Latest Photon Stories
University of California - Santa Barbara Physicists at UC Santa Barbara are manipulating light on superconducting chips, and forging new pathways to building the quantum devices of the future –– including super-fast and powerful quantum computers. The science behind tomorrow's quantum computing and communications devices is being conducted today at UCSB in what some physicists consider to be one of the world's top laboratories in the study of quantum physics. A team in the lab of...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Two researchers from the University of Waterloo, Canada say the next big space race is building the first global quantum-communication satellite network. Up until now, the furthest quantum-communication signals have traveled is just a few hundred miles. However, this technology is up-and-coming, and is what Thomas Jennewein and Brendon Higgins believe will be driving the next space race. Quantum communication is the science of...
In an article published in the PNAS scientific journal, researchers from Aalto University and the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland showed experimentally that vacuum has properties not previously observed. According to the laws of quantum mechanics, it is a state with abundant potentials. Vacuum contains momentarily appearing and disappearing virtual pairs, which can be converted into detectable light particles. The researchers conducted a mirror experiment to show that by changing...
Scientists Racing to Capture First Film of Mind Leaving the Body to Explain Great Mysteries. MediaScience has just launched its fundraising campaign on Kickstarter. Santa Monica, California (PRWEB) February 08, 2013 Now several teams of researchers working separately in Canada, Germany, Italy, Russia and China are all attempting to capture first footage of the answer to the greatest mystery: can the mind exist outside of the body? Seeing this event would help explain telepathy, remote...
A proof-of-concept device that could pave the way for on-chip optical quantum networks has been created by a group of researchers from the US. Presenting the device today, 8 February, in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society's New Journal of Physics, it has been described as the "building block of future quantum networks." In an optical quantum network, information is carried between points by photons – the basic unit of light. There is a huge potential for this type of...
AlphaGalileo Not only do optical fibers transmit information every day around the world at the speed of light, but they can also be harnessed for the transport of quantum information. In the current issue of Nature Photonics, a research team of Innsbruck physicists led by Rainer Blatt and Tracy Northup report how they have directly transferred the quantum information stored in an atom onto a particle of light. Such information could then be sent over optical fiber to a distant atom....
Emmy Noether Research Group Leader Wolfram Pernice Achieves Breakthrough at KIT in Building an Efficient Single-photon Detector Ultrafast, efficient, and reliable single-photon detectors are among the most sought-after components in photonics and quantum communication, which have not yet reached maturity for practical application. Physicist Dr. Wolfram Pernice of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), in cooperation with colleagues at Yale University, Boston University, and Moscow...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online According to new research led by Michigan Technological University, spacetime might be less like a foamy beer and more like a smooth Einsteinian whiskey. Robert Nemiroff and his team studied the tracings of three photons of differing wavelengths to reach this heady conclusion. NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope recorded these tracings in 2009. About 7 billion light years from Earth, a gamma ray outburst threw the photons from...
University of Vienna Whether a quantum object behaves like a wave or like a particle depends (according to the Copenhagen interpretation) on the choice of measurement apparatus used for observing the system, and therefore on the type of measurement performed. Anton Zeilinger's team of physicists at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences has recently taken this phenomenon further than ever. Whether a certain photon behaves like a particle or like a wave depends on...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Two of the greatest scientific achievements of the last century were the establishment of the theories of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, both of which have withstood continual experimental scrutiny. However, a problem remains. The two theories seem to be at odds with each other. Researchers, for decades, have sought a theory that would combine the two realms – the large-scale gravity fields, and the tiny...
Latest Photon Reference Libraries
Electromagnetic Spectrum -- The electromagnetic spectrum describes the various types of electromagnetic radiation based on their wavelengths. Radio, representing wavelengths from a few feet to well over a mile, is at one end of the spectrum. Gamma ray radiation is at the other end: the wavelength of the harder types is so short, in the subatomic range, that we do not have instruments capable of directly measuring it. While the above classification scheme is generally accurate, in...
Electromagnetic Radiation -- Electromagnetic radiation is a combination of oscillating electric and magnetic fields propagating through space and carrying energy from one place to another. Light is a form of electromagnetic radiation. The theoretical study of electromagnetic radiation is called electrodynamics, a subfield of electromagnetism. When any wire (or other conducting object such as an antenna) conducts alternating current, electromagnetic radiation is propagated at the same...
