The Science Of Balloon Popping: Fragmentation Vs. Opening.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day 2016 February 11 

LIGO Detects Gravitational Waves from Merging Black Holes 

Gravitational radiation has been directly detected. The first-ever detection was made by both facilities of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Washington and Louisiana simultaneously last September. After numerous consistency checks, the resulting 5-sigma discovery was published today. The measured gravitational waves match those expected from two large black holes merging after a death spiral in a distant galaxy, with the resulting new black hole momentarily vibrating in a rapid ringdown. 

A phenomenon predicted by Einstein, the historic discovery confirms a cornerstone of humanity’s understanding of gravity and basic physics. It is also the most direct detection of black holes ever. The featured illustration depicts the two merging black holes with the signal strength of the two detectors over 0.3 seconds superimposed across the bottom. Expected future detections by Advanced LIGO and other gravitational wave detectors may not only confirm the spectacular nature of this measurement but hold tremendous promise of giving humanity a new way to see and explore our universe.

Three quarks for Muster Mark*! And for every proton and neutron, too… right? 

Not so fast. You might have learned that every proton and neutron is made of elementary particles called quarks, and that each of the familiar subatomic bits that make up the nucleus of atoms is built out of precisely three of the quirky, quarky sub-subatomic bunch. 

This great video from The Physics Girl explains why that idea doesn’t quite add up to what’s really going on at matter’s smallest scales. Plus, CANDY! I love candy! Just wait ‘til you get to the part about how much mass is inside of a proton compared to the number of particles. Mind = blown, Einstein. 

*Funny historical note: At the beginning of the video, Dianna asks why “quark” is spelled the way it is. It looks like it should be pronounced “kwahrk,” but we clearly pronounce it “kwork”. Well, Murray Gell-Mann, the physicist who first theorized the existence of these elementary particles, had already picked out the name he wanted, a made-up word that he pronounced “kwork”, but with no idea how he should spell it. Then, while reading Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce, he stumbled on the following passage:

Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he has not got much of a bark And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

Gell-Mann stuck to his guns on the “kwork” pronunciation, despite the fact that it’s obviously supposed to rhyme with “Mark”, but seeing that Joyce had stumbled upon the same rule of three quarks that the universe had, he couldn’t pass it up. Quantum literature!

Scientists don’t fully understand quantum entanglement—but they know that space, or physical distance, is not a factor in the “communication” between two entangled particles. If one is affected by a force or a measurement, the other also reacts in the same moment, even if they are separated by leagues. Unlocking the secrets of this phenomenon could lead to incredible advancements in technology, such as quantum machines that transmit information faster than light.

Click the image above to learn more!

Physicists Set a New Speed Record for Light-Emitting Quantum Dots

Photonic computing is closer than ever.

Researchers at Duke University have developed a light-emitting device that can be switched on and off up to 90 billion times per second. This 90 GHz is roughly twice the speed of the fastest laser diodes in existence, potentially offering a whole new level of optoelectronic computing. Central to the technology are the infinitesimal crystal beads known as quantum dots.

The computing devices we’re used to are based on shuttling electrons around via wires and switches. This has worked out pretty well through the history of computing, but electronics have limits, both in speed and in scale. Optoelectronics swap out electrons for pure light: photons. A computer based on information carried via photon is just by definition optimal, offering the literal fastest thing in the universe. Other advantages over electronic systems: less heat, less power, less noise, less information loss, less wear.

Continue Reading.

The liquid oxygen/liquid methane engine, developed by Armadillo Aerospace with help from NASA, is tested in the vacuum chamber at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility, August 2009. (NASA)

Storing electricity in paper

One sheet, 15 centimetres in diameter and a few tenths of a millimetre thick can store as much as 1 F, which is similar to the supercapacitors currently on the market. The material can be recharged hundreds of times and each charge only takes a few seconds.

It’s a dream product in a world where the increased use of renewable energy requires new methods for energy storage – from summer to winter, from a windy day to a calm one, from a sunny day to one with heavy cloud cover.

”Thin films that function as capacitors have existed for some time. What we have done is to produce the material in three dimensions. We can produce thick sheets,” says Xavier Crispin, professor of organic electronics and co-author to the article just published in Advanced Science.

Other co-authors are researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Innventia, Technical University of Denmark and the University of Kentucky.

The material, power paper, looks and feels like a slightly plasticky paper and the researchers have amused themselves by using one piece to make an origami swan – which gives an indication of its strength.

The structural foundation of the material is nanocellulose, which is cellulose fibres which, using high-pressure water, are broken down into fibres as thin as 20 nm in diameter. With the cellulose fibres in a solution of water, an electrically charged polymer (PEDOT:PSS), also in a water solution, is added. The polymer then forms a thin coating around the fibres.

”The covered fibres are in tangles, where the liquid in the spaces between them functions as an electrolyte,” explains Jesper Edberg, doctoral student, who conducted the experiments together with Abdellah Malti, who recently completed his doctorate.

The new cellulose-polymer material has set a new world record in simultaneous conductivity for ions and electrons, which explains its exceptional capacity for energy storage. It also opens the door to continued development toward even higher capacity. Unlike the batteries and capacitors currently on the market, power paper is produced from simple materials – renewable cellulose and an easily available polymer. It is light in weight, it requires no dangerous chemicals or heavy metals and it is waterproof.

The Power Papers project has been financed by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation since 2012.

”They leave us to our research, without demanding lengthy reports, and they trust us. We have a lot of pressure on us to deliver, but it’s ok if it takes time, and we’re grateful for that,” says Professor Magnus Berggren, director of the Laboratory of Organic Electronics at Linköping University.

The new power paper is just like regular pulp, which has to be dehydrated when making paper. The challenge is to develop an industrial-scale process for this.

