reputation for publishing groundbreaking research in all areas of physics, from particle physics to condensed matter physics and beyond. PRL is known for its rigorous standards and short article format, with a maximum length of four pages, making it an important venue for rapid communication of new findings and ideas in the physics community.

The Large Hadron Collider yields a five-quark particle that includes a ‘strange’ quark, as predicted by theory.

The first observation of neutrinos produced at a particle collider opens a new field of study and offers ways to test the limits of the standard model.

Neutrinos are among the most abundant particles in the Universe, but they rarely interact with matter: trillions pass through us every second, but most of us will never have even a single one interact with the matter in our bodies. Nonetheless, scientists can study these particles using high-intensity neutrino sources and detectors that are large enough to overcome the rarity of neutrino interactions. In this way, neutrinos have been observed from the Sun, from cosmic-ray interactions in the atmosphere, from Earth’s interior, from supernovae and other astrophysical objects, and from artificial sources such as nuclear reactors and particle accelerators in which a beam of particles hits a fixed target. But no one had ever detected neutrinos produced in colliding beams. This feat has now been achieved by the Forward Search Experiment (FASER), located at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland [1].

As neutral particles, neutrinos cannot be directly observed by detectors of the kind used in particle colliders. Instead, scientists study neutrinos via the particles produced when incoming neutrinos interact with matter: the properties of the incoming neutrinos can be inferred from the measured properties of their interaction products. While these interactions are always rare, their probability increases with neutrino energy. In a particle collider, the highest energy neutrinos are most likely to be produced in a region of the collider where there are no particle detectors. Collider experiments are built to surround the colliding beams with detectors, with only a small central region left empty to allow for the entry and exit of the beams. It is in this empty “forward” region, along the collision axis, that the highest energy neutrinos are most likely to be produced.

A team led by Prof. Li Chuanfeng and Prof. Xu Jinshi from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), collaborating with Prof. Chen Jingling from Nankai University and Prof. Adán Cabello from the University of Seville, studied the single-system version of multipartite Bell nonlocality, and observed the highest degree of quantum contextuality in single system. Their work was published in Physical Review Letters.

Quantum contextuality refers to the phenomenon that the measurements of quantum observables cannot be simply considered as revealing preexisting properties. It is a distinctive feature in quantum mechanics and a crucial resource for quantum computation. Contextuality defies noncontextuality hidden-variable theories and is closely linked to quantum nonlocality.

In multipartite systems, quantum nonlocality arises as the result of the contradiction between quantum contextuality and noncontextuality hidden-variable theories. The extent of nonlocality can be measured by the violation of Bell inequality and previous researches showed that the violation increases exponentially with the number of quantum bits involved. However, while single-particle high-dimensional system offers more possibilities for measurements compared to multipartite systems, the quest to enhance contextual correlation’s robustness remains an ongoing challenge.

The Dark SRF experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has achieved unprecedented sensitivity in the search for hypothetical dark photons. By innovatively employing superconducting radio frequency (SRF) cavities, researchers can now explore different potential mass ranges for these elusive particles, pushing the boundaries of our understanding of dark matter.

Scientists working on the Dark SRF experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have demonstrated unprecedented sensitivity in an experimental setup used to search for theorized particles called dark photons.

Researchers trapped ordinary, massless photons in devices called superconducting radio frequency cavities to look for the transition of those photons into their hypothesized dark sector counterparts. The experiment has put the world’s best constraint on the dark photon.

There’s an old joke among astronomy students about a question on the final exam for a cosmology class. It goes like this: “Describe the Universe and give three examples.” Well, a team of researchers in Germany, the U.S., and the UK took a giant leap toward giving at least one accurate example of the Universe.

To do it, they used a set of simulations called “MillenniumTNG”. It traces the buildup of galaxies and cosmic structure across time. It also provides new insight into the standard cosmological model of the Universe. It’s the latest in cosmological simulations, joining such ambitious efforts as the AbacusSummit project of a couple of years ago.

This simulation project takes into account as many aspects of cosmic evolution as possible. It uses simulations of regular (baryonic) matter (which is what we see in the Universe). It also includes dark matter, neutrinos, and the still-mysterious dark energy on the formation mechanisms of the Universe. That’s a tall order.