Sinister Security: Particle Physics

Gravity Could Be Produced by Bizarre Quantum 'Flashes'

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Since the mid-twentieth century, two theories of physics have offered powerful yet incompatible models of the physical universe.

General relativity brings space and time together into the (then) portmanteau space-time, the curvature of which is gravity. It works really well on large scales, such as interplanetary or interstellar space.

But zoom into the subatomic, and things get weird. The mere act of observing interactions changes the behavior of what is (presumably) totally independent of observation. In those situations, we need quantum theory to help us make sense of it all.

Though scientists have made some remarkable attempts to bring these estranged theories together, viz., string theory, the math behind the theories remains incompatible.

However, new research from Antoine Tilloy of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, suggests that gravity might be an attribute of random fluctuations on the quantum level, which would supplant gravity as the more fundamental theory and put us on the path to a unified theory of the physical universe.

In quantum theory, a particle's state is described by its wave function. This function allows theorists to predict the probability that a particle will be in this or that place.

However, before the act of verification is made via measurement, no one knows for sure where the particle will be, or if it even exists. In scientific terms, the act of observation "collapses" the wave function.

Here's the thing about quantum mechanics: it doesn't define what a measurement is. Who - or what - is an observer? A conscious human?

Bracketing all explanations to observed phenomena, we're stuck with paradoxes like Schrödinger's cat, which invites us to consider the equal possibilities that a previously boxed cat is, as far as we know, simultaneously dead and alive in the box, and will remain as such until we lift the lid.

One attempt to solve the paradox is the Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber (GRW) model from the late eighties. It incorporates random "flashes" that can cause the wave functions in quantum systems to spontaneously collapse.

This purports to leave the outcome unbesmirched by meddling human observation.

Tilloy meddled with this model to extend quantum theory to encompass gravity. When a flash collapses a wave function, and the particle reaches its final position, a gravitational field pops into existence at that precise moment in space-time.

On a large enough scale, quantum systems have many particles going through innumerable flashes.

If gravity comes from quantum processes, but nevertheless behaves in a classical (or Newtonian) way, what we have is a "semiclassical" theory.

However, Klaus Hornberger of the University of Duisberg-Essen in Germany cautions the scientific world that other problems must be tackled before Tilloy's semiclassical solution can warrant serious consideration as a unifying theory of fundamental forces underlying all modern physical laws.

It fits Newton's theory of gravity, but Tilloy's yet to work out the math to show that the quantum theory also describes gravity under Einstein's theory of general relativity.

With the greatest explanatory power, physics is one of the most exciting scientific disciplines. But the key to unified theories in physics is patience.

As with Schrödinger's cat, the will-to-know alone cannot fill in the gaps of what we simply don't yet know.

This article was originally published by Futurism. Read the original article.

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Scientists Have Glimpsed a World Beyond the Standard Model

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Physicists are using the LHC to probe for elementary particles that may exist beyond the Standard Model. By doing so, they may discover (and may have already discovered) a “new physics” that has a real chance to resolve some of the greatest mysteries in science.

MESON, FERMIONS, LEPTONS, AND BOSONS

The Standard Model, which emerged in the 1970s, is a theoretical foundation that explains the world and matter at the very smallest levels of reality: elementary particles so minute they boggle the imagination and defy easy understanding. It has been a pretty successful description so far, but like most old foundations, it’s beginning to show signs of cracks and disrepair.

Of course, it’s not so much that the standard model is wrong; rather, there may be a deeper kind of physics, a dark sector that we haven’t been able to reach yet.

In other words, there are hints of something greater and even more fundamental shining through those cracks like glinting rays of sunshine. And a team of physicists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN), working with the LHC particle accelerator at CERN, think they may be on the track of what that “something” is.

Briefly, the Standard Model divides matter and the forces of the universe into several categories of elementary particles. Pay attention now, reader, because this will go quickly. Bosons transmit force; photons (light) emerge from electromagnetic activity; eight species of gluon are involved in the strong nuclear force (holding atoms together); and the W+, W- and Z0 bosons oversee the weak nuclear force (responsible for radioactive decay). Matter comprises fermions, which are formed by quarks and leptons; there are six species of quarks, and six of leptons (which include electrons and neutrinos), together with 12 antiparticles for each. The Higgs boson provides mass for all, save the gluons and photons.

Got that? Good.

