Scientists have shown that they can extend the life of a molecular qubit by changing the surrounding crystal structure to be less symmetric. The asymmetry protects the qubit from noise, enabling it to hold information five times longer than if it existed in a symmetric structure. Credit: MIT/Dan Lorenza stability in asymmetry By breaking the … Read more
Artist’s conception of Cygnus A, surrounded by a ring of dust and debris with jets shooting out from its center. Magnetic fields trapping dust near the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core are illustrated. This initial study spurred a larger comparison of radio loudness with polarization and was included in the composite data set. … Read more
sAbine Hossenfelder is a German theoretical physicist who writes books and runs a YouTube channel (with 618,000 subscribers at the time of writing) called Science without Gobbledygook. Born in Frankfurt, she studied mathematics at Goethe University and continued to focus on particle physics – her PhD explored the possibility that the Large Hadron Collider could … Read more
A few hundred feet from where we are sitting there is a large metal chamber, airless and covered with wires needed to control the instruments within. A beam of particles passes through the chamber’s interior silently at about half the speed of light until it strikes a solid piece of matter, exploding rare isotopes. All … Read more
The microloop resonator, shown here as a closed loop, produces pairs of high-dimensional photons. The researchers investigated these photons by manipulating the phases of the different frequencies, or colors, of the light and mixing the frequencies, as indicated by the intersecting multicolored lines. Credit: Yun-Yi Pai/ORNL, US Department of Energy A multi-institutional team has devised … Read more
Polarization in a magnetic field perpendicular to wormholes with a different redshift coefficient α. Each color represents the observed polarization for orbitals at r = 6M (outer ring) and r = 4.5M (inner ring) for a given wormhole solution with α∈[0,3]. The polarization of the Schwarzschild black hole is given by a black dotted line … Read more
Did you know: lightning can strike the same place multiple times? For example, the Empire State Building is said to be struck by lightning approximately 23 times a year. Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain The odds of being struck by lightning are less than one in a million, but those odds were greatly reduced this month … Read more
Approximate steady state in the near field. left: profile ω̅; Right: θ̅ x. attributed to him: arXiv (2022). doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2210.07191 The motion of fluids in nature, including the flow of water in our oceans, the formation of hurricanes in our atmosphere, and the airflow surrounding aircraft, has long been described and simulated by what are … Read more
Particle physicist Donald Perkins, who died at the age of 97, made fundamental discoveries about the structure of the proton and nuclear interactions at extreme energies, first proposing the use of beams of pion particles in the treatment of cancer. His career spanned the birth of particle physics, emerging from studies of cosmic rays in … Read more
Supercomputers can beat us at chess and perform more calculations per second than the human brain. But there are other tasks our brains perform routinely that computers simply can’t match — interpreting events and situations and using imagination, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Our brains are amazingly powerful computers, using not just neurons but the connections … Read more
