Wednesday, November 17, 2010

A solid case of entanglement

For the first time, physicists have convincingly demonstrated that physically separated particles in solid-state devices can be quantum-mechanically entangled. The achievement is analogous to the quantum entanglement of light, except that it involves particles in circuitry instead of photons in optical systems. Both optical and solid-state entanglement offer potential routes to quantum computing and secure communications, but solid-state versions may ultimately be easier to incorporate into electronic devices.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Demonic device converts information to energy

The laws of physics say that you can't get energy for nothing -- worse still, you will always get out of a system less energy than you put in. But a nanoscale experiment inspired by a nineteenth-century paradox that seemed to break those laws now shows that you can generate energy from information.

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Relativistic trading: The speed of light isn't fast enough for some market transactions

The profit made on a stock share bought and sold a moment later might only be a penny or so, but if multiplied by millions of shares over the course of a day the money earned can be big.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Holometer experiment to test if the universe is a hologram

Many ideas in theoretical physics involve extra dimensions, but the possibility that the universe has only two dimensions could also have surprising implications. The idea is that space on the ultra-small Planck scale is two-dimensional, and the third dimension is inextricably linked with time. If this is the case, then our three-dimensional universe is nothing more than a hologram of a two-dimensional universe.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Topological insulators could help define fundamental constants

A newly discovered class of materials known as "topological insulators" could help physicists to obtain new ways of defining the three basic physical constants – the speed of light (c); the charge of the proton (e); and Planck’s constant (h). That’s the claim of a team of physicists in the US, which has proposed a new experiment to measure the fine-structure constant (α), which is a function of h, c and e, by scattering light from such a material. Topological insulators are unusual in that electrical current flows well on their surface, but not through their bulk.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

The quest for dilute ferromagnetism in semiconductors: Guides and misguides by theory

A material that exhibits both ferromagnetic and semiconductor properties offers the exciting prospect of combining nonvolatile magnetic storage and conventional semiconductor electronics in a single device. Magnetic semiconductors offer a number of interesting possibilities in the pursuit of  spintronics , a branch of science and technology that exploits the spin dimension of the electron in addition to its charge, for novel electronic devices. These materials combine the properties of a semiconductor and a magnetic material, providing, for instance, a way to create 100 % spin-polarized currents, and by the same token, the promise of electrical control of magnetic effects. While in some magnetic semiconductors, for example, magnetite, all of the material’s constituent ions are intrinsically magnetic (  concentrated magnets  ), the most recent focus has been on nonmagnetic semiconductor host materials that can be doped by a small amount of magnetic transition-metal ions or by defects that promote magnetism (  dilute magnets  ).

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Understanding behavioural patterns: why bird flocks move in unison

Animal flocks, be it honeybees, fish, ants or birds, often move in surprising synchronicity and seemingly make unanimous decisions at a moment’s notice, a phenomenon which has remained puzzling to many researchers.

New research published today in the New Journal of Physics ( co-owned by the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society ), uses a particle model to explain the collective decision making process of flocks of birds landing on foraging flights.

Using a simple self-propelled particle (SPP) system, which sees the birds represented by particles with such parameters as position and velocity, the researchers from Budapest, Hungary, find that the collective switching from the flying to the landing state overrides the individual landing intentions of each bird.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Relativity with a human touch

In the famous twin paradox, a sibling who journeys in a fast-moving spacecraft will return home younger than the sibling who remained on Earth. While this apparent slowing of time occurs whenever a body is set in motion, it had been much too small to be detected for movement on a human scale.

Who wants to live for ever? A scientific breakthrough could mean humans live for hundreds of years

A genetically engineered organism that lives 10 times longer than normal has been created by scientists in California. It is the greatest extension of longevity yet achieved by researchers investigating the scientific nature of ageing.