But here’s the problem—the Standard Model, in common with other theories explaining the universe (such as Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity), is not quite as comprehensive as we’d like it to be. It fails to explain some of the most interesting and pressing questions confronting physics.

For instance, it doesn’t account for the division of fermions into different families, or why matter achieved the upper hand over antimatter in the early universe. And if dark matter is indeed an actual form of “matter,” it is not explained by our current understanding of elementary particles. Perhaps most importantly, gravity (that most mysterious and fundamental of forces) is utterly unaccounted for by the Standard Model.

Highly complicated, graphical analysis of the decay of a “beauty” meson into a kaon and two muons. Credit: CERN

THE BEAUTY MESON

The Large Hadron Collider has turned its considerable particle-smashing heft to the task of seeking out new elementary particles beyond the Standard Model; but it’s possible they exist just outside the energy limit of the LHC. If this is the case, then the only way to discover their presence will be to discern their “shadow,” as it were—the influence they exert upon other particles at lower energies.

And one way this might work is if they cause “mesons”—unstable, short-lived combinations of a quark and antiquark—to decay in unusual and unexpected ways.

This is what the team believes it may have found. A few years back, the LHCb experiment, which probes the mysteries of matter and antimatter, detected anomalous readings in the decay of a B meson or “beauty” meson—a meson consisting of a light quark and a heavy beauty antiquark. It was necessary to rig up a more accurate method of determining the parameters by which the beauty quark decayed in order to test its deviation from the Standard Model; the Polish team devised a means to determine the parameters independently.

According to Dr. Marcin Chrzaszcz of IFJ PAN, one of the authors of the new research, “[m]y approach can be likened to determining the year when a family portrait was taken. Rather than looking at the whole picture, it is better to analyze each person individually and from that perspective try to work out the year the portrait was taken.”

By more accurately determining the degree of deviation from the Standard Model, scientists will be able to ascertain whether the anomaly really represents the influence of unknown elementary particles beyond the Model, or whether it is merely some hitherto undiscovered property which the Model does account for.

For now, physicists hypothesize that there is something called a “Z-prime” (Z’) boson, which mediates the decay of B mesons. The LHC is gearing up now for new, higher-energy collisions. Perhaps, at last, they’ll discover the new particles, and the new physics, they’ve been searching for.

References: Phys Org

Via Futurism.

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Everything You Need to Know About Particle Physics and the Origins of the Universe

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“Holy Grail” Particle: New Physics Research Shows Tetraquarks Must Exist

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Quark Quirks Called Tetraquarks

Everything and everything in the universe is made up of atoms — except, of course, atoms themselves. They are made up of subatomic particles, namely, protons, neutrons, and electrons. While electrons are classified as leptons, protons and neutrons are in a class of particles famously known as quarks. Though, “known” may be a bit misleading: there is a lot more theoretical physicists don’t know about the particles than they do with any degree of certainty.

As far as we know, quarks are the fundamental particle of the universe. You can’t break a quark down into any smaller particles. Imagining them as being uniformly minuscule is not quite accurate, however: while they are tiny, they are not all the same size. Some quarks are larger than others, and they can also join together and create mesons (1 quark + 1 antiquark) or baryons (3 quarks of various flavors).

In terms of possible quark flavors, which are respective to their position, we’ve identified six: up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange. As mentioned, they usually pair up either in quark-antiquark pairs or a quark threesome — so long as the charges ( ⅔, ⅔, and ⅓ ) all add up to positive 1.

The so-called tetraquark pairing has long-eluded scientists; a hadron which would require 2 quark-antiquark pairs, held together by the strong force. Now, it’s not enough for them to simply pair off and only interact with their partner. To be a true tetraquark, all four quarks would need to interact with one another; behaving as quantum swingers, if you will.

“Quarky” Swingers

It might seem like a pretty straightforward concept: throw four quarks together and they’re bound to interact, right? Well, not necessarily. And that would be assuming they’d pair off stably in the first place, which isn’t a given. As Marek Karliner of Tel Aviv University explained to LiveScience, two quarks aren’t any more likely to pair off in a stable union than two random people you throw into an apartment together. When it comes to both people and quarks, close proximity doesn’t ensure chemistry.

“The big open question had been whether such combinations would be stable, or would they instantly disintegrate into two quark-antiquark mesons,” Karliner told Futurism. “Many years of experimental searches came up empty-handed, and no one knew for sure whether stable tetraquarks exist.”