”Together with KTH, Acreo and Innventia we just received SEK 34 million from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research to continue our efforts to develop a rational production method, a paper machine for power paper,” says Professor Berggren.

Power paper – Four world records

Highest charge and capacitance in organic electronics, 1 C and 2 F (Coulomb and Farad).

Highest measured current in an organic conductor, 1 A (Ampere).

Highest capacity to simultaneously conduct ions and electrons.

Highest transconductance in a transistor, 1 S (Siemens)

Publication:

An Organic Mixed Ion-Electron Conductor for Power Electronics, Abdellah Malti, Jesper Edberg, Hjalmar Granberg, Zia Ullah Khan, Jens W Andreasen, Xianjie Liu, Dan Zhao, Hao Zhang, Yulong Yao, Joseph W Brill, Isak Engquist, Mats Fahlman, Lars Wågberg, Xavier Crispin and Magnus Berggren.  Advanced Science, DOI 10.1002/advs.201500305

Linköping University

Associated Press

GENEVA — Physicists on the team that measured particles traveling faster than light said Friday they were as surprised as their skeptics about the results, which appear to violate the laws of nature as we know them.

Hundreds of scientists packed an auditorium at one of the world’s foremost laboratories on the Swiss-French border to hear how a subatomic particle, the neutrino, was found to have outrun light and confounded the theories of Albert Einstein.

“To our great surprise we found an anomaly,” said Antonio Ereditato, who participated in the experiment and speaks on behalf of the team.

An anomaly is a mild way of putting it.

Going faster than light is something that is just not supposed to happen, according to Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity. The speed of light — 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second) — has long been considered a cosmic speed limit.

The team — a collaboration between France’s National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research and Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory — fired a neutrino beam 454 miles (730 kilometers) underground from Geneva to Italy.

They found it traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than light. That’s sixty billionth of a second, a time no human brain could register.

“You could say it’s peanuts, but it’s not. It’s something that we can measure rather accurately with a small uncertainty,” Ereditato told The Associated Press.

If the experiment is independently repeated — most likely by teams in the United States or Japan — then it would require a fundamental rethink of modern physics.

“Everybody knows that the speed limit is c, the speed of light. And if you find some matter particle such as the neutrino going faster than light, this is something which immediately shocks everybody, including us,” said Ereditato, a researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Physicists not involved in the experiment have been understandably skeptical.

Alvaro De Rujula, a theoretical physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva from where the neutron beam was fired, said he blamed the readings on a so-far undetected human error.

If not, and it’s a big if, the door would be opened to some wild possibilities.

The average person, said De Rujula, “could, in principle, travel to the past and kill their mother before they were born.”

But Ereditato and his team are wary of letting such science fiction story lines keep them up at night.

“We will continue our studies and we will wait patiently for the confirmation,” he told the AP. “Everybody is free to do what they want: to think, to claim, to dream.”

He added: “I’m not going to tell you my dreams.”

Curiosity, Sojourner and Opportunity size comparisons to people.

via reddit

Magnetic Wormhole Created in Lab

“Ripped from the pages of a sci-fi novel, physicists have crafted a wormhole that tunnels a magnetic field through space.

“This device can transmit the magnetic field from one point in space to another point, through a path that is magnetically invisible,” said study co-author Jordi Prat-Camps, a doctoral candidate in physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. “From a magnetic point of view, this device acts like a wormhole, as if the magnetic field was transferred through an extra special dimension.“ 

The idea of a wormhole comes from Albert Einstein’s theories. In 1935, Einstein and colleague Nathan Rosen realized that the general theory of relativity allowed for the existence of bridges that could link two different points in space-time. Theoretically these Einstein-Rosen bridges, or wormholes, could allow something to tunnel instantly between great distances (though the tunnels in this theory are extremely tiny, so ordinarily wouldn’t fit a space traveler). So far, no one has found evidence that space-time wormholes actually exist. 

The new wormhole isn’t a space-time wormhole per se, but is instead a realization of a futuristic “invisibility cloak” first proposed in 2007 in the journal Physical Review Letters. This type of wormhole would hide electromagnetic waves from view from the outside. The trouble was, to make the method work for light required materials that are extremely impractical and difficult to work with, Prat said.

But it turned out the materials to make a magnetic wormhole already exist and are much simpler to come by. In particular, superconductors, which can carry high levels of current, or charged particles, expel magnetic field lines from their interiors, essentially bending or distorting these lines. This essentially allows the magnetic field to do something different from its surrounding 3D environment, which is the first step in concealing the disturbance in a magnetic field.So the team designed a three-layer object, consisting of two concentric spheres with an interior spiral-cylinder. The interior layer essentially transmitted a magnetic field from one end to the other, while the other two layers acted to conceal the field’s existence.”

This seemed like a good day to post some rainbow laser modes!

Light in a circular cavity makes a variety of standing wave patterns, some of which look like flowers, wagon wheels, or even tie-fighter spaceships. These images are from my simulations of the light in the cavities of nanolasers - each pattern is called a mode, and the smaller the laser, the simpler the mode tends to be.

In our lasers, the modes that tend to do the best are the whispering gallery modes - for example, the mode at the upper center.  Whispering gallery modes get their name from the whispering gallery phenomenon first noticed with sound waves in cathedral domes. People noticed that if they stood along the perimeter of some cathedral domes, the sound waves from a whisper would bounce along the walls of the dome, and could be clearly heard at certain other places along the dome’s perimeter.  In the case of our lasers, it’s light that bounces around the laser cavity - wavelengths that make an integer number of oscillations in one round trip end up forming a sort of circular standing wave.  Whispering gallery modes appear not just for light and sound, but for other kinds of waves as well, like matter waves and gravitational waves.