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7 "Mind-Blowing" Physics Breakthroughs Since 2009

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posted on Mar, 29 2011 @ 09:53 PM
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I just stumbled across this LiveScience article, and most of it was new to me, so I thought I'd share it here.

There are so many discoveries happening now, it's hard just to keep up with them all, and I'm sure this is no complete listing of significant discoveries.


Here are the seven:

7. "Quark-gluon soup" - Feb 2010


Another amazing feat of physics came out of Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider this year. In February 2010 scientists announced they'd created a "quark-gluon soup" where protons and neutrons had broken up into their constituent building blocks – quarks and gluons.

It took extremely powerful collisions of gold atoms in the accelerator to achieve the temperatures necessary – about 7 trillion degrees Fahrenheit (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.



6. "Amazing particle triplets" - Dec 2009


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, called the Borromean rings, 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.



5. "Light bends matter" - Mar 2010


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 nanoparticles – tiny bits of matter only billionths of a meter long – in a darkened laboratory.

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.



4. "Levitating magnet" - Jan 2010

A step closer to deriving energy from fusion?


Nuclear fusion – the melding of atomic nuclei that happens inside stars – is a long-sought goal on Earth. 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, the researchers said.



3. "New antimatter particle" - Mar 2010


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, but its eerie opposite, called 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 experiment was conducted at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. The results were announced in March 2010.



2. "Knots of light" - Jan 2010


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, the physicists said.




1. "Spooky entanglement" - Jun 2009


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.




One that I notice they didn't include here, was one lab being able to achieve entanglement between 3 quantum bits that they called "quibits," the idea being to ultimately make a computer that uses entanglement to computer problems instantaneously.



Who knows, maybe one of these discoveries will lead to the next transistor (you know, the thing that revolutionized electronics, and allowed computers to fit onto desks instead of taking up whole rooms?).


And then again, in just a few more decades, we may all be looking back on these quaint discoveries with the same affection that we look on ones like these:




edit on 29-3-2011 by bsbray11 because: BB code not working to change text size



posted on Mar, 29 2011 @ 11:17 PM
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SF awesome read before crashing.



posted on Mar, 30 2011 @ 09:20 AM
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Interesting post. Nice work. Thanks!



posted on Mar, 30 2011 @ 10:46 AM
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physicsworld.com...


Many physicists believed it could not be done, but now a team in Germany has created a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) from photons. BECs are formed when identical bosons – particles with integer spin – are cooled until all particles are in the same quantum state. This means that a BEC comprising tens of thousands of particles behaves as a single quantum particle.

The first BEC was made in 1995 by cooling a cloud of rubidium atoms to near absolute zero and today such condensates are routinely used to study a variety of quantum phenomena. However, few physicists had contemplated making a BEC from the most common boson in the universe – the photon. This is because photons are easily created or destroyed when they interact with other matter, which makes it very difficult to cool a fixed number of photons such that they form a condensate.


physicsworld.com...


Physicists at CERN in Geneva are the first to capture and store atoms of antimatter for long enough to study its properties in detail. Working at the lab's ALPHA experiment, the team managed to trap 38 anti-hydrogen atoms for about 170 ms. The next step for the researchers is to measure the energy spectrum of the atoms, which could provide important clues as to why there is much more matter than antimatter in the universe.

Antihydrogen is the antimatter version of the hydrogen atom and comprises a positron – or antielectron – and an antiproton. According to the Standard Model of particle physics, the energy levels of antihydrogen should be identical to those of hydrogen. Any deviations from this could help physicists identify new physics – and explain why there is much more matter than antimatter in the universe.


physicsworld.com...


Two independent groups of physicists have built invisibility cloaks that can shield large objects lying on a plane. These "carpet cloaks" are far closer to the intuitive idea of an invisibility cloak than devices previously built, they argue, because they hide objects that can be seen with the naked eye and do so at visible wavelengths. The cloaks are also relatively cheap and easy to make, being constructed from the natural material calcite.



thetechjournal.com...


The engineers of “School of Engineering and Applied Sciences” of Princeton University have made a breakthrough the development of new materials. They have solved an 80-year-old quandary in quantum physics. This can predict the kinetic energy of electrons in simple metals—and semiconductors—will enable computers to simulate the behavior of new materials up to 100,000 times faster than they currently can and that could make electronic devices smaller and cars more energy efficient.

Originally Posted: thetechjournal.com...


I HEART SCIENCE



posted on Mar, 30 2011 @ 03:17 PM
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reply to post by Nefarious
 


Damn! And all of those are from 2010 and 2011!


I think our rate of achieving scientific advances is also following one of these curves:




posted on Mar, 31 2011 @ 12:16 PM
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Uber woot!



Neil Savage / February 2011 - IEEE.org

17 February 2011—Yale University physicists have built an antilaser, a device capable of completely absorbing coherent light beams instead of scattering them as most other things do. If such a device proves practical, it might provide a way to build miniature silicon optical switches or lead to new types of photonic sensors.

The device works on the same principle as a laser but in reverse, and uses "time-reversal symmetry," a concept from electromagnetic theory. In essence, explains A. Douglas Stone, a professor of applied physics at Yale, "anything that could go forwards, the same process could go backwards."



Physics Breakthrough: Fast-Moving Neutral Atom Isolated and Captured

The entrapment of the Rubidium 85 atom is the result of a three-year research project funded by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, and has already prompted world-wide interest in the new science which will flow from the breakthrough.

A team of four researchers from Otago's Physics Department, led by Dr Mikkel F. Andersen, used laser cooling technology to dramatically slow a group of rubidium 85 atoms. A laser-beam, or "optical tweezers," was then deployed to isolate and hold one atom -- at which point it could be photographed through a microscope.


I'm always intrigued by anything involving gold and biology, mainly due to all that Mana / ORME schtuff.


Hydrocarbo n Breakthrough Made Using Gold Catalyst

"Our research resulted in unprecedented yields of a single product of over 90%. We achieved this using a gold catalyst, an unexpected result as gold is the most noble of the elements."

This opens up the possibility of using hydrocarbon feedstocks in a new way to form intermediates and final products for use in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and agricultural business sectors.


And just one of many lab-on-a-chip breakthroughs in the last two years. These chips are just amazing, thanks to real progress in resonance.


Breakthrough Towards Lab-on-Chip System for Fast Detection of Single Nucleotide Variations in DNA

ScienceDaily (Dec. 27, 2010) — Panasonic, core partner within imec's Human++ program and imec has present at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco various critical components of a biomedical lab-on-chip sensor enabling fast detection of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) in DNA, such as a miniaturized pump for on-chip generation of high pressures, a micropillar filter optimized for DNA separation achieving world-record resolution, and a SNP detector allowing on-chip detection using very small sample volumes.



posted on Apr, 2 2011 @ 12:21 PM
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reply to post by bsbray11
 


Excellent bsbray11...

I found this article on "entanglement"... Someone lifted it off New Scientist mag...

Entanglement: The weirdest link

Brilliant thread man... thanks

Seems Muggles are catching a glimpse of the Wizarding World... It's about time they do, even if only from the corner of their eye. :|



posted on Apr, 8 2011 @ 08:27 AM
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reply to post by bsbray11
 


I especially like the bit where light does NOT travel in a straight line...

Thank you.




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