Most discussions of tetraquarks up until recently involved those “ad-hoc” tetraquarks; the ones where four quarks were paired off, but not interacting. Finding the bona-fide quark clique has been the “holy grail” of theoretical physics for years – and we are agonizingly close.

Recalling that quarks are not something we can actually see, it probably goes without saying that predicting the existence of such an arrangement or particle would be incredibly hard to do.

The very laws of physics dictate that it would be impossible for four quarks to come together and form a stable hadron. But two physicists found a way to simplify (as much as you can “simplify” quantum mechanics) the approach to the search for tetraquarks.

Several years ago, Karliner and his research partner, Jonathan Rosner of the University of Chicago, set out to establish the theory that if you want to know the mass and binding energy of rare hadrons, you can start by comparing them to the common hadrons you already know the measurements for. In their research they looked at charm quarks; the measurements for which are known and understood (to quantum physicists, at least).

Based on these comparisons, they proposed that a doubly-charged baryon should have a mass of 3,627 MeV, +/- 12 MeV. The next step was to convince CERN to go tetraquark-hunting, using their math as a map.

A diagram shows how quarks usually fit into our understanding of tiny particles. Credit: udaix/Shutterstock

Smashing Atoms

For all the complex work it undertakes, the vast majority of which is nothing detectable by the human eye, The Large Hadron Collider is exactly what the name implies: it’s a massive particle accelerator that smashes atoms together, revealing their inner quarks. If you’re out to prove the existence of a very tiny theoretical particle, the LHC is where you want to start — though there’s no way to know how long it will be before, if ever, the particles you seek appear.

It took several years, but in the summer of 2017, the LHC detected a new baryon: one with a single up quark and two heavy charm quarks — the kind of doubly-charged baryon Karliner and Rosner were hoping for. The mass of the baryon was 3,621 MeV, give or take 1 MeV, which was extremely close to the measurement Karliner and Rosner had predicted. Prior to this observation physicists had speculated about — but never detected — more than one heavy quark in a baryon. In terms of the hunt for the tetraquark, this was an important piece of evidence: that more robust bottom quark could be just what a baryon needs to form a stable tetraquark.

The perpetual frustration of studying particles is that they don’t stay around long. These baryons, in particular, disappear faster than “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” speed; one 10/trillionth of a second, to be exact. Of course, in the world of quantum physics, that’s actually plenty of time to establish existence, thanks to the LHC.

The great quantum qualm within the LHC, however, is one that presents a significant challenge in the search for tetraquarks: heavier particles are less likely to show up, and while this is all happening on an infinitesimal level, as far as the quantum scale is concerned, bottom quarks are behemoths.

The next question for Rosner and Karliner, then, was did it make more sense to try to build a tetraquark, rather than wait around for one to show up? You’d need to generate two bottom quarks close enough together that they’d hook up, then throw in a pair of lighter antiquarks — then do it again and again, successfully, enough times to satisfy the scientific method.

“Our paper uses the data from recently discovered double-charmed baryon to point, for the first time, that a stable tetraquark *must* exist,” Karliner told Futurism, adding that there’s “a very good chance” the LHCb at CERN would succeed in observing the phenomenon experimentally.

That, of course, is still a theoretical proposition, but should anyone undertake it, the LHC would keep on smashing in the meantime — and perhaps the combination would arise on its own. As Karliner reminded LiveScience, for years the assumption has been that tetraquarks are impossible. At the very least, they’re profoundly at odds with the Standard Model of Physics. But that assumption is certainly being challenged. “The tetraquark is a truly new form of strongly-interacting matter,” Karliner told Futurism,”in addition to ordinary baryons and mesons.”

If tetraquarks are not impossible, or even particularly improbable, thanks to the Karliner and Rosner’s calculations, at least now we have a better sense of what we’re looking for — and where it might pop up.

Where there’s smoke there’s fire, as they say, and while the mind-boggling realm of quantum mechanics may feel more like smoke and mirrors to us, theoretical physicists aren't giving up just yet. Where there’s a 2-bottom quark, there could be tetraquarks.

References: Nature, LiveScience, APS Physics

Article was originally published on Futurism.

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Teleportation Could Be Possible Using Quantum Physics

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Physicists Chart the ‘Secret’ Movement of Quantum Particles

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Researchers from the University of Cambridge have taken a peek into the secretive domain of quantum mechanics. In a theoretical paper published in the journal Physical Review A, they have shown that the way that particles interact with their environment can be used to track quantum particles when they’re not being observed, which had been thought to be impossible.

