Latest Quantum field theory Stories

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online According to a study in the journal Nature, a team of international scientists has found the first ever direct evidence of pear-shaped atomic nuclei. Bizarre pear-shaped nuclei could be the key to understanding one of the great mysteries of the universe: the reason for the Big Bang’s creation of a massive imbalance between matter and antimatter. "If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created at the Big Bang, everything...

John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online All fundamental matter in the Universe – protons, electrons, etc. – has counterparts known as antimatter. In most ways, antimatter simply mirrors regular matter. For instance, the antimatter counterpart to the electron is the positron, a particle of the same mass of the electron, but possessing the opposite charge and opposite spin. When normal matter encounters its antimatter counterpart, the pair will annihilate and...

An international team of scientists has shed new light on a fundamental area of physics which could have important implications for future electronic devices and the transfer of information at the quantum level. The electrical currents currently used to power electronic devices are generated by a flow of charges. However, emerging quantum technologies such as spin-electronics, make use of both charge and another intrinsic property of electrons – their spin – to transfer and process...

John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online When we talk about the vacuum of space, we imagine a complete lack of matter – a cold void, dark, and absent of all energy. Over the last century, however, physicists have come to realize that the emptiness of space is anything by empty. On the macro scale, the vacuum of empty space may appear to lack matter and energy as we normally think of it. But when we look closely, and begin to examine the quantum interactions that...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Albert Einstein, almost unanimously considered the greatest physicist since Sir Isaac Newton, would have turned 134 today. His legacy can still be seen in modern society – in the revelations being made by physicists around the world and by his theories that they are still struggling to comprehend. "I am convinced that (God) does not play dice." Perhaps the most prominent contemporary example of Einstein’s legacy is the...

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...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online While experts had previously only confirmed the existence of two states of magnetism, experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report that they have been able to experimentally demonstrate the existence of a third kind. The MIT researchers have dubbed the new state a quantum spin liquid (QSL), and they describe their findings in this week's edition of the journal Nature. It joins ferromagnetism (the simple form...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Researchers wrote in the journal Physical Review Letters that they have found evidence of a strict limit on CPT violation from polarization of gamma-ray bursts. Photons produced by gamma-ray bursts travel billions of light years to reach the Earth. This makes them excellent probes of space-time structures on extremely small scales. Some quantum gravity theories predict that structures of space-time at extremely short...

New research has demonstrated a way to make bismuth electrons and nuclei work together as qubits in a quantum computer. The discovery, published in Nature Materials, takes us a key step further to creating practical quantum computing which could tackle complex programs that would otherwise take the lifetime of the universe to finish. The collaboration partners are based in the University of Warwick, UCL, ETH Zurich and the USA Sandia National Labs. Information on our normal computers...

A cornerstone of physics may require a rethink if findings at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are confirmed. Recent experiments suggest that the most rigorous predictions based on the fundamental theory of electromagnetism—one of the four fundamental forces in the universe, and harnessed in all electronic devices—may not accurately account for the behavior of atoms in exotic, highly charged states. The theory in question is known as quantum electrodynamics, or...