“Canadian and international scientists have announced a major breakthrough in their ability to capture and store minuscule particles of antimatter, the mysterious substance described as a mirror image of everyday reality. It lies at the heart of the most fundamental questions in physics.

‘I call this a game-changer,’ said Makoto Fujiwara, a University of Calgary scientist and the lead author of a paper published in the journal Nature Physics.

‘The antimatter world is some sort of mirror world,’ he said.

‘We’re really peeking. There’s so many things were thought of as science fiction that we can seriously consider scientifically studying them. We’re really excited about this.’”

Mirror image: physics breakthrough offers peek at antimatter universe – The Canadian Press

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“The findings can be summarized as follows. (1) We have demonstrated confinement of antihydrogen atoms for 1,000 s. Our calculations show that these atoms are very probably in the atomic ground state after ~1 s, providing the first indication that anti-atoms have been prepared in the ground state, as required for precision spectroscopy. (2) From the distributions of annihilations in time and position of the released anti-atoms, information on the kinetic-energy distribution of the trapped antihydrogen was obtained for the first time. Our data are consistent with a model in which antihydrogen is produced from antiprotons thermalized in a positron plasma. Furthermore, from our detailed simulation studies, several features of trapping dynamics have been identified, including the possibility of measuring anisotropic energy distributions.”

Confinement of antihydrogen for 1,000 seconds – Nature Physics

Aaron O’Connell is the first person to experimentally induce and measure quantum effects in the motion of a humanmade object, bridging the quantum and classical worlds.

“Information theory, to be ontologically real, must rest on something like Feynman’s formulation of quantum mechanics.

And, startlingly, this seems to rule out the Bohmian interpretation of quantum mechanics in which the behavior of the total system is deterministic, but merely epistemologically unknowable. Here information would not be ontologically real.

In short, if we think information is ontologically real, we seem stuck with its base in quantum mechanics and quantum ontological Possibiles.”

Information Needs Quantum Indeterminacy – NPR

This decay would be visible as jets of particles. Physicists I’ve seen asked about these have more or less said you couldn’t miss it.

What you could do, however, is mistake something else for a black hole. Interactions governed by quantum chromodynamics will also produce jets at a certain frequency, so the black-hole events would have to stand out above this background. So that’s what the new analysis looks for. The authors model what the jets from both string and quantum theories should look like in order to allow them to pull out and save jet events. (This actually involved the same modeling software used by the people who evaluated the TSA’s scanners.)

They then use an area of the LHC’s energy spectrum that’s too low to produce black holes to figure out the level of background jet production via quantum chromodynamics. Next, they extend the analysis into the energy range where black holes should appear, and see whether any signal tands out above this background. It doesn’t. ‘We can exclude the production of black holes with minimum mass of 3.5-4.5 eV [electron volts] for values of the multidimensional Planck scale up to 3.5 TeV [teraelectron volts] at 95 percent CL [confidence level],’ the authors conclude.”

Missing Black Holes Cause Trouble for String Theory – Wired.com

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Now a research collaboration at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, has managed, 38 times, to confine single antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic trap for more than 170 milliseconds. ‘We’re ecstatic. This is five years of hard work,’ says Jeffrey Hangst, spokesman for the ALPHA collaboration at CERN.”

Antimatter held for questioning – Nature.com

“In 1929, Leó Szilárd invented a feedback protocol1 in which a hypothetical intelligence—dubbed Maxwell’s demon—pumps heat from an isothermal environment and transforms it into work. After a long-lasting and intense controversy it was finally clarified that the demon’s role does not contradict the second law of thermodynamics, implying that we can, in principle, convert information to free energy2, 3, 4, 5, 6. An experimental demonstration of this information-to-energy conversion, however, has been elusive. Here we demonstrate that a non-equilibrium feedback manipulation of a Brownian particle on the basis of information about its location achieves a Szilárd-type information-to-energy conversion. Using real-time feedback control, the particle is made to climb up a spiral-staircase-like potential exerted by an electric field and gains free energy larger than the amount of work done on it. This enables us to verify the generalized Jarzynski equality7, and suggests a new fundamental principle of an ‘information-to-heat engine’ that converts information into energy by feedback control.”

Experimental demonstration of information-to-energy conversion and validation of the generalized Jarzynski equality – Nature.com

As many of you know, the censors at YouTube have been threatening to shut down the video channel affiliated with this blog. Today, they did just that. On the bright side, I knew this day was coming and have spent the past few weeks uploading videos to my new channel at Daily Motion. Here’s the link:

dailymotion.com/theobservereffect

To those of you who were my friends and subscribers at YouTube, many thanks. I have enjoyed our adventures in physics, consciousness and mind-body medicine, appreciate your continuing support and I hope you will join me on my new Daily Motion channel, which features all my of YouTube videos… and more!

Kelly

“Yesterday (Sept. 29), a team of researchers announced the discovery of Gliese 581g, a rocky, roughly Earth-size planet in its parent star’s so-called “habitable zone” — a just-right range that can allow liquid water to exist.

One of the planet’s discoverers said in a briefing yesterday that “the chances of life on this planet are 100 percent.” To determine if this is true, researchers will have to scrutinize Gliese 581g from afar, searching its atmosphere for certain telltale molecules.”

If There’s Life on Alien Planet Gliese 581g, How Do We Find It? – Space.com

“Entanglement is a fascinating property connecting quantum systems. Albert Einstein
called it the ‘spooky action at a distance’. This bizarre coupling can link particles, even if they are located on opposite sides of the galaxy. The strength of their connections is behind the promising quantum computers, the dream machines capable of quick and efficient computations.