One of the fundamental ideas of quantum theory is that quantum objects can exist both as a wave and as a particle, and that they don’t exist as one or the other until they are measured. This is the premise that Erwin Schrödinger was illustrating with his famous thought experiment involving a dead-or-maybe-not-dead cat in a box.

“This premise, commonly referred to as the wave function, has been used more as a mathematical tool than a representation of actual quantum particles,” said David Arvidsson-Shukur, a PhD student at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, and the paper’s first author. “That’s why we took on the challenge of creating a way to track the secret movements of quantum particles.”

Any particle will always interact with its environment, ‘tagging’ it along the way. Arvidsson-Shukur, working with his co-authors Professor Crispin Barnes from the Cavendish Laboratory and Axel Gottfries, a PhD student from the Faculty of Economics, outlined a way for scientists to map these ‘tagging’ interactions without looking at them. The technique would be useful to scientists who make measurements at the end of an experiment but want to follow the movements of particles during the full experiment.

Some quantum scientists have suggested that information can be transmitted between two people – usually referred to as Alice and Bob – without any particles travelling between them. In a sense, Alice gets the message telepathically. This has been termed counterfactual communication because it goes against the accepted ‘fact’ that for information to be carried between sources, particles must move between them.

“To measure this phenomenon of counterfactual communication, we need a way to pin down where the particles between Alice and Bob are when we’re not looking,” said Arvidsson-Shukur. “Our ‘tagging’ method can do just that. Additionally, we can verify old predictions of quantum mechanics, for example that particles can exist in different locations at the same time.”

The founders of modern physics devised formulas to calculate the probabilities of different results from quantum experiments. However, they did not provide any explanations of what a quantum particle is doing when it’s not being observed. Earlier experiments have suggested that the particles might do non-classical things when not observed, like existing in two places at the same time. In their paper, the Cambridge researchers considered the fact that any particle travelling through space will interact with its surroundings. These interactions are what they call the ‘tagging’ of the particle. The interactions encode information in the particles that can then be decoded at the end of an experiment, when the particles are measured.

The researchers found that this information encoded in the particles is directly related to the wave function that Schrödinger postulated a century ago. Previously the wave function was thought of as an abstract computational tool to predict the outcomes of quantum experiments. “Our result suggests that the wave function is closely related to the actual state of particles,” said Arvidsson-Shukur. “So, we have been able to explore the ‘forbidden domain’ of quantum mechanics: pinning down the path of quantum particles when no one is observing them.”

Publication: D. R. M. Arvidsson-Shukur, etal., “Evaluation of counterfactuality in counterfactual communication protocols,” Physical Review A (2017) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.96.062316

Source: University of Cambridge

The full study is published in the journal Physical Review A.

Image Credit: Robert Couse-Baker

Article was originally published on SciTechDaily.

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Researchers Discover "Angel Particle" Which Is Both Matter And Antimatter At The Same Time

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A group of researchers has discovered proof for a strange particle that, strangely, is also its own antiparticle. It was first proposed 80 years ago but now existence of it might be a reality. The results, published in the journal Science, were led by researchers from Stanford University in California and the University of California.

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The notion of a particle having its own antiparticle was first introduced in 1937 when Italian physicist Ettore Majorana (who strangely disappeared in 1938) first suggested the theory.

He said that inside the class of fermions, which comprise protons, electrons, and neutrons, some particles must have their own antiparticles, which became known as Majorana particles.

An antiparticle is a particle that has the same mass as the normal particle, but a reverse electric or magnetic property. For instance, the electron’s antiparticle is the positron. If the two come across each other, they annihilate each other.

In this study, the group of physicists stacked thin films of two quantum materials together and directed an electrical current through them in a chilled vacuum chamber. The top film was a superconductor, and the bottom one was a magnetic topological insulator.

By sweeping a magnet over the stack, the team was then able to adjust the speed of electrons. At certain points, this triggered what seemed to be Majorana quasiparticles to appear in pairs alongside with electrons. One was always bounced away so that the flow of the individual quasiparticles could be measured.

The particular kind of Majorana quasiparticle they think they’ve found is called a “chiral” fermion, which moves along a one-dimensional path in one direction.

So the scientists are denoting to this as “smoking gun” indication of Majorana particles. It was already believed that neutrinos might be their own antiparticles, though separate research is ongoing to find out if that’s the case.