Einstein's theory is proved – and it is bad news if you own a penthouse

The world's most accurate clock has neatly shown how right Albert Einstein was 100 years ago, when he proposed that time is a relative concept and the higher you live above sea level the faster you should age.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Quantum Time Machine Lets You Travel to the Past Without Fear of Grandfather Paradox

Looking to build a time machine but nervous about the classic grandfather paradox, aka the Marty McFly conundrum, aka the idea that you might unwittingly do something that causes you to never exist in the first place? An MIT professor and a few of his quantum quoting buddies have published a theory that  allows for time travel while circumventing the grandfather paradox . All you need is a quantum teleportation device and a precise understanding of the idea of postselection--Flux Capacitor optional.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Topological insulators: Star material

 A topological insulator sounds simple enough:  A block of material that lets electrons move along its surface, but not through its inside . In fact, it is far from straightforward. Ordinary metals conduct electrons all the way through, whereas ordinary insulators don't conduct electrons at all. A copper-plated block of wood conducts only on the surface, but that is two materials, not one. The idea of a topological insulator is so strange that for a long time, physicists had no reason to believe that such a material would exist .

 Researchers also believe that the collective motions of electrons inside topological insulators will mimic several of the never-before-seen particles predicted by high-energy physicists. Among them are axions, hypothetical particles predicted in the 1970s; magnetic monopoles, single points of north and south magnetism; and Majorana particles — massless, chargeless entities that can serve as their own antiparticles. 

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Could some entangled states be useless for quantum cryptography ?

↑ 
One of the widely accepted properties of quantum entanglement is secrecy. Since scientists and researchers began working with quantum key distribution, entanglement has been considered an essential part of keeping communications private. What if entanglement didn't always mean secrecy, though ? New work is shedding light on the nature of entanglement and quantum key distribution -  and possibly proving that a high degree of entanglement does not necessarily lead to complete secrecy .

Thursday, June 17, 2010

What Is Time? One Physicist Hunts for the Ultimate Theory

One way to get noticed as a scientist is to tackle a really difficult problem. Physicist Sean Carroll has become a bit of a rock star in geek circles by attempting to answer an age-old question no scientist has been able to fully explain: What is time ?.

Dropping ultra-cold quantum gas down an elevator shaft could help prove Einstein wrong

Scientists have shown that it’s possible to keep sufficiently close tabs on quantum mechanical objects in free fall to tell whether two such objects experience gravity the same way. In 1907, Einstein suggested that if you were in a windowless elevator that was plunging towards Earth in free fall, you would feel the same weightlessness as if you were floating in outer space. This notion, known as the equivalence principle, laid the foundation for general relativity. It explains why a pebble and a piano fall at the same speed if dropped from the same roof, despite their different masses. It’s also a necessary first step toward describing the effects of gravity as curvature in spacetime.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/06/quantum-gravity-in-an-elevator/#ixzz0rBEhUpVj

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Stretched molecule puts a new spin on electrons

Physicists in the US have invented a way of measuring the magnetic properties of a single molecule as it is being stretched. The technique provides a

new approach for studying quantum chemistry and how the spin of an electron affects its passage through tiny structures.

The technique could one day even be adapted for use in spintronic devices, which use the spin of the electron to process and store information.

Monday, June 14, 2010

Physicists build quantum amplifier with single artificial atom

By demonstrating how a single artificial atom can be used to amplify electromagnetic waves, physicists from Japan are opening up new possibilities for quantum amplifiers, which can be used in a variety of electronic and optical applications.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Entropy study suggests Pictish symbols likely were part of a written language

How can you tell the difference between random pictures and an ancient, symbol-based language ?

 A new study has shown that concepts in entropy can be used to measure the degree of repetitiveness in Pictish symbols from the Dark Ages, with the results suggesting that the inscriptions appear be much closer to a modern written language than to random symbols 

. The Picts, a group of Celtic tribes that lived in Scotland from around the 4th-9th centuries AD, left behind only a few hundred stones expertly carved with symbols. Although the symbols appear to convey information, it has so far been impossible to prove that this small sample of symbols represents a written language.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Physicsts reveal how to cope with 'frustration'

For most people, frustration is a condition to be avoided. But for scientists studying certain "frustrated" ensembles of interacting components -that is, those which cannot settle into a state that minimizes each interaction-

 it may be the key to understanding a host of puzzling phenomena that affect systems from neural networks and social structures to protein folding and magnetism.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Math behind Internet encryption wins top award: Abel prize awarded to number theorist John Tate

The Abel prize--considered the "Nobel" prize of mathematics--has been awarded to John Tate, recently retired from the University of Texas at Austin, for his work on algebraic number theory, the mathematical discipline that deals with connections between whole numbers and lies at the heart of Internet security.
Established in 2002, the Abel Prize is presented annually by the King of Norway and carries a cash award of $1 million.

