Lifeboat Foundation

One of the main goals of the LHC experiments is to look for signs of new particles, which could explain many of the unsolved mysteries in physics. Often, searches for new physics are designed to look for one specific type of new particle at a time, using theoretical predictions as a guide. But what about searching for unpredicted—and unexpected—new particles?

For the first time in history, scientists have measured radium’s bonding interactions with oxygen atoms in an organic molecule. Scientists have not measured this bonding before because radium-226 is available only in small amounts and it is highly radioactive (radium is one million times more radioactive than the same mass of uranium), making it challenging to work with.

Researchers at the University of Bonn have demonstrated that super photons, or photon Bose-Einstein condensates, conform to fundamental physics theorems, enabling insights into properties that are often difficult to observe.

Under suitable conditions, thousands of particles of light can merge into a type of “super photon.” Physicists call such a state a photon Bose-Einstein condensate. Researchers at the University of Bonn have now shown that this exotic quantum state obeys a fundamental theorem of physics. This finding now allows one to measure properties of photon Bose-Einstein condensates which are usually difficult to access. The study was published on June 3 in the journal Nature Communications.

If many atoms are cooled to a very low temperature confined in a small volume, they can become indistinguishable and behave like a single “super particle.” Physicists also call this a Bose-Einstein condensate or quantum gas. Photons condense based on a similar principle and can be cooled using dye molecules. These molecules act like small refrigerators and swallow the “hot” light particles before spitting them out again at the right temperature.

Researchers at QuTech have found a way to make Majorana particles in a two-dimensional plane. This was achieved by creating devices that exploit the combined material properties of superconductors and semiconductors. The inherent flexibility of this new 2D platform should allow one to perform experiments with Majoranas that were previously inaccessible. The results are published in Nature.

Promethium, one of the rarest and most mysterious elements in the periodic table, has finally given up some crucial chemical secrets.

By Mark Peplow & Nature magazine

One of the rarest and most mysterious elements in the periodic table has finally given up some crucial chemical secrets, eight decades after its discovery. Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have become the first to use radioactive promethium to make a chemical ‘complex’ — a compound in which it is bound to a few surrounding molecules. This feat of synthesis enabled the team to study how the element bonds with other atoms in a solution with water. Published May 22 in Nature the findings fill a long-standing gap in chemistry textbooks, and could eventually lead to better methods for separating promethium from similar elements in nuclear waste, for example.

ARLINGTON, Va. – U.S. military researchers are approaching industry to enhance atomic vapor sensors for electric field sensing, imaging, communications, and quantum information science (QIS).

Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., have issued a broad agency announcement (HR001124S0031) for the Enhancing Quantum Sensor Technologies with Rydberg Atoms (EQSTRA) program.

EQSTRA seeks to enhance the performance, capabilities, and maturity of atomic vapor sensors for future compact, calibration-free, small, and lightweight devices with low drift, and quantum-limited accuracy and sensitivity.

Researchers have developed a new method that uses attosecond core-level spectroscopy to capture molecular dynamics in real time.

The mechanisms behind chemical reactions are complex, involving many dynamic processes that affect both the electrons and the nuclei of the involved atoms. Frequently, the strongly coupled electron and nuclear dynamics trigger radiation-less relaxation processes known as conical intersections. These dynamics underpin many significant biological and chemical functions but are notoriously difficult to detect experimentally.

The challenge in studying these dynamics stems from the difficulty of tracing the nuclear and electronic motion simultaneously. Their dynamics are intertwined and occur on ultrafast timescales, which has made capturing the molecular dynamical evolution in real time a major challenge for both physicists and chemists in recent years.

A detailed study of a reaction between a molecular ion and a neutral atom has implications for both atmospheric and interstellar chemistry.

Reactions between ions and neutral atoms or molecules occur in various settings, from planetary atmospheres to plasmas. They are also the driving force behind rich reaction chains at play in the interstellar medium (ISM)—the giant clouds of gas and dust occupying the space between stars. The ISM is cold, highly dilute, and abundant with ionizing radiation [1]. These conditions are usually unfavorable for chemistry. Yet, more than 300 molecular species have been detected in the ISM to date, of which about 80% contain carbon [2]. Now Florian Grussie at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Germany and collaborators report an experimental and theoretical study of an ion–neutral reaction: that between a neutral carbon atom and a molecular ion (HD⁺), made of a hydrogen and a deuterium (heavy hydrogen) atom [3, 4]. The study’s findings could improve our understanding of the chemistry of the ISM.

Ion–neutral reactions are fundamentally different from those involving only neutral species. Unlike typical neutral–neutral reactions, ion–neutral reactions often do not need to overcome an activation energy barrier and proceed efficiently even if the temperature approaches absolute zero. The reason for this difference is that, in ion–neutral reactions, the ion strongly polarizes the neutral atom or molecule, causing attractive long-range interactions that bring the reactants together.

While carbon nanotubes are the materials that have received most of the attention so far, they have proved very difficult to manufacture and control, so scientists are eager to find other compounds that could be used to create nanowires and nanotubes with equally interesting properties, but easier to handle.

So, Chiara Cignarella, Davide Campi and Nicola Marzari thought to use computer simulations to parse known three-dimensional crystals, looking for those that—based on their structural and electronic properties —look like they could be easily “exfoliated,” essentially peeling away from them a stable 1-D structure. The same method has been successfully used in the past to study 2D materials, but this is the first application to their 1-D counterparts.

The researchers started from a collection of over 780,000 crystals, taken from various databases found in the literature and held together by van der Waals forces, the sort of weak interactions that happen when atoms are close enough for their electrons to overlap. Then they applied an algorithm that considered the spatial organization of their atoms looking for the ones that incorporated wire-like structures, and calculated how much energy would be necessary to separate that 1-D structure from the rest of the crystal.