Tag

Discoveries

All articles tagged with #discoveries

discoveries20 days ago•44 min saved

Entangled Z bosons in Higgs decays confirm quantum links at the electroweak scale

Physicists with CERN's ATLAS collaboration found strong evidence that Z bosons produced in Higgs decays remain quantum-entangled, rejecting a nonentangled alternative at 4.7 sigma (just shy of the 5-sigma discovery threshold). By analyzing the Z bosons’ spin states via four-lepton decays and angular distributions, the result supports Standard Model predictions and demonstrates entanglement at the electroweak scale with massive, short-lived particles. This extends collider tests of quantum information to new regimes and could sharpen future precision tests as more Run 3 and High-Luminosity LHC data become available.

via thebrighterside.news|

#cern #discoveries #higgs-boson

discoveries22 days ago•43 min saved

Atomic Cannon Tests Gravity on Muonium to Probe Second-Generation Matter

ETH Zurich and the Paul Scherrer Institute have produced a narrow, cold-like muonium beam inside superfluid helium, enabling a future atom-interferometry experiment to test how gravity acts on a second-generation particle. While the gravity of muonium has not yet been measured, the method could reach about 1% precision after roughly 100 days of measurements, extending tests of Einstein’s weak equivalence principle to new frontiers beyond ordinary matter.

via The Brighter Side of News|

#atom-interferometry #discoveries #equivalence-principle

discoveries24 days ago•44 min saved

Ancient Andes Landscape Survived Giant Eruption, Revealing Slow Mountain Growth

A 21.9-million-year-old Cardones ignimbrite eruption buried an ancient Andean landscape in northern Chile, enabling researchers to reconstruct pre-eruption topography and place an upper bound on uplift of about 0.26 km per million years (roughly 2.6 cm per century), supporting a slow, steady rise of the Andes and illustrating a new method for reading vanished landscapes from volcanic deposits.

via The Brighter Side of News|

#andes-mountains #cardones-ignimbrite #discoveries

discoveries26 days ago•42 min saved

Ancient Gondwana Expanded: Isotope Mapping Suggests It Spanned 80% of Earth’s Crust

Isotope-based basement maps mapped by Curtin University reveal hidden Gondwanan crust beneath Asia, Europe and North America, boosting Gondwana’s share to about 80% of Earth’s continental crust and defining a larger landmass called Greater Gondwana. The study also uncovers a ~32,000 km belt of subduction and volcanism around Gondwana around 525–500 million years ago, a tectonic reorganization that may have influenced climate and coincided with the Cambrian explosion.

via The Brighter Side of News|

#continental-crust #discoveries #gondwana

discoveries1 month ago•47 min saved

Pairs of retinal neurons drive the brain's arrow of time

Researchers developed an information-theoretic framework to break a system's local arrow of time into contributions from individuals, pairs, triplets and higher-order groups. When applied to 53 salamander retinal neurons, pairwise interactions accounted for about 66–74% of local irreversibility, and the retina showed a stronger arrow of time under a time-reversible Brownian stimulus than under a natural movie, indicating internal neural processing can generate temporal asymmetry independent of the external input. The approach could be applied to other complex nonequilibrium systems to understand how irreversibility emerges from simple components.

via The Brighter Side of News|

#arrow-of-time #discoveries #irreversibility

discoveries1 month ago•46 min saved

Quantum watch timestamps time through helium interference

A team at Uppsala University demonstrates a “quantum watch” that reads elapsed time from evolving interference patterns among many excited helium states (Rydberg states) instead of counting clock ticks. By matching short slices of the changing quantum pattern to theory, they achieve femtosecond precision and uncover small drifts in conventional lab timing, offering a new tool for ultrafast experiments where the exact start time is hard to define.

via The Brighter Side of News|

#discoveries #femtosecond #quantum-interference

discoveries1 month ago•48 min saved

Toba caldera's long shadow: danger lingers for millennia after eruption

New research on Indonesia’s Toba caldera shows that after its 74,000-year‑old super-eruption, magma continued to move and trigger renewed activity for 5,000–13,000 years, even as parts of the system cooled into solid rock. By dating post-eruption lava domes with argon/zircon methods, scientists reveal a thermally uneven reservoir with a warmer core and colder shell, meaning eruptions can occur without liquid magma and long-term hazards persist long after the main eruption.

