Category :: Physics



New Quantum Weirdness: Balls That Don’t Roll Off Cliffs

Date November 20, 2008

Quantum particles continue to behave in ways traditional particles do not
A good working definition of quantum mechanics is that things are the exact opposite of what you thought they were. Empty space is full, particles are waves, and cats can be both alive and dead at the same time. Recently a group of physicists studied […]

Mysterious Source Of High-Energy Cosmic Radiation Discovered: Nearby Exotic Object?

Date November 20, 2008

Scientists announced Wednesday the discovery of a previously unidentified nearby source of high-energy cosmic rays. The finding was made with a NASA-funded balloon-borne instrument high over Antarctica.

Researchers from the Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC) collaboration, led by scientists at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, published the results in the Nov. 20 issue of the journal […]

Physicist Make Droplets Dance Above A Surface

Date November 18, 2008

Our blood, sweat and tears are three precious fluids that can answer lots of questions about the state of our health but testing small amounts of bodily fluids, without contaminating them through contact with solid surfaces or other fluids, is something that fluid mechanics have long pondered.

A group of physicists from the University of Liege, […]

Nanotechnology: Quantum Computer May Be Closer With Extended Quantum Lifetime Of Electrons

Date November 17, 2008

Physicists in the USA and at the London Centre for Nanotechnology have found a way to extend the quantum lifetime of electrons by more than 5,000 per cent, as reported recently in Physical Review Letters. Electrons exhibit a property called ‘spin’ and work like tiny magnets which can point up, down or a quantum superposition […]

‘Super-microscope’ opens at Isis

Date November 11, 2008

The world’s newest "super microscope" is fired up and ready to go.
The £200m second target station at Isis in Oxfordshire will allow scientists to see things 10,000 times thinner than a human hair.

The machine is known as a pulsed neutron source. But what does that actually mean?
Well, if you’re a physicist curious to see how […]

Physicists Create BlackMax To Search For Extra Dimensions In The Universe

Date November 10, 2008

A team of theoretical and experimental physicists, with participants from Case Western Reserve University, have designed a new black hole simulator called BlackMax to search for evidence that extra dimensions might exist in the universe.

Black holes are theorized to be regions in space where the gravitational field is so strong that nothing can escape its […]

What To Do With 15 Million Gigabytes Of Data

Date November 3, 2008

When it is fully up and running, the four massive detectors on the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva are expected to produce up to 15 million gigabytes, aka 15 petabytes, of data every year. Andreas Hirstius, manager of CERN Openlab and the CERN School of Computing, explains in […]

Ultrafast Lasers Show Snapshot Of Electrons In Action

Date October 31, 2008

In the quest to slow down and ultimately understand chemistry at the level of atoms and electrons, University of Colorado at Boulder and Canadian scientists have found a new way to peer into a molecule that allows them to see how its electrons rearrange as the molecule changes shape.

Understanding how electrons rearrange during chemical reactions […]

Memoirs Of A Qubit: Hybrid Memory Solves Key Problem For Quantum Computing

Date October 23, 2008

An international team of scientists has performed the ultimate miniaturisation of computer memory: storing information inside the nucleus of an atom. This breakthrough is a key step in bringing to life a quantum computer - a device based on the fundamental theory of quantum mechanics which could crack problems unsolvable by current technology.

In the quantum […]

Microscopic Structure Of Quantum Gases Made Visible: Bose-Einstein Condensate

Date October 22, 2008

Scientists at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz have, for the first time, succeeded in rendering the spatial distribution of individual atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate visible. Bose-Einstein condensates are small, ultracold gas clouds which, due to their low temperatures, can no longer be described in terms of traditional physics but must be described using the […]

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