HENRIETTA, N.Y (WROC) According to the Rochester Institute of Technology, Mishkat Bhattacharya, an associate professor at RITsSchool of Physics and AstronomyandFuture Photon Initiative, proposed a new method for detecting superfluid motion in anarticle published inPhysical Review Letters.

Bhattacharyas theoretical team on the paper consisted of RIT postdoctoral researchers Pardeep Kumar and Tushar Biswas, and alumnus Kristian Feliz 21 (physics). The international collaborators consisted of professors Rina Kanamoto from Meiji University, Ming-Shien Chang from the Academia Sinica, and Anand Jha from the Indian Institute of Technology. Bhattacharyas work was supported by aCAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

The laser is shined through the superfluid in a minimally destructive manner, and the system can then read how the superfluid and light react, so the subatomic movements can be observed and studied.

This new research represents the first time that scientists will be able to get a closer look at how this seemingly-physics-defying moves. As scientists understand this wonder-liquid, they can start to harness it to make incredibly efficient power generation.

Bhattacharyas measuring method can also be used in quantum information processing.

So, clearly, theres a lot going on there. Lets break it down.

A superfluid is a gas or a liquid that can move without viscosity, or internal friction.

This means that the particles dont jostle each other, Bhattacharya said. Theyre not elbowing each other, or colliding.

Water for example has a very low viscosity. Its easy to imagine how quickly and smoothly water flows, compared to a highly viscous fluid, like maple syrup.

Its difficult to imagine, but a superfluid has zero internal friction.

This means that it slows down at an incredibly slow rate, meaning that once the gas or liquid is set in motion, its nearly impossible to stop. It also means that this movement of the particles doesnt lose energy like other processes of friction.

Slamming the brakes on your car introduces a lot of friction, and everyone knows that there is a lot of sound and heat that is given off. That is the release of energy when friction is applied. Superfluids dont have this.

This unusual trait can be harnessed practically if an electrical current is applied to it.

If you can get something to flow, its like current going around in a circle, Bhattacharya said.

That means that unlike normal electrical circuits that get incredibly hot when they are used to capacity, these atomtronic circuits with superfluid dont.

We dont really understand the physics of this, Bhattacharya said.

Part and parcel with this lack of understanding is that the only known superfluids like liquid helium only reach that state when they are supercooled. Needless to say, our cell phones would be massive and unusable if they needed a supercooler to use them.

Bhattacharya says that if someone can discover a superfluid that works at room temperature, they would not only win a Nobel prize, but they would revolutionize technology as we know it.

He says tests in Germany have shown that this technology admittedly with the supercooled superfluid can power entire towns in an economically feasible way.

Youd have to ask a computer scientist, Bhattacharya said when asked how much more powerful our phones would get. But it would be reasonable to say one hundred or one thousand times more powerful.

The challenge in creating a room temperature superfluid is that as Bhattacharya alluded to, physicists dont quite understand how superfluids really work, beyond the visually observable macro effects, like seeing it infinitely loop in a closed circuit, or the creep effect of liquid helium.

But to begin to understand how superfluids work, Bhattacharya and his team decided they needed a way to measure its subatomic movement, using quantum physics.

If you think about the particles of which the fluid is made, as little balls, it is impossible to explain what it is, without realizing that it also acts as a wave, he said.

So since an electrically charged superfluid circuit acts more like a wave rather than a particle, because of its lack of friction and electrical charges, it becomes a quantum object. Which means then that even the incredibly weak pressure force of a light wave will destroy the object, making it impossible to observe.

Bhattacharya and his team worked their way around this problem, by calibrating their laser light source to be a different wavelength than the superfluid that they are observing.

This minimally destructive method allows them to observe the incredibly small effect that the laser has, and by studying that wiggle, they can begin to determine how superfluid moves.

Once they understand how it moves, they can begin to figure out how to engineer a superfluid that stays in that state at room temperature.

Interestingly, this measuring method also has that application.

Scientists have begun to encode information on a paritcular kind of quantum particular that wiggles in a particular way. That can not only storage vast amounts of information, but move information at the speed of light.

Bhattacharya says that fiber optics does this is some manner, but the optics are too impure to move at that speed, and even the most advance fiber optics need signal boosters and repeaters at fairly regular intervals.

While quantum light processing made need those as well, the information would still be moving at the speed of light.

But his measuring technology can begin to more precisely measure the quantum wiggle, allowing them to figure out how to store the information longer.