Stanford professor Shoucheng Zhan, a senior author on the paper, said:

“Our team predicted exactly where to find the Majorana fermion and what to look for as it's ‘smoking gun’ experimental signature. This discovery concludes one of the most intensive searches in fundamental physics, which spanned exactly 80 years.”

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The Large Hadron Collider Just Detected a New Particle That's Heavier Than a Proton

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The Large Hadron Collider has once again done what it does best – smash bits of matter together and find new particles in the carnage. This time physicists have come across a real charmer. It's four times heavier than a proton and could help challenge some ideas about how this kind of matter sticks together.

We've seen a lot of interesting new particles from CERN's Large Hadron Collider "beauty" (LHCb) collaboration, which is a little sister to the ATLAS and CMS experiments that brought us the famous Higgs boson a few years back.

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The experiments run in CERN's colliders all involve accelerating matter and then bringing it to a quick stop. The resulting burst of energy results in a shower of particles with different properties, most of which we're pretty familiar with. Running these experiments over and over again and doing the maths on the sizes and behaviours of the particles as they form and interact with one another can occasionally provide something different.

We can now officially add a new kind of baryon to the zoo of particles, one that was already predicted to exist but never before seen. The two baryons you're no doubt most familiar with are the ones that make up an atom's nucleus, called protons and neutrons. Baryons are effectively triplets of smaller particles called quarks, which are elementary particles meaning they aren't made up of anything smaller themselves.

Quarks come in a variety of flavours, oddly called up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange. It's combinations of these that give us different bosons. Current models predict there are a bunch of ways quarks can make baryons, with some more common than others.

Protons consist of two ups and a down quark, while neutrons are two downs and an up. These quarks stick together under what's called the strong nuclear force, which is caused by the swapping of particles called gluons. Never let it be said that physicists lack a sense of humour.

This new baryon – made when two charm quarks and a single up bound together – was given the less whimsical name Xi cc++, so they can't all be winners. Quarks have different masses, and charm is a beefy one. That makes this baryon a touch on the heavy side, which is good news for particle physicists.

"Finding a doubly heavy-quark baryon is of great interest as it will provide a unique tool to further probe quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes the strong interaction, one of the four fundamental forces," said Giovanni Passaleva, the spokesperson for the LHCb collaboration.

Seeing how this particle keeps itself together compared to the predictions made by current models will help give the going theories a good shake. Being made of two heavy quarks should give Xi cc++ a slightly different structure to protons and neutrons.

"In contrast to other baryons, in which the three quarks perform an elaborate dance around each other, a doubly heavy baryon is expected to act like a planetary system, where the two heavy quarks play the role of heavy stars orbiting one around the other, with the lighter quark orbiting around this binary system," says former collaboration spokesperson Guy Wilkinson.

If you're wondering where this baryon has been hiding all this time, like many particles it doesn't hang around very long. It wasn't seen directly, but was recognised by the particles it broke into. The LHCb experiment is a champion at spotting these kinds of decay products, as well as making heavy quarks.

The discovery has a high statistical significance at 7 sigma. Physicists break out the champagne at 5 sigma, so we can be pretty confident Xi cc++ was produced. If you're playing Standard Model bingo, that's one more to cross off your list.

This research has been submitted to Physical Review Letters.

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Physicists Discover a Possible Break in the Standard Model of Physics

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A review of three separate experiments has turned up "remarkably similar" results, pointing to what researchers say is a strong possibility that we've found hits of a phenomenon that goes beyond the standard model of particle physics.

When taken together, data from experiments conducted in the US, Switzerland, and Japan, have yielded a result with 99.95 percent certainty that lepton universality - a fundamental assumption of the standard model - does not hold up.

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"These studies have resulted in observations that seem to challenge lepton universality. A confirmation of these results would point to new particles or interactions, and could have profound implications for our understanding of particle physics." an international team of physicists reports.

If you're unfamiliar with lepton universality, it's actually a pretty simple concept - that the interactions of certain elementary particles are the same, despite those particles having different masses and lifetimes (decay rates). The particles in question are called charged leptons, and they include electrons, muons, and the much heavier taus.

What the three experiments found is that, when considered in relation to the decay rates of electrons and muons, tau decay rates are much higher than they should be. In other words, taus decay quicker than the standard model of particle physics predicts, based on the principle of lepton universality and that's strange, because the result from one experiment could easily be a mistake, but all three experiments observed a higher-than-expected tau decay rate, despite the fact that they were all operating in different environments.