The team lead by Rainer Blatt at the Institute of Experimental Physics of the University of Innsbruck has been working very successfully towards the realization of a quantum computer. In their recent study, these physicists exposed four entangled ions to a noisy environment. ‘At the beginning the ions showed very strong connections,’ says Julio Barreiro. ‘When exposed to the disturbing environment, the ions started a journey to the classical world. In this journey, their entanglement showed a variety of flavors or properties.’”

Quantum physics: Flavors of entanglement – Physorg.com

‘It is a small effect, but it is very interesting in itself,’ said physicist Guido Tonelli, spokesperson for the LHC’s CMS experiment. Tonelli and colleagues announced the results in a seminar at CERN September 21 and in a paper submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics.

It’s as if two particles somehow talked to each other when they were produced, the physicists said. This phenomenon has never been seen before in proton-proton collisions, though it resembles something seen at RHIC (the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. That effect was interpreted to be from the creation of hot dense matter shortly after the collisions.”

LHC Detects Evidence of New Physics – Wired Science

Recent observations of distant galaxies suggest that the strength of the electromagnetic force – the so-called fine-structure constant – actually varies throughout the universe. In one direction, the constant seemed to grow larger the farther astronomers looked; in another direction the constant took on smaller values with greater distance.

If confirmed, this revelation could reshape physicists’ understanding of cosmology from the ground up. It may even help solve a major conundrum: Why are all the constants of nature perfectly tuned for life to exist?

‘When you look in one direction, you cannot distinguish between variation in space and variation in time,’ co-researcher Victor Flambaum, also of the University of New South Wales, told SPACE.com. ‘Now there is nearly complete coverage of the sky. The conclusion is: It’s a variation in space, not in time.’ “

New Physics? Fundamental Cosmic Constant Now Seems Shifty – Space.com

“The first rule is that this qubit can slide smoothly and continuously between the two states in its superposition. This is sufficient to distinguish quantum theory from classical physics, where such effortless reversible transitions are not possible, but does not rule out a weirder theory.

The second rule is that whatever superposition state the qubit is in, you can only ever extract one bit of information from it- you can only measure it in one state at once.

The third rule applies only to composite systems of two or more qubits. Knowing the probabilities that the individual qubits are in a particular state plus the probabilities of correlations between them tells you the state of the whole system. This encapsulates the property of entanglement between remote quantum states that experiments show holds in the real world.

Only a theory precisely as correlated as quantum theory can obey all the axioms and produce the kind of entanglement observed in nature. Less correlated theories don’t create entanglement at all, while weirder theories produce a situation where, for example, you might measure the state of all the qubits in a system, know the correlations between them, and still not be able to say what state the whole system is in. ‘Entanglement is the unique feature, and it comes out of the three axioms,’ says Brukner.”

Is quantum theory weird enough for the real world? – New Scientist

The qualities of a high-temperature superconductor — a compound in which electrons obey the spooky laws of quantum physics, and flow in perfect synchrony, without friction — appear linked to the fractal arrangements of seemingly random oxygen atoms.

Those atoms weren’t thought to matter, especially not in relation to the behavior of individual electrons, which exist at a scale thousands of times smaller. The findings, published Aug. 12 in Nature, are a physics equivalent of discovering a link between two utterly separate dimensions.”

Inexplicable Superconductor Fractals Hint at Higher Universal Laws – Wired Science
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“Superconductivity, where a material conducts electricity at very low temperature with no resistance, and therefore transmission wastes virtually no energy, has applications ranging from medical scanners to maglev trains.

Until now, scientists have focused on atomic-scale phenomena to explain this mysterious property of some special compounds.

But in this week’s Nature, UCL researchers from the London Centre for Nanotechnology, working with collaborators in Rome and Grenoble, report that the strength of the superconductivity – its ability to persist as temperature is increased– correlates in certain oxide materials with structures visible over a range of length scales. Intriguingly, these structures extend almost to the millimeter scale, and have a “fractal” nature, similar to the intricate patterns in a snowflake.”

Fractals make better superconductors – UCL News

“Since Horava published his work in January 2009, it has received an astonishing amount of attention. Already, more than 250 papers have been written about it. Some researchers have started using it to explain away the twin cosmological mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Others are finding that black holes might not behave as we thought. If Horava’s idea is right, it could forever change our conception of space and time and lead us to a “theory of everything”, applicable to all matter and the forces that act on it.

For decades now, physicists have been stymied in their efforts to reconcile Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which describes gravity, and quantum mechanics, which describes particles and forces (except gravity) on the smallest scales. The stumbling block lies with their conflicting views of space and time. As seen by quantum theory, space and time are a static backdrop against which particles move. In Einstein’s theories, by contrast, not only are space and time inextricably linked, but the resulting space-time is moulded by the bodies within it…”

Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time – New Scientist

In a study published in the July 1 issue of the journal Nature, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Alex Rimberg and his colleagues describe one example of the microscopic quantum world influencing, even dominating they say, the behavior of something in the macroscopic classical world. They used tiny semiconducting crystals that contain two separate reservoirs of electrons to explore the different influences of both classical and quantum physics.

‘We found that the motion of the crystals is not dominated by something classical like thermal motion, but instead by random quantum fluctuations in the number of electrons tunneling through the barrier; the fluctuations were the size of about 10,000 electrons,’ says Rimberg. ‘But the macroscopic world in this study also influences the quantum world, in that the vibrations of the crystal caused the electrons to tunnel in big bunches, more or less in sync with the vibrations of the crystal.’”

Dartmouth Researchers Contribute To Solving A Quantum Puzzle – RedOrbit