It started at 1 millionth of a second, Bhattacharya said. Its now up to 60 seconds of storage. Thats seven orders of magnitude greater.

With Bhattacharya and his team on it, we may have those 1,000 times stronger cell phones in no time.

Read more:

RIT professor and team discover new method to measure motion of superfluids - RochesterFirst

Since winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, Strickland says that she feels that more people in her community pay attention to her voice. Also, she now has seats on various government-led research organizations in Canada and the US, which she never had before.

The award has opened up opportunities for conveying to nonscientists what scientists do and why, something I embrace, Schleier-Smith says. These opportunities range from interviewing with National Public Radio to sitting on a career panel for high school students. I love the fact that the MacArthur has led to invitations to speak to so many different audiences.

Ive always believed tremendously in the value of visible role models, Ghez says. Ghez makes herself visible by teaching introductory undergraduate classes, where, she says, she can shape the next generations ideas about who can be a scientist.

As a woman of color, I have faced a myriad of challenges within and outside of science, Nissanke says, adding that she uses the attention garnered from her prize to advocate for diversity in science. She says that, with more role models speaking up about racism and sexism in science and then promoting change from within, she hopes that people from all backgroundsand not just privileged oneswill consider careers in physics or astronomy. The night skies are for everyone, she says.

UCLA Galactic Center Group

UCLA Galactic Center Group

The rest is here:

Physics - The Women Who Win - Physics

Rice physicists teamed with colleagues at Europes Large Hadron Collider to study matter-generating collisions of light. Researchers showed the departure angle of debris from the smashups is subtly distorted by quantum interference patterns in the light prior to impact. Credit: Illustration by 123rf.com

Understanding photon collisions could aid search for physics beyond the Standard Model.

Hot on the heels of proving an 87-year-old prediction that matter can be generated directly from light, Rice University physicists and their colleagues have detailed how that process may impact future studies of primordial plasma and physics beyond the Standard Model.

We are essentially looking at collisions of light, said Wei Li, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Rice and co-author of the study published in Physical Review Letters.

We know from Einstein that energy can be converted into mass, said Li, a particle physicist who collaborates with hundreds of colleagues on experiments at high-energy particle accelerators like the European Organization for Nuclear Researchs Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and Brookhaven National Laboratorys Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).

Accelerators like RHIC and LHC routinely turn energy into matter by accelerating pieces of atoms near the speed of light and smashing them into one another. The 2012 discovery of the Higgs particle at the LHC is a notable example. At the time, the Higgs was the final unobserved particle in the Standard Model, a theory that describes the fundamental forces and building blocks of atoms.

Rice physics professor Wei Li (left) and postdoctoral research associate Shuai Yang teamed with colleagues at the Large Hadron Colliders (LHC) Compact Muon Solenoid experiment to study matter-generating collisions of light that occurred in heavy ion experiments at LHC. Yang lead-authored a newly published study that detailed how the departure angle of debris from the smashups is subtly distorted by quantum interference patterns prior to impact. Credit: Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Impressive as it is, physicists know the Standard Model explains only about 4% of the matter and energy in the universe. Li said this weeks study, which was lead-authored by Rice postdoctoral researcher Shuai Yang, has implications for the search for physics beyond the Standard Model.

There are papers predicting that you can create new particles from these ion collisions, that we have such a high density of photons in these collisions that these photon-photon interactions can create new physics beyond in the Standard Model, Li said.

Yang said, To look for new physics, one must understand Standard Model processes very precisely. The effect that weve seen here has not been previously considered when people have suggested using photon-photon interactions to look for new physics. And its extremely important to take that into account.

The effect Yang and colleagues detailed occurs when physicists accelerate opposing beams of heavy ions in opposite directions and point the beams at one another. The ions are nuclei of massive elements like gold or lead, and ion accelerators are particularly useful for studying the strong force, which binds fundamental building blocks called quarks in the neutrons and protons of atomic nuclei. Physicists have used heavy ion collisions to overcome those interactions and observe both quarks and gluons, the particles quarks exchange when they interact via the strong force.

But nuclei arent the only things that collide in heavy ion accelerators. Ion beams also produce electric and magnetic fields that shroud each nuclei in the beam with its own cloud of light. These clouds move with the nuclei, and when clouds from opposing beams meet, individual particles of light called photons can meet head-on.

In a PRL study published in July, Yang and colleagues used data from RHIC to show photon-photon collisions produce matter from pure energy. In the experiments, the light smashups occurred along with nuclei collisions that created a primordial soup called quark-gluon plasma, or QGP.