via The Brighter Side of News|

#caldera-resurgence #discoveries #magma-storage

discoveries2 months ago•39 min saved

Microscopic Arrow of Time Emerges From Accelerating Light Waves

Researchers propose an accelerating wave equation that describes waves whose speed changes with time, introducing a wave’s intrinsic time and revealing relativistic-like effects; the framework suggests a microscopic arrow of time within wave mechanics and offers a new lens on momentum in dielectrics, potentially testable in time-varying photonic systems, though practical challenges like energy losses and material damage remain.

via The Brighter Side of News|

#accelerating-wave-equation #arrow-of-time #discoveries

discoveries2 months ago•53 min saved

Quantum experiment reveals negative weak time for photons in atomic cloud

University of Toronto physicists measured a negative weak value for the time transmitted photons leave atoms excited in a rubidium cloud, using weak measurement and postselection to link a negative group delay with a measurable phase shift in a probe beam. The result clarifies how quantum interference and dwell-time concepts govern light–matter interactions, without implying backward time travel, and has spurred further work extending the weak-value framework.

via The Brighter Side of News|

#atomic-excitation #discoveries #negative-time

discoveries2 months ago•35 min saved

Ancient bristle worm jaws redefine metal in biology as a new class of bio-metals

Microscopic tests of Perinereis cultrifera jaws show ion‑coordinated proteins that harden toward the tips and display metal‑like, size‑dependent elasticity, supporting a new category called bio-metals that blend polymeric structure with metal‑like hardness; researchers used nanoindentation and manifold micromechanics to define bio-metals by hardness, strain behavior, and ion‑protein structure and plan to study more species and potential genetic links to material design.

via The Brighter Side of News|

#bioengineering #biomaterials #biophysics

discoveries3 months ago•38 min saved

Vacuum’s Hidden Particles Leave Real Traces in Proton Collisions

Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University, using RHIC’s STAR detector, observed short-range spin correlations between lambda and anti-lambda hyperons produced in high-energy proton collisions. This implies virtual quark–antiquark pairs from the quantum vacuum can be liberated into real particles and retain a spin imprint, providing direct evidence of vacuum structure and offering a new way to probe quark confinement and the proton spin puzzle.

via The Brighter Side of News|

#discoveries #hadronization #proton-spin-crisis

discoveries3 months ago•44 min saved

Ancient Flores drought likely ended Homo floresiensis without direct human conflict

A long-term drought on Flores, inferred from stalagmite records and Stegodon tooth enamel, dried rivers and prey around Liang Bua, likely forcing Homo floresiensis to retreat and eventually vanish from Flores around 61,000 years ago; there is no evidence of direct contact with modern humans at the site, suggesting climate-driven ecological collapse rather than a violent extinction.

via The Brighter Side of News|

#ancient-drought #climate-change-history #discoveries

discoveries3 months ago•39 min saved

Resistivity Hits a Ceiling: Ultracold-atom Experiments Surface a Lattice-Bound Transport Limit

Ultracold potassium atoms in a controlled optical lattice reveal that increasing collisions initially raise resistivity but then saturate, showing a lattice-bound upper limit to collision-driven transport and offering a cleaner window into resistivity in low-density quantum materials.

via The Brighter Side of News|

#discoveries #optical-lattice #quantum-materials

discoveries4 months ago•39 min saved

Indian Plate Peels Apart Under Tibet, Redrawing Himalayan Tectonics

New seismic evidence shows the Indian Plate beneath southern Tibet is peeling away and tearing, with delamination of the mantle lithosphere and a tear likely forming a patchwork beneath the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau. By combining S-receiver functions and shear-wave splitting across thousands of stations, researchers map two mantle domains and surface gas signals that hint at mantle sources. The work challenges the classic single-slab view of continental collision and highlights deep Earth processes that shape mountain building and earthquake hazards in Asia.

via The Brighter Side of News|

#continental-collision #discoveries #earthquakes

discoveries4 months ago•45 min saved

East Africa’s Slow Rift Points to a Future Ocean, Scientists Say

GPS-based analysis shows Nubia and Somalia are slowly pulling apart along the East African Rift, with the Afar region experiencing the fastest opening (up to about 6.9 mm/year). This slow continental breakup signals the early formation of a new ocean basin over millions of years, potentially reshaping Africa’s coastlines and tectonic framework.

via The Brighter Side of News|

#afar-triple-junction #continental-breakup #discoveries