Ian Stewart Try to find the prime factors of a 200-digit number with pencil and paper--or even with a computer program--and it would take longer than the age of the Universe .

John Tate Biography in Wikipedia

Electrical properties of glass at the nanoscale lead to a pump the size of a red blood cell

Researchers have devised a way to fabricate tiny electrodes from glass, harnessing a phenomenon by which nanoscale glass walls can be transformed from insulators to conductors and back again. At larger scales, that phenomenon, known as  dielectric breakdown , leads to excess heating and structural damage,  but at the nanoscale the process appears to be harmless and  reversible.

Friday, May 21, 2010

Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg

Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, who made important contributions in many fields of theoretical physics, passed away on 8 November 2009 in Moscow; he had suffered for several years from a blood disease.

Recurrence Analysis of Stock and Commodity indices

In the contemporary global scenario, the working of the complex and multidimensional factors on the time behaviour of financial series necessitates an investigation of the underlying characteristic features of the same. In addition to the state of the art econometric approaches, analysis in terms of state space dynamics considering the financial time series as deterministic chaos has emerged to be of utmost importance. Understanding the dynamics of a financial series, as a stock market index or a commodity market index is still however, a complex task having its specific requirements.  Market behaviour, in case of both commodity and securities is ultimately reflected by the average trading price movement . Thus the time series representing the indices in the respective markets is a key to understanding the economic similarities/dissimilarities in the two markets.  Our purpose was to analyse the time series representing the indices of commodity and stock markets .

CSS3 Examples and Code

We present a set of CSS3 examples which include the state of art in web design. Simple code for the examples are included.
 
http://fisica.ciens.ucv.ve/felix/css3/

Friday, May 14, 2010

Global classical solutions of the Boltzmann equation with long-range interactions

Ludwig Boltzmann
1844-1906
This is a brief announcement of our recent proof of global existence and rapid decay to equilibrium of classical solutions to the Boltzmann equation without any angular cutoff, that is, for long-range interactions. We consider perturbations of the Maxwellian equilibrium states and include the physical cross-sections arising from an inverse-power intermolecular potential r -(p-1) with p > 2, and more generally. We present here a mathematical framework for unique global in time solutions for all of these potentials.  We consider it remarkable that this equation, derived by Boltzmann in 1872 and Maxwell in 1867, grants a basic example where a range of geometric fractional derivatives occur in a physical model of the natural world . Our methods provide a new understanding of the effects due to grazing collisions.

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/13/5744.abstract?sid=9d675b61-b4d1-4bc0-88d1-b450d0b4b5ca
 
Philip T. Gressman and Robert M. Strain
University of Pennsylvania, Department of Mathematics, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6395

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Time travel? Maybe

Einstein and Rosen made a very bold supposition: What if a traveler fell into the mouth of something that looked like a black hole, but rather than being crushed by a singularity at the center of a black hole, instead emerged from another mouth, potentially many light-years from where he or she started ?. This isn't as crazy as it sounds. Einstein's theory of general relativity -- our current working model for how gravity and space work -- has been confirmed with countless experiments. And, as ad hoc as it sounds, an Einstein-Rosen bridge is a perfectly valid solution to the equations of general relativity.

Graphene transistor could advance nanodevices

For years, scientists and researchers have been looking into the properties of carbon nanotubes and graphene for use in nanoelectronics.  There is no real mass application of devices based on graphene and carbon nanotubes , Zhenxing Wang tells PhysOrg.com.  This is really an opportunity for them to show their capabilities .

Appl. Phys. Lett. 96, 173104 ( 2010 )

Death of a star in 3D

PhysOrg.com ) -- Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching have for the first time managed to reproduce the asymmetries and fast-moving iron clumps of observed supernovae by complex computer simulations in all three dimensions. To this end they successfully followed the outburst in their models consistently from milliseconds after the onset of the blast to the demise of the star several hours later. ( Astrophysical Journal, May 10th, 2010 ).

Friday, April 23, 2010

Unraveling the physics of DNA's double helix

 The stability of DNA is so fundamental to life that it's important to understand all factors , said Piotr Marszalek, a professor of mechanical engineering and materials sciences at Duke.  If you want to create accurate models of DNA to study its interaction with proteins or drugs, for example,  you need to understand the basic physics of the molecule . For that, you need solid measurements of the forces that stabilize DNA .

DNA construction kit for nanoengines

For a rotaxane molecule consists essentially of an axle and a ring, or hoop, threaded over it. To prevent the hoop from slipping off the axle, bulky  stoppers  are placed at each end. These, in turn, consist of intertwined rings. The whole construction looks rather like a dumbbell with a hoop around its handle ( see diagram ).

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Laser technology provides a quantum leap (La tecnología láser da un salto cuántico)

En la Universidad de Innsbruck ( Austria ), un equipo de investigación financiado con fondos comunitarios ha creado un láser de átomo único que se rige por el mismo principio que los láseres clásicos pero que además presenta propiedades cuánticas en sus interacciones entre átomos y fotones. Los resultados de su investigación, publicados en la revista Nature Physics, ampliarán el conocimiento que se posee de las propiedades de los láseres y podrán utilizarse para medir composiciones de oligoelementos gaseosos e isótopos de carbono en el aire y el suelo.
At the University of Innsbruck ( Austria ), a team of private funded research has created a single atom laser which is governed by the same principle as lasers but also presents classical quantum properties in interactions between atoms and photons. The results of their research, published in the journal Nature Physics, expand the knowledge of the lasers properties and may be used to measure gas compositions of trace elements and isotopes of carbon in the air and soil.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

La mayor tormenta solar en 500 días inquieta a los científicos

Una vez más, y esta vez con más fuerza y de forma totalmente inesperada, el Sol ha dado muestras de que ha despertado de su letargo. El telescopio espacial 'Tesis' registró el lunes la mayor tormenta geomagnética desde octubre de 2008, según informa el Instituto ruso de Física 'Lebedev'. La tormenta solar alcanzó el nivel 7 en una escala de 10, el máximo histórico del último año y medio. Su fase activa se prolongó de las 10.00 a las 19.00 horas. "No se han producido fluctuaciones de tal magnitud durante 540 días, desde el 11 de octubre de 2008", aseguran los técnicos. Una gran actividad solar no presagia nada bueno en un mundo absolutamente dependiente de la tecnología.
Once again, this time harder and quite unexpectedly, the Sun has shown that he has awakened from its slumber. The Hubble Space 'thesis' posted on Monday, the largest geomagnetic storm of October 2008, according to the Russian Institute of Physics 'Lebedev'. The solar storm reached level 7 on a scale of 10, the record high last year and a half. Active phase lasted from 10.00 to 19.00. "There have been no fluctuations of such magnitude for 540 days, from October 11, 2008", say the technicians. A high solar activity does not bode well in a world utterly dependent on technology.

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Viajar a la velocidad de la luz mataría en pocos segundos

Malas noticias para todos los que soñábamos con recorrer la galaxia a velocidades relativísticas. Según parece, al desplazarnos a velocidades cercanas a la de la luz, los escasos átomos de hidrógeno que existen en el espacio  vacío  nos golpearían tan duro como las partículas aceleradas por el Gran Colisionador de Hadrones ( LHC ). Si los científicos de la Universidad Johns Hopkins están en lo cierto,  esos pequeños átomos nos freirían en pocos segundos .
Bad news for all those who dreamed of exploring the galaxy at relativistic speeds. Apparently, the motion at speeds approaching that of light, the few hydrogen atoms that exist in the  vacuum  would hit us as hard as particles accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider ( LHC ). If scientists at Johns Hopkins University are right,  these little atoms will fry us in a few seconds .

Charging Ahead: Carbon Nanotubes Could Hold Long-Sought Battery Technology Breakthrough

With battery technology advances long overdue, researchers are racing to develop more efficient ways to store power. One hopeful option is in the use of carbon nanotubes,  which can store much more electricity by weight than lithium-ion batteries while keeping their charge and remain durable for far longer .