At RHIC, you can have the photon-photon collision create its mass at the same time as the formation of quark-gluon plasma, Yang said. So, youre creating this new mass inside the quark-gluon plasma.

Yangs Ph.D. thesis work on the RHIC data published in PRL in 2018 suggested photon collisions might be affecting the plasma in a slight but measurable way. Li said this was both intriguing and surprising, because the photon collisions are an electromagnetic phenomena, and quark-gluon plasmas are dominated by the strong force, which is far more powerful than the electromagnetic force.

To interact strongly with quark-gluon plasma, only having electric charge is not enough, Li said. You dont expect it to interact very strongly with quark-gluon plasma.

He said a variety of theories were offered to explain Yangs unexpected findings.

One proposed explanation is that the photon-photon interaction will look different not because of quark-gluon plasma, but because the two ions just get closer to each other, Li said. Its related to quantum effects and how the photons interact with each other.

If quantum effects had caused the anomalies, Yang surmised, they could create detectable interference patterns when ions narrowly missed one another but photons from their respective light clouds collided.

So the two ions, they do not strike each other directly, Yang said. They actually pass by. Its called an ultraperipheral collision, because the photons collide but the ions dont hit each other.

The Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Researchs Large Hadron Collider. Credit: CERN

Theory suggested quantum interference patterns from ultraperipheral photon-photon collisions should vary in direct proportion to the distance between the passing ions. Using data from the LHCs Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, Yang, Li and colleagues found they could determine this distance, or impact parameter, by measuring something wholly different.

The two ions, as they get closer, theres a higher probability the ion can get excited and start to emit neutrons, which go straight down the beam line, Li said. We have a detector for this at CMS.

Each ultraperipheral photon-photon collision produces a pair of particles called muons that typically fly from the collision in opposite directions. As predicted by theory, Yang, Li and colleagues found that quantum interference distorted the departure angle of the muons. And the shorter the distance between the near-miss ions, the greater the distortion.

Li said the effect arises from the motion of the colliding photons. Although each is moving in the direction of the beam with its host ion, photons can also move away from their hosts.

The photons have motion in the perpendicular direction, too, he said. And it turns out, exactly, that that perpendicular motion gets stronger as the impact parameter gets smaller and smaller.

This makes it appear like somethings modifying the muons, Li said. It looks like one is going at a different angle from the other, but its really not. Its an artifact of the way the photons motion was changing, perpendicular to the beam direction, before the collision that made the muons.

Yang said the study explains most of the anomalies he previously identified. Meanwhile, the study established a novel experimental tool for controlling the impact parameter of photon interactions that will have far-reaching impacts.

We can comfortably say that the majority came from this QED effect, he said. But that doesnt rule out that there are still effects that relate to the quark-gluon plasma. This work gives us a very precise baseline, but we need more precise data. We still have at least 15 years to gather QGP data at CMS, and the precision of the data will get higher and higher.

Reference: Observation of Forward Neutron Multiplicity Dependence of Dimuon Acoplanarity in Ultraperipheral Pb-Pb Collisions at sNN=5.02TeV by A.M. Sirunyan et al. (CMS Collaboration), 17 September 2021, Physical Review Letters.DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.122001

LHC and CMS are supported by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and scientific funding agencies in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Iran, Ireland, Italy, South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Montenegro, New Zealand, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

Go here to read the rest:

Physicists Probe Light Smashups To Guide Future Research Beyond the Standard Model - SciTechDaily

image:A Memorandum of Understanding was inked by (front row, from left) Professor Chen Tsuhan, Deputy President (Research and Technology), National University of Singapore, and Mr Kevin Chow, Country Director and Chief Executive, Thales in Singapore. The signing was witnessed by (back row, from left) Mr Ling Keok Tong, Director (Smart Nation and Digital Economy), National Research Foundation, Singapore, and Mr Chen Guan Yow, Vice President and Head (New Businesses), Economic Development Board. (Photo: Thales) view more

Credit: Thales

The National University of Singapore (NUS) and Thales have inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to mark the start of a two-year partnership to jointly develop and test quantum technologies for commercial applications.

Under the MoU, SingaporesQuantum Engineering Programme(QEP) and Thales aim to advance quantum technologies and prepare industry players for their arrival. The partnership will see industry and academic experts from Thales and QEP develop capabilities to test and evaluate interdisciplinary quantum security technologies. They will also explore potential research collaboration opportunities in the fields of new materials and design for quantum sensing. In addition, they will organise joint activities such as seminars and conferences to share their expertise and showcase their research outcomes.

