-
-
--------------------- 2575 - STRANGE PHYSICS - in 2020 experiments.
-
---------------- QUARK - GLUON SOUP - The ALICE experiment in the cyclotron in Switzerland is recording the tracks made by heavy ion collisions in the Quark-gluon soup. Such collisions are likely to create conditions closer to the beginning of the universe than ever before, though obviously on a much, much smaller scale.
-
- In February 2010 scientists announced they had created a "quark-gluon soup" where protons and neutrons had broken up into their constituent building blocks, the fundamental particles of quarks and gluons.
-
- It took extremely powerful collisions of gold atoms in the accelerator to achieve the temperatures necessary, about 4 trillion degrees Celsius. These conditions are 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun and similar to temperatures seen just after the birth of the universe. They were the hottest temperatures ever reached on Earth.
-
- Quark-gluon plasma is a state of matter in which the elementary particles that make up the hadrons of baryonic matter are freed of their strong attraction for one another under extremely high energy densities. These particles are the quarks and gluons that compose baryonic matter.
-
- Although the experimental high temperatures and densities predicted as producing a quark-gluon plasma have been realized in the laboratory, the resulting matter does not behave as a quasi-ideal state of free quarks and gluons, but, rather, as an almost perfect dense fluid.
-
- Because of the extremely high energies involved, quark-antiquark pairs are produced by pair production and thus QGP is a roughly equal mixture of quarks and antiquarks of various flavors, with only a slight excess of quarks. This property is not a general feature of conventional plasmas, which may be too cool for pair production.
-
- The ultimate goal of the fluid-gravity correspondence is to understand QGP. The QGP is believed to be a phase of QCD which is completely locally thermal and thus suitable for an effective fluid dynamics.
-
--------------- BORROMEAN RINGS - The Borromean rings, a symbol dating back to the second century, were recreated with lithium atoms. Using lithium atoms, scientists recreated an ancient mathematical symbol that had been seen as far back as the second century in Afghan Buddhist art. The symbol depicts three rings linked together. If any ring were removed, they would all come apart.
-
- Physicists predicted that particles should be able to form this same arrangement, but no one had been able to achieve it until now. The final realization, announced in December 2009, came 40 years after the prediction.
-
- In knot theory, the Borromean rings are a simple example of a Brunnian link: although each pair of rings is unlinked, the whole link cannot be unlinked. There are a number of ways of seeing this.
-
- In arithmetic topology, there is an analogy between knots and prime numbers in which one considers links between primes. The triple of primes (13, 61, 937) are linked modulo 2, but, are pair wise unlinked modulo 2. Therefore, these primes have been called a "proper Borromean triple modulo 2", or "mod 2 Borromean primes".
-
----------------- LIGHT BENDING MATTER - While it's easy to see matter bending light, just look through a prism, it's rare to find light bending matter. But scientists saw just that in an experiment reported in March 2010. Researchers assembled flat ribbons of nano-particles, tiny bits of matter only billionths of a meter long.
-
- Then when the ribbons were exposed to light, they curled up into spirals. The results could help engineers design new types of optics and electronics.
-
- -------------------- NUCLEAR FUSION - A tokamak reactor is housed inside a 16-foot-diameter steel structure in a building on the MIT campus that also houses MIT’s other fusion reactor, a tokamak called Alcator C-mod.
-
- Nuclear fusion is the melding of atomic nuclei that happens inside stars. If scientists can achieve it, it could offer a powerful source of energy with few negative environmental consequences.
-
- Scientists took a step closer to this goal in January 2010 when they announced they'd built a levitating magnet that created some of the conditions thought to be necessary for fusion. By suspending a giant donut-shaped magnet in midair, researchers were able to control the motion of an extremely hot gas of charged particles contained within the magnet's outer chamber. The density of this gas was “close” to what's needed for nuclear fusion.
-
---------------------- ANTI- HYPER TRITON - By smashing particles together at close to light speed inside an atom smasher, scientists created a never-before-seen type of matter: an anti-hypertriton. This particle is weird in many ways:
-
- First, it's not normal matter, it’s antimatter, which annihilates whenever it comes into contact with regular mass. Second, the anti-hypertriton is what's called a "strange" particle, meaning it contains a rare building block called a strange quark, which isn't present in the protons and neutrons that make up regular atoms.
-
- The hypertriton is a type of hypernucleus, formed of a proton, a neutron and any hyperon. The name comes from hyperon, which refers to baryons containing strange quarks, and triton, which refers to the nucleus of tritium. Because low-mass hyperons are longer-lived and easier to create than high-mass hyperons, the most common hypertritons are those containing Lambda baryons.
-
- Its antiparticle, the antihypertriton, is formed of an antiproton, an antineutron and any antihyperon. The first one was discovered in March 2010 by the “STAR detector” of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
-
------------------ KNOT THEORY: By reflecting a laser beam from a specially designed hologram , physicists created knots of dark filaments. Light may seem to travel a straight line, but sometimes it gets twisted into knots.
-
- In January 2010 researchers reported using a computer-controlled hologram to twist beams of laser light into pretzel shapes. The holograms, which direct the flow of light, were specially created to send light in certain directions and shapes.