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Fossil finger points to new human species

Its genetic material told another story. When German researchers extracted and sequenced DNA from the fossil, they found that  it did not match  that of Neanderthals — or of modern humans, which were also living nearby at the time.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

The Bose-Einstein Condensate

ATOMIC TRAP cools by means of two different mechanisms

First, six laser beams ( red ) cool atoms, initially at room temperature, while corralling them toward the center of an evacuated glass box.

Next, the laser beams are turned off, and the magnetic coils ( copper ) are energized. Current flowing through the coils generates a magnetic field that further confines most of the atoms while allowing the energetic ones to escape. Thus, the average energy of the remaining atoms decreases, making the sample colder and even more closely confined to the center of the trap.

Ultimately, many of the atoms attain the lowest possible energy state allowed by quantum mechanics and become a single entity known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Light Improvement: Could Quantum Dots Boost the Quality of Cell Phone Pix?

Semiconductor crystals known as quantum dots have long held the promise of improving solar cells, lasers and lighting fixtures, but the reality is that integrating these fluorescent nanoparticles into existing technologies has proved difficult. One Silicon Valley start-up now aims to change this by the end of next year using quantum dots to vastly improve the picture-taking quality of cell phone cameras.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Scientists supersize quantum mechanics

A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Scanner scans a 200 page book in one minute (w/ Video)

A research team led by Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa of the University of Tokyo has developed a prototype scanner that allows users to scan a book simply by rapidly flipping its pages. A high-speed camera operating at 500 fps and producing pictures with a resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels, takes pictures of the page and its contents of text and images under ordinary light. A laser then projects lines on the page, and the camera captures this image as well. The lines allow the system to adjust for the curvature and distortion of pages as they are being flipped, and the software reconstructs the image into a digitized picture of a flat, regular page.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Perelman wins Millenium Prize for proving Poincaré conjecture

The American Clay Mathematics Institute has awarded the Russian maths genius Grigori Perelman a million dollars for proving what is known as the Poincare Conjecture, a milestone theorem which opens up a whole new field in geometry. The Institute says such breakthroughs happen once in a millennium and cannot be allowed to pass unrewarded. Forty-six-year-old Mr. Perelman meantime is a known recluse who has already rejected a gold medal and cash from the latest World Mathematical Congress for his remarkable discovery. He has spent the period since 2006 in a remote suburban location without contact with colleagues. His former superior at the Steklov Mathematical Institute Professor Sergei Kislyakov warns the Clay Institute that Dr. Perelman is likely to ignore his latest international honour.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

A Theory Set in Stone: An Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs, After All

Although any T. Rex–enthralled kid will tell you that a gigantic asteroid wiped the dinosaurs off the planet, scientists have always regarded this impact theory as a hypothesis subject to revision based on further evidence gathered from around the globe. Other possible causes, such as volcanism and smaller, multiple asteroid strikes, never actually went away,

and over the years researchers raised important points that did not fully jibe with a history-changing celestial impact near the Yucatan peninsula one awful day some 65.5 million years ago.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

A New Spin on Conductivity: Electric Signals Can Propagate through an Insulator: Scientific American

But that is precisely what a group of Japanese researchers has found, as detailed in a study in the March 11 issue of Nature. The electric current induces a collective excitation in the magnetic insulator that can travel relatively long distances before unloading its momentum to generate a voltage when it reaches an electric conductor.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

A precision measurement of the gravitational redshift by the interference of matter waves

One of the central predictions of metric theories of gravity, such as general relativity, is that a clock in a gravitational potential U will run more slowly by a factor of 1 + U/c2, where c is the velocity of light, as compared to a similar clock outside the potential1.

This effect, known as gravitational redshift, is important to the operation of the global positioning system, timekeeping, and future experiments with ultra-precise, space-based clocks ( such as searches for variations in fundamental constants ).

The gravitational redshift has been measured using clocks on a tower, an aircraft and a rocket, currently reaching an accuracy of 7×10-5.

Here we show that laboratory experiments based on quantum interference of atoms enable a much more precise measurement, yielding an accuracy of 7×10-9.

Our result supports the view that gravity is a manifestation of space-time curvature, an underlying principle of general relativity that has come under scrutiny in connection with the search for a theory of quantum gravity.

