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Category: quantum physics – Page 457

When we encounter metals in our day-to-day lives, we perceive them as shiny. That’s because common metallic materials are reflective at visible light wavelengths and will bounce back any light that strikes them. While metals are well suited to conducting electricity and heat, they aren’t typically thought of as a means to conduct light.

But in the burgeoning field of , researchers are increasingly finding examples that challenge expectations about how things should behave. In new research published in Science Advances, a team led by Dmitri Basov, Higgins Professor of Physics at Columbia University, describes a metal capable of conducting light. “These results defy our daily experiences and common conceptions,” said Basov.

The work was led by Yinming Shao, now a postdoc at Columbia who transferred as a Ph.D. student when Basov moved his lab from the University of California San Diego to New York in 2016. While working with the Basov group, Shao has been exploring the optical properties of a semimetal material known as ZrSiSe. In 2020 in Nature Physics, Shao and his colleagues showed that ZrSiSe shares electronic similarities with graphene, the first so-called Dirac material discovered in 2004. ZrSiSe, however, has enhanced electronic correlations that are rare for Dirac semimetals.

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HOW did our universe begin? This is among the most profound questions of all, and you would be forgiven for thinking it is impossible to answer. But Laura Mersini-Houghton says she has cracked it. A cosmologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she was born and raised under communist dictatorship in Albania, where her father was considered ideologically opposed to the regime and exiled. She later won a Fulbright scholarship to study in the US, forging a career in cosmology in which she has tackled the origins of the universe – and made an extraordinary proposal.

Mersini-Houghton’s big idea is that the universe in its earliest moments can be understood as a quantum wave function – a mathematical description of a haze of possibilities – that gave rise to many diverse universes as well as our own. She has also made predictions about how other universes would leave an imprint upon our own. Those ideas have been controversial, with some physicists arguing that her predictions are invalid. But Mersini-Houghton argues that they have been confirmed by observations of the radiation left over from the big bang, known as the cosmic microwave background.

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Thermodynamic phases governed by the strong nuclear force have been linked together using multiple theoretical tools.

Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the theory of the strong nuclear force. On a fundamental level, it describes the dynamics of quarks and gluons. Like more familiar systems, such as water, a many-body system of quarks and gluons can exist in very different thermodynamic phases depending on the external conditions. Researchers have long sought to map the different corners of the corresponding phase diagram. New experimental probes of QCD—first and foremost the detection of gravitational waves from neutron-star mergers—allow for a more comprehensive view of this phase structure than was previously possible. Now Tuna Demircik at the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics, South Korea, and colleagues have put together models originally used in very different contexts to push forward a global understanding of the phases of QCD [1].

Phase transitions governed by the strong force require extreme conditions such as high temperatures and high baryon densities (baryons are three-quark particles such as protons and neutrons). The region of the QCD phase diagram corresponding to high temperatures and relatively low baryon densities can be probed by colliding heavy ions. By contrast, the region associated with high baryon densities and relatively low temperatures can be studied by observing single neutron stars. For a long time, researchers lacked experimental data for the phase space between these two regions, not least because it is very difficult to create matter under neutron-star conditions in the laboratory. This difficulty still exists, although collider facilities are being constructed that are intended to produce matter at higher baryon densities than is currently possible.

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New research finds evidence of waveguiding in a unique quantum material. These findings counter expectations about how metals conduct light and may push imaging beyond optical diffraction limits.

We perceive metals as shiny when we encounter metals in our day-to-day lives. That’s because common metallic materials are reflective at visible light wavelengths and will therefore bounce back the light that strikes them. Although metals are well suited to conducting electricity and heat, they aren’t typically thought of as a means to conduct light.

However, scientists are increasingly finding examples that challenge expectations about how things should behave in the burgeoning field of quantum materials. New research describes a metal capable of conducting light through it. Conducted by a team of researchers led by Dmitri Basov, Higgins Professor of Physics at Columbia University.

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Marking the passage of time in a world of ticking clocks and swinging pendulums is a simple case of counting the seconds between ‘then’ and ‘now’.

Down at the quantum scale of buzzing electrons, however, ‘then’ can’t always be anticipated. Worse still, ‘now’ often blurs into a haze of uncertainty. A stopwatch simply isn’t going to cut it for some scenarios.

A potential solution could be found in the very shape of the quantum fog itself, according to researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden.

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How does something as immaterial as consciousness arise from something as unconscious as matter?
This is known as the Hard Problem and this theory gets around this problem by explaining consciousness as electrical activity that is aware of its own electrical potential. This is possible because the light photon is the carrier of the electromagnetic force. Because light has momentum and momentum is frame dependent electrical activity in the brain is always in the centre of its own reference frame in ‘the moment of now’ with a potential future that is always uncertain and a past that has gone forever. It is because consciousness is always in the centre of its own reference frame that we have the concept of ‘mind’ with each one of us having our own personal view of the Universe. This is within a process formed by the spontaneous absorption and emission of light a process of continuous energy exchange forming the ever changing world of our everyday life. If our eyes where more sensitive to light we would be able to see that everything is radiating EMR or light continuously because the Universe is never at absolute zero.
In this theory consciousness is the most advanced part of a universal process that can be explained by physics. There are no paradoxes in this theory! We are in the centre of our own reference frame being able to look back in time in every direction at the beauty of the stars. We can also look down into individual reference frames seeing the future unfold photon by photon relative to that frame of reference.
The greatest affect this process of continuous energy exchange has on us is the aging process with photon energy from the Sun cascading down forming greater degrees of freedom for the continuous increase in entropy or disorganization.
But above all this is a creative process with the future coming into existence relative to the energy and momentum or actions of each individual life form. The wave-particle duality of light is acting like the bits or zeros and ones of a computer. This forms a blank canvas for life to form its own future relative to its position and the energy and momentum of its own actions. The Universe is a continuum with spacetime as an emergent property with an Arrow of Time for each object or life form with a future coming into existence relative to their energy & momentum with each new photon electron coupling or dipole moment.
I believe this is what we are seeing when we see an artist at work we are seeing the future unfolding relative to the energy and momentum of the artist!
In this theory creation is truly in the eye and hand of the beholder!
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Link to my web site: http://quantumartandpoetry.blogspot.co.uk/

Link to: A new interpretation of Quantum Mechanics on Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/280524372113402/

Quantum Atom Theory on facebook with diagrams and scientific experimental videos:
https://www.facebook.com/QuantumAtomTheory/

The Schrodinger’s Cat Thought Experiment Explained by QAT

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