QEP is an initiative launched in 2018 by the National Research Foundation, Singapore (NRF) and hosted at NUS. The projects under the collaboration span technologies for security and sensing, and involve QEP researchers across Singapores institutes of higher learning and research centres.

Professor Chen Tsuhan, NUS Deputy President (Research & Technology), said, Singapores drive in quantum technologies is creating exciting opportunities for the nations digital economy. Building on this momentum, QEPs partnership with Thales, a forerunner in the quantum revolution, will accelerate innovation and development of quantum solutions that are commercially attractive locally and globally. The success of this collaboration will also bolster Singapores attractiveness as a testbed and springboard for deploying new quantum technologies.

With its track record in developing security and cybersecurity equipments, Thales will make available its SafeNet Luna Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) and high-speed network encryptors that support interfaces to quantum devices for research use. The algorithms and quantum random number generation technology in these equipment provide the crypto-agility to easily implement quantum-safe crypto and combat the threats of quantum computing. This equipment would be deployed for proof-of-concept trials and test beds in Singapore. In May 2021, Thales launched a network encryption solution capable of protecting enterprise data from future quantum cyber-attacks. It supplements standard encryption with a scheme resistant to quantum computing that is under consideration for international standards.

Quantum technologies open almost infinite possibilities for the future and our researchers see real potential in three types of quantum applications, namely in sensors, communications and post-quantum cryptology. Thales has a rich heritage in research and technology in Singapore and being part of the QEP is a strong testament to our collaborative approach towards using quantum technologies to solve real world, end-user challenges. While this initial partnership involves our network encryption technology to provide crypto-agility and cybersecurity, we continue to work with the R&T ecosystem in Singapore to explore new topics, including using novel materials for quantum sensing or in secured communications in quantum technologies, said Mr Kevin Chow, Country Director and Chief Executive, Thales in Singapore.

The joint team of scientists and engineers will also develop devices that tap on quantum physics for higher performance. This is an area of focus under Singapores Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2025 Plan (RIE2025).

Mr Ling Keok Tong, Director (Smart Nation and Digital Economy) at NRF, said, Quantum communications and security, as well as quantum devices and instrumentation are two significant focus areas under the QEP. This MOU will enable like-minded organisations like Thales to collaborate with our public sector research performers to translate their capabilities into impactful next-generation quantum technologies for application in the industry.

Thales, which has 33,000 engineers across the world, also aims to be a key player in what is often called the second quantum revolution, which exploits subtle properties of quantum physics and requires mastery of the associated technologies.

Quantum communication, for example, relies on quantum physics to make secure encryption keys that can protect confidential messages sent over public networks, while quantum sensors can use quantum physics to make precise measurements. In the future, quantum sensors may help vehicles navigate without global-positioning systems, power new medical imaging technologies and contribute to many other fields.

A third family of quantum technologies, quantum computing, harnesses quantum physics to process information in new ways. It brings the promise of surpassing supercomputers for some data problems but also carries the threat of being able to break some of todays standard encryption.

France-Singapore collaboration in quantum research

Thales has its global headquarters in France, which has a strong partnership with Singapore in science and innovation. A meeting of the France-Singapore Joint Science and Innovation Committee (COSIMIX) in June 2021 included exchanges on potential cooperation in quantum technologies.

There is intense global interest in quantum technologies for both countries. In France, a Quantum Plan announced by French President Emmanuel Macron in January 2021 dedicates 1.8 billion euros (S$2.8 billion) towards developing quantum technologies in the country. In Singapore, theCentre for Quantum Technologies(CQT) at NUS has been building up a pool of quantum expertise since its establishment in 2007. QEP is investing S$121.6 million to advance Singapores quantum ecosystem, supporting research that applies quantum technologies for solving user-defined problems and activities that engage industry. Quantum communication and security, as well as quantum sensing are two pillars of the programme.

Associate Professor Alexander Ling, Director of the QEP, said, "The QEP looks for strong technology partners from industry to help meet its goal of deploying Singapore's quantum know-how to benefit our economy and society. We are delighted that Thales has joined us in studying how quantum techniques can improve communications and sensing." Assoc Prof Ling is also from theNUS Department of Physicsand is a Principal Investigator at CQT.

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

Read more from the original source:

New partnership between QEP and Thales to spur innovation in quantum security and quantum sensors - EurekAlert