Improving the redshift measurement is particularly important because this test has been the least accurate among the experiments that are required to support curved space-time theories.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Paul Krugman: Good and Boring ("Right now, Canada is a very important role model")

First, some background. Over the past decade the United States and Canada faced the same global environment. Both were confronted with the same flood of cheap goods and cheap money from Asia. Economists in both countries cheerfully declared that the era of severe recessions was over.
But when things fell apart, the consequences were very different here and there.

In the United States, mortgage defaults soared, some major financial institutions collapsed, and others survived only thanks to huge government bailouts. In Canada, none of that happened. What did the Canadians do differently ?

read more...

Sunday, February 7, 2010

NIST’s Second ‘Quantum Logic Clock’ Based on Aluminum Ion is Now World’s Most Precise Clock

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have built an enhanced version of an experimental atomic clock based on a single aluminum atom that is now the world’s most precise clock, more than twice as precise as the previous pacesetter based on a mercury atom. The new aluminum clock would neither gain nor lose one second in about 3.7 billion years, according to measurements to be reported in Physical Review Letters ( preprint ). The new clock is the second version of NIST’s  quantum logic clock , so called because it borrows the logical processing used for atoms storing data in experimental quantum computing, another major focus of the same NIST research group. ( The logic process is described at http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/releases/logic_clock/logic_clock.html#background ) The second version of the logic clock offers more than twice the precision of the original.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

The Quantum Physics of Photosynthesis

By hitting single molecules with quadrillionth-of-a-second laser pulses, scientists have revealed the quantum physics underlying photosynthesis, the process used by plants and bacteria to convert light into energy, at efficiencies unapproached by human engineers. The quantum wizardry appears to occur in each of a photosynthetic cell’s millions of antenna proteins. These route energy from electrons spinning in photon-sensitive molecules to nearby reaction-center proteins, which convert it to cell-driving charges Almost no energy is lost in between. That’s because it exists in multiple places at once, and always finds the shortest path.

Read More in
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/quantum-photosynthesis/#ixzz0eVrEvcho

Pablo Antillano: "Tomás Eloy Martínez cambió el Periodismo Venezolano"

En mi generación casi nadie discute que Tomás Eloy Martínez partió en dos la historia de nuestro periodismo. En la época que él llegó al país, los periodistas de El Nacional asumían como maestros a Moradell y a Mario Delfín Becerra, y se sentían herederos de Miguel Otero Silva y Federico Álvarez, de Sergio Antillano y Héctor Mujica, de Arístides Bastidas y Pascual Venegas Filardo, de Antonio Arráiz y Jesús Sanoja. Se hacía un periodismo correcto, devoto de la noticia, el tubazo, el objetivismo y la pirámide invertida. Aunque simpatizaban, en su mayoría, con causas de izquierda suscribían las normas clásicas del diarismo norteamericano.

Continue leyendo...

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Buscan crear super computadoras sin límite de velocidad

Un equipo de investigadores liderados por científicos de la Universidad de Yale ejecutó exitosamente operaciones simples de mecánica cuántica, lo cual podría significar la creación de hardware con potencial ilimitado de procesamiento.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Quantum Simulation of a Relativistic Particle

Researchers of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Innsbruck, Austria, used a calcium ion to simulate a relativistic quantum particle, demonstrating a phenomenon that has not been directly observable so far:

The Zitterbewegung

They have published their findings in the current issue of the journal Nature.

Golden Ratio Discovered in Quantum World: Hidden Symmetry Observed for the First Time in Solid State Matter

The magnetic field is used to tune the chains of spins to a quantum critical state. The resonant modes ( notes ) are detected by scattering neutrons. These scatter with the characteristic frequencies of the spin chains. (Credit: Image courtesy of Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres)
Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie ( HZB ), in cooperation with colleagues from Oxford and Bristol Universities, as well as the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, have for the first time observed a nanoscale symmetry hidden in solid state matter. They have measured the signatures of a symmetry showing the same attributes as the golden ratio famous from art and architecture.

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Venezuela gana por tercera vez la «Letra de Oro» en Leipzig

...esta vez con Geohistoria de la Sensibilidad en Venezuela, de Pedro Cunill Grau, edición de la Fundación Empresas Polar, Caracas, 2007.