-
- The researchers used a field of mathematics known as knot theory to study the resulting loops. These swirls of light, called optical vortices, could have implications for future laser devices.
-
- Physical knot theory is the study of mathematical models of knotting phenomena, often motivated by considerations from biology, chemistry, and physics. Physical knot theory is used to study how geometric and topological characteristics of filamentary structures, such as magnetic flux tubes, vortex filaments, polymers, DNAs, influence their physical properties and functions.
-
- It has applications in various fields of science, including topological fluid dynamics, structural complexity analysis and DNA biology .
-
- Traditional knot theory models a knot as a simple closed loop in three-dimensional space. Such a knot has no thickness or physical properties such as tension or friction. Physical knot theory incorporates more realistic models. The traditional model is also studied but with an eye toward properties of specific embeddings ("conformations") of the circle. Such properties include rope length and various knot energies.
-
-------------------- ENTANGLEMENT: Physicists exposed four entangled particles to a noisy environment to see if they held on to their quantum entanglement. One of the strangest predictions of the theory of quantum mechanics is that particles can become "entangled" so that even after they are separated in space, when an action is performed on one particle, the other particle responds immediately.
-
- In June 2009 scientists announced they had measured entanglement in a new kind of system, two separated pairs of vibrating particles. Previous experiments had entangled the internal properties of particles, such as spin states, but this was the first time scientists had entangled the particles' pattern of motion, which is a system that resembles the larger, everyday world.
-
- Quantum entanglement is a label for the observed physical phenomenon that occurs when a pair or group of particles is generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in a way such that the quantum state of each particle of the pair or group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance.
-
- The topic of quantum entanglement is at the heart of the disparity between classical and quantum physics. Measurements of physical properties such as position, momentum, spin, and polarization, performed on entangled particles are found to be perfectly correlated.
-
- For example, if a pair of entangled particles is generated such that their total spin is known to be zero, and one particle is found to have clockwise spin on a first axis, then the spin of the other particle, measured on the same axis, will be found to be counterclockwise.
-
- However, this behavior gives rise to seemingly paradoxical effects: any measurement of a property of a particle results in an irreversible wave function collapse of that particle and will change the original quantum state. In the case of entangled particles, such a measurement will affect the entangled system as a whole.
-
- Such phenomena were the subject of a 1935 paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, and several papers by Erwin Schrödinger shortly thereafter, describing what came to be known as the EPR paradox.
-
- Einstein and others considered such behavior to be impossible, as it violated the local realism view of causality. Einstein referring to it as "spooky action at a distance", and argued that the accepted formulation of quantum mechanics must therefore be incomplete.
-
- Later, however, the counterintuitive predictions of quantum mechanics were verified experimentally in tests in which polarization or spin of entangled particles were measured at separate locations, statistically violating Bell's inequality. In earlier tests it couldn't be absolutely ruled out that the test result at one point could have been subtly transmitted to the remote point, affecting the outcome at the second location.
-
- However, so-called "loophole-free" Bell tests have been performed in which the locations were separated such that communications at the speed of light would have taken longer, in one case 10,000 times longer, than the interval between the measurements.
-
- According to some interpretations of quantum mechanics, the effect of one measurement occurs instantly. Other interpretations which don't recognize wave function collapse dispute that there is any "effect" at all.
-
- However, all interpretations agree that entanglement produces correlation between the measurements and that the mutual information between the entangled particles can be exploited, but that any transmission of information at faster-than-light speeds is impossible.
Quantum entanglement has been demonstrated experimentally with photons, neutrinos,[ electrons, molecules as large as buckyballs, and even small diamonds.
-
- On July 13, 2019, scientists from the University of Glasgow reported taking the first ever photo of a strong form of quantum entanglement known as Bell entanglement. The utilization of entanglement in communication, computation and quantum radar is currently a very active area of research and development.
-
---------------------------- Index of other Physics Reviews, that are more down to earth. All available upon request:
-
- 2386 - Laws of motion?
- 2261 - The science of physics?
- 2220 - The laws of motion?
- 2219 - Mysteries for science students?
- 2218 - Physics in CD’s and DVD’s?
- 2217 - The standard model of physics?
- 2051 - Paul Dirac’s physics?
- 2050 - The quest for reality?
- 2040 - Physics in oceans and molecules?
- 2021 - New discoveries in planets and stars?
- 2015 - Quantum mechanic and the theory of relativity?
- 2021 - New discoveries in physics?
- 2009 - Physics theory of everything?
- 2004 - The trouble with physics, 5 big problems?
- 2003 - Too weird to ponder?
- 2002 - Physics the way I learned it?
- 1995 - The natural constants?
- 1984 - Delving into extreme physics?
- 1301 - Can bird poop break a car windshield?
- 532 - Robert Millican, a physics teacher.
- 531 - Joseph Henry, an American teacher.
- 524 - Physics keeps getting simpler.
-
- January 3, 2020 2575
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ----
--- Some reviews are at: -------------- http://jdetrick.blogspot.com -----
-- email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews
--- to: ------ jamesdetrick@comcast.net ------ “Jim Detrick” -----------
- https://plus.google.com/u/0/ -- www.facebook.com -- www.twitter.com
--------------------- Saturday, January 4, 2020 --------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment