Physics

We believe we know a lot about the universe but there's a lot left to be explained, especially about its origins. A team of cosmologists from the University of the Basque Country are searching for a model that best explains how the universe evolved - mathematically. One of the phenomena that standard models of physics have not yet been able to explain is that of the accelerated expansion of the universe. Although Einstein proposed a static model to describe the Cosmos, phenomena like supernovas tell us the universe is expanding. Supernovas are very brilliant stellar explosions that provide…

Mystery is unfolding at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Six tonnes of helium, not one as told before in the LHC news, were released accidentally into the tunnel. That is 40 percent of the helium inventory at the sector 3-4 as documented in an interim summary report* dated 15 October 2008. Accident investigation is ongoing. Many magnets appear to be damaged: 5 quadrupoles and 24 dipoles, for now. Also, the detection system requires work. This is not the whole story. I will write more once I digest the interim summary report. * CERN/AT/PhL Document EDMS 973073 dated 15 October 2008…

Did you know there was such a thing as 'Quantum Darwinism'?  Indeed there is, and it postulates the theory that quantum mechanical states are selected and reproduced. Theoretical proof of stable and measurable states extending over two quantum dots and creating offspring has now been provided, say researchers at the Institute of Physics at the University of Leoben, togetherwith colleagues from the Arizona State University. This supports the notion of what is known as Quantum Darwinism, which makes the selection and reproduction of quantum mechanical states responsible for theway in which…

Despite thousands of years of research, astronomers know next to nothing about how the universe is structured. One theory is that large galaxies are clustered together on structures similar to giant soap bubbles, with tinier galaxies sprinkled on the surface of this "soapy" layer.  New observations from Tel Aviv University may be giving new strength to this theory. A team led by Dr. Noah Brosch, Director of the Tel Aviv University-owned Wise Observatory, say they have uncovered what they believe are visible traces of a "filament" of dark matter –– an entity on which galaxies meet,…

Physicists working to disprove "Lorentz invariance" -- Einstein's prediction that matter and massless particles will behave the same no matter how they're turned or how fast they go -- won't get that satisfaction from muon neutrinos, at least for the time being, says a consortium of scientists. The test of Lorentz invariance, conducted by MINOS Experiment scientists and reported in the Oct. 10 issue of Physical Review Letters, started with a stream of muon neutrinos produced at Fermilab particle accelerator, near Chicago, and ended with a neutrino detector 750 meters away and 103 meters below…

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2008 with one half to Yoichiro Nambu of the Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, IL, USA "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics" and the other half jointly to; Makoto Kobayashi, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan and Toshihide Maskawa,Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Japan, "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three…

If you follow either the worlds of physics or the worlds of conspiracy theories, you know that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started this month. Shortly after an uneventful beginning (uneventful in that the world did not end, apparently to the chagrin of those supporting lawsuits to stop it from starting, who then said they knew it would not end until next year anyway) the computer system was invaded by hackers, an electrical transformer fault happened and then a 'magnetic quench' occurred. Immediately, people who know of a colloquial definition of the word 'quench' assumed this meant…

Get ready for the world's first atomic microscope. A team of physicists from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and the Madrid Institute of Advanced Studies in Nanoscience (IMDEA-Nanociencia) has created the “quantum stabilized atom mirror”, the smoothest surface ever, according to this week's edition of Advanced Materials magazine. One of the study's authors, Rodolfo Miranda, professor of condensed matter physics at the UAM and director of the IMDEA-Nanociencia, explained to SINC that the innovation with this almost perfect mirror is the ability to reflect “extraordinarily well” most…

It sounds like an episode of MacGyver. What can you make from a lump of graphite, a piece of Scotch tape and a silicon wafer? Cornell researchers didn't fly out off a cliff or blow up a door, they created the world's thinnest balloon - a membrane that is just one atom thick but strong enough to contain gases under several atmospheres of pressure without popping. Unlike your average party balloon or even a thick, sturdy glass container, this membrane is ultra-strong, leak-proof and impermeable to even nimble helium atoms. The research, by former Cornell graduate student Scott Bunch (now an…

With all the hype surrounding the Large Hadron Collider, it's easy to forget that there are lots of other puzzles in physics still being tackled every day. The Kondo effect, one of the few examples in physics where many particles collectively behave as one object (a single quantum-mechanical body), has intrigued scientists around the world for decades. When a single magnetic atom is located inside a metal, the free electrons of the metal 'screen' the atom. That way, a cloud of many electrons around the atom becomes magnetized. Sometimes, if the metal is cooled down to very low temperatures,…