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It’s easy to take time’s arrow for granted — but the gears of physics actually work just as smoothly in reverse. Maybe that time machine is possible after all?

An experiment earlier this year shows just how much wiggle room we can expect when it comes to distinguishing the past from the future, at least on a quantum scale. It might not allow us to relive the 1960s, but it could help us better understand why not.

Researchers from Russia and the US teamed up to find a way to break, or at least bend, one of physics’ most fundamental laws on energy.

Hailed as a pioneer by Photonics Media for his previous discoveries of supercontinuum and Cr tunable lasers, City College of New York Distinguished Professor of Science and Engineering Robert R. Alfano and his research team are claiming another breakthrough with a new super-class of photons dubbed “Majorana photons.” They could lead to enhanced information on quantum-level transition and imaging of the brain and its working.

Alfano’s group based its research on the fact that photons, while possessing salient properties of polarization, wavelength, coherence and spatial modes, take on several forms. “Photons are amazing and are all not the same,” Alfano says.

Their focus “was to use a special super-form of photons, which process the entanglement twists of both polarizations and the wavefront … and would propagate deeper in brain tissues, microtubules and neuron cells, giving more fundamental information of the brain than the conventional photon forms.”

Spaceflight is hard. Blasting heavy cargo, spacecraft, and maybe people to respectable speeds over interplanetary distances requires an amount of propellant too massive for current rockets to haul into the void. That is, unless you have an engine that can generate thrust without fuel.

It sounds impossible, but scientists at NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories have been building and testing just such a thing. Called an EmDrive, the physics-defying contraption ostensibly produces thrust simply by bouncing microwaves around inside a closed, cone-shaped cavity, no fuel required.

The device last made headlines in late 2016 when a leaked study reported the results of the latest round of NASA testing. Now, independent researchers in Germany have built their own EmDrive, with the goal of testing innovative propulsion concepts and determining whether their seeming success is real or an artifact.

Using a new technique, scientists have performed the world’s smallest magnetic resonance imaging to capture the magnetic fields of single atoms. It’s an incredible breakthrough that could improve quantum research, as well as our understanding of the Universe on subatomic scales.

“I am very excited about these results,” said physicist Andreas Heinrich of the Institute for Basic Sciences in Seoul. “It is certainly a milestone in our field and has very promising implications for future research.”

You’re probably most familiar with magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, as a method used to image internal body structures in medicine. An MRI machine uses highly powerful magnets to induce a strong magnetic field around the body, forcing the spin of the protons in the nuclei of your body’s hydrogen atoms to align with the magnetic field, all without producing side-effects.

Atom Computing is building quantum computers using individually controlled atoms.

As one of the world’s leading researchers in atomic clocks and neutral atoms, Benjamin Bloom (co-founder of Atom Computing) built the world’s fastest atomic clock, and it is considered the most precise and accurate measurement ever performed.

Ben has shown that neutral atoms could be more scalable, and could build a stable solution to create and maintain controlled quantum states. He used his expertise to lead efforts at Intel on their 10nm semiconductor chip, and then to lead research and development of the first cloud-accessible quantum computer at Rigetti.

Science, Space & Robotics News | Posted: 9 hours, 42 mins ago.

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Time goes in one direction: forward. Little boys become old men but not vice versa; teacups shatter but never spontaneously reassemble. This cruel and immutable property of the universe, called the “arrow of time,” is fundamentally a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates that systems will always tend to become more disordered over time. But recently, researchers from the U.S. and Russia have bent that arrow just a bit — at least for subatomic particles.

In the new study, published Tuesday (Mar. 12) in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers manipulated the arrow of time using a very tiny quantum computer made of two quantum particles, known as qubits, that performed calculations. [Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings]

At the subatomic scale, where the odd rules of quantum mechanics hold sway, physicists describe the state of systems through a mathematical construct called a wave function. This function is an expression of all the possible states the system could be in — even, in the case of a particle, all the possible locations it could be in — and the probability of the system being in any of those states at any given time. Generally, as time passes, wave functions spread out; a particle’s possible location can be farther away if you wait an hour than if you wait 5 minutes.

In an incredible first, scientists have captured the world’s first actual photo of quantum entanglement — a phenomenon so strange, physicist Albert Einstein famously described it as ‘spooky action at a distance’.

The image was captured by physicists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and it’s so breathtaking we can’t stop staring.

It might not look like much, but just stop and think about it for a second: this fuzzy grey image is the first time we’ve seen the particle interaction that underpins the strange science of quantum mechanics and forms the basis of quantum computing.

Scientists have achieved the first realization of a terahertz quantum cascade laser operating without cryogenic cooling. This feat heralds the widespread use of these devices in practical applications.