From the cosmosmagazine.com article:
Chaotic behaviour has been observed for the first time in a quantum system of ‘frozen’ atoms. The controversial finding is an important step in applying classical physical laws to weird quantum systems and could have spin-off benefits in technologies such as electronics and optical fibres.
The research, led by Brian Saam from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, U.S., is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
His team examined the properties of atoms in four tubes of xenon exposed to first to a magnetic field, then to a laser beam and radio-wave pulses. This had the result of locking the samples into a crystal lattice that constrained the ‘spin’ of the atoms.
Nuclear spin is a measurement of the direction of spin of the atomic nucleus and its electrons. Spin state may be either ‘up’ or ‘down’.
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“Chaos (classical physics) and quantum mechanics lie at extreme ends of the spectrum of physical theories. Quantum mechanics deals with probabilities and statistics, while chaos is a product of classical, deterministic mathematics,” he said. “Quantum chaos straddles the boundary between these two difficult fields, and hence by its nature is controversial.”
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A new particle-smashing experiment has uncovered surprising evidence that nature treats matter and antimatter differently.
The findings, detailed today in the U.K. journal Nature, suggests that a complete solution to the mystery of why the observable universe is dominated by matter, and not antimatter, may have to await the discovery of novel particles or the invention of new physics.
Antimatter is the weird twin of matter. For every particle of normal matter, there is a particle of equal mass but opposite electric charge. When a normal particle and an anti-particle collide, they annihilate one another in an explosion of pure energy.
According to the standard model of physics, matter and antimatter were created in equal quantities shortly after the Big Bang. The two types of particles should have thus cancelled each other out and the universe should be permeated by energy.
But as our existence attests, that did not happen. Experiments suggests the universe today is composed of about 75 per cent dark energy, 20 per cent dark matter, and five per cent matter/antimatter, with the overwhelming bulk of the latter consisting of normal matter.
A major mystery of modern physics is why normal matter particles are the building blocks of the observable universe. Why are we not made of antimatter? Or pure energy? Scientists speculate that a tiny imbalance in the early universe allowed a small fraction of normal matter – one particle for every one billion – to avoid annihilation and survive to form stars, planets, and humans.
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From the sciencedaily.com article:
Scientists have used a supercomputer to shed new light on one of the most important theories of physics, the Standard Model, which encapsulates understanding of all the material that makes up the universe. This 30-year-old theory explains all the known elementary particles and three of the four forces acting upon them – however, it excludes the force of gravity, which is its shortcoming.
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From the space.com article:
Squarks, photinos, selectrons, neutralinos. These are just a few types of supersymmetric particles, a special brand of particle that may be created when the world’s most powerful atom smasher goes online this spring.
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at a particle physics lab called the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, will very likely change our understanding of the universe forever. The 17-mile-long underground particle accelerator will send protons flying around its circular track until they smash into each other going faster than 99 percent of the speed of light. When the particles impact, they will unleash energies similar to those in the universe shortly after the Big Bang, the theoretical beginning of time.
Scientists don’t know exactly what to expect from the LHC, but they anticipate its energetic collisions will create exotic particles that physicists have so far only dreamed of.
Many researchers are hoping to see supersymmetric particles, called sparticles for short. Sparticles are predicted by supersymmetry theory, which posits that for every particle we know of, there is a sister particle that we have not yet discovered. For example, the superpartner to the electron is the selectron, the partner to the quark is the squark and the partner to the photon is the photino.
Read the article here.