"The tau lepton is key, because the electron and the muon have been well measured. Taus are much harder because they decay very quickly. Now that physicists are able to better study taus, we're seeing that perhaps lepton universality is not satisfied as the standard model claims." says one of the team, Franco Sevilla from the University of California - Santa Barbara.

When reviewed together, results from the LHCb experiment at CERN in Switzerland, the BaBaR detector at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, and the Belle experiment in Japan challenged the principles of lepton universality at a level of 4 standard deviations.

That indicates a 99.95 percent certainty, the US team reports. To be clear, that sounds like a pretty convincing case against one of the fundamental assumptions of the standard model, but this is science, so before we go dismantling anything, we're going to need to get that result to 5 standard deviations.

That means we need more experiments for a bigger sample size, and absolute certainty that this isn't a mistake that's managed to appear across three continents. We'll also need to figure out what it could possibly mean if these results are true - but let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet.

"We're not sure what confirmation of these results will mean in the long term," says Sevilla. "First, we need to make sure that they're true, and then we'll need ancillary experiments to determine the meaning."

The good news is that CERN has just fast-tracked plans to build a particle collider three times larger and seven times more powerful than the LHC, so if anything is going to put this mystery to bed, something like that would be a pretty good bet.

The review has been published in Nature.

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Researcher Have Created a “Molecular Black Hole” in Lab

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Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have managed to produce an extreme physical object – a molecule that attracts more electrons than it can keep until it explodes. This object, dubbed a molecular black hole, caught researchers by surprise as they weren’t expecting something quite so intense.

As reported in Nature, scientists used the world’s most powerful X-ray laser to remove almost all the electrons from the largest atom in a molecule, from the inside out.

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Within 30 femtoseconds (millionths of a billionth of a second), more than 50 electrons from the rest of the molecule came rushing in, which quickly led to the explosive demise of the molecule.

While scientists have seen similar behavior before when this experiment was attempted with less intense beams or isolated atoms, they've not seen it to this magnitude. The molecular black hole is not just really cool as a new discovery, but it provides clues on how X-ray lasers affect molecules. This is important because we use X-ray lasers to study how individual biological systems work.

“For any type of experiment you do that focuses intense X-rays on a sample, you want to understand how it reacts to the X-rays. This paper shows that we can understand and model the radiation damage in small molecules, so now we can predict what damage we will get in other systems.” experiment leader Daniel Rolles, of Kansas State University, said in a statement.

The researchers looked at three samples: Individual xenon atoms, each with 54 electrons, and two molecules containing a single iodine atom, which has 53 electrons. By using the powerful laser, they started kicking electrons out of the atoms. In the xenon, the atom was left with only the most strongly bound electrons, but the iodine behaved differently.

In the molecule, the iodine began attracting electrons from the hydrogen and carbon atoms as well. Iodine was expected to lose 47 electrons, but the iodine in the smaller molecule lost 54 electrons.

“We think the effect was even more important in the larger molecule than in the smaller one, but we don't know how to quantify it yet. We estimate that more than 60 electrons were kicked out, but we don't actually know where it stopped because we could not detect all the fragments that flew off as the molecule fell apart to see how many electrons were missing. This is one of the open questions we need to study.” lead author Artem Rudenko added.

The power of the laser has allowed the study of reactions like photosynthesis in never-seen-before detail, and it remains an incredibly powerful instrument. The X-ray pulses are 100 times more intense than if you concentrate all the sunlight we receive on Earth onto a single thumbnail.

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Sinister Security

Gravity Could Be Produced by Bizarre Quantum 'Flashes'

Scientists Have Glimpsed a World Beyond the Standard Model

Everything You Need to Know About Particle Physics and the Origins of the Universe

“Holy Grail” Particle: New Physics Research Shows Tetraquarks Must Exist

Teleportation Could Be Possible Using Quantum Physics

Physicists Chart the ‘Secret’ Movement of Quantum Particles

Researchers Discover "Angel Particle" Which Is Both Matter And Antimatter At The Same Time

The Large Hadron Collider Just Detected a New Particle That's Heavier Than a Proton

Physicists Discover a Possible Break in the Standard Model of Physics

Researcher Have Created a “Molecular Black Hole” in Lab

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