Luminous gravitons?

If we look at the world on a sufficiently small scale, we find that it has a grainy structure. Physicists have demonstrated particles of matter, light, and most interactions - but no experiment has revealed the granular properties of gravity.

Many physicists believe that gravity must be carried by massless "gravitons", but the interaction with known particles is too weak to be proven. Some theorists have come up with the idea that the existence of gravity can be confirmed if significant numbers of gravitons accumulate during intense gravitational phenomena, such as the merging of black holes. In March, Physical Review Letters published an analysis showing that such violent disasters can pull gravitons out of the shadows.

Where there is energy, there is also gravity. Douglas Singleton, a California State University physicist who was not involved in the new study, claims that photons - massless packets of radiant energy - can, in extremely rare cases, spontaneously convert into gravitational particles. The opposite can also happen: Gravitons become photons. The new analysis looks at the mechanism by which gravitons can release as many photons billions of times as previous studies have shown, which would make it easier to confirm their existence.

Raymond Sawyer, the work author and physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says that a rough estimate based on the density of gravitons near the black hole collision location is close to the number that would produce detectable radiation.

Space crisis

One of the two results of various measurements of the rate of expansion of the universe must be wrong - but which one?

At the beginning of the XXI century the standard cosmological model seemed complete. It contains many secrets - also full of fertile areas for further research, of course - definitely. But in general everything was in a "heap": about two thirds of the universe was dark energy (the mysterious thing that accelerates its expansion), about a quarter was dark matter (the mysterious thing that determines the development of its structure), and 4% or 5% was "ordinary" matter (that is, what we, the planets, the stars, the galaxies and everything we have always considered, not counting the last few decades, to be a complete universe). It was a logical whole.

...Not so fast. Or, more precisely, too quickly!

In recent years there has been a discrepancy between two ways of measuring the rate of expansion of the universe - a quantity known as Hubble constant (H0) is designated. The method, which consisted of starting with measurements in today's universe and going back to earlier and earlier stages, consistently gave a value of H0. However, the measurements, which began in the earliest stages of the universe and went back to the present day, also consistently provided a different value - one that shows that the universe is expanding faster than we thought.

Image source: Pixelbay

New superheavy isotopes could be produced soon

What are the chances of creating new isotopes of superheavy elements? Researchers highlighted the most promising channels for the production of a wide range of isotopes with atomic numbers from 112 to 118.
Calculations carried out by Polish scientists in collaboration with a group of scientists from Dubna (Russia) allow them to predict the chances for the creation of new isotopes of superheavy elements with previously unavailable accuracy. Scientists presented the most promising channels for the production of a wide range of isotopes with atomic numbers 112 to 118 in various nuclear collision configurations that led to their formation. The predictions confirm, with excellent compatibility, the experimental data available for methods that have already been tested.

Holograms like in Star Wars.

Using carefully prepared nanomaterials, scientists at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology succeeded in “bending” the laser beam in such a way that a holographic image with previously unattainable properties was created, which observers compared with the holograms known from the "Star Wars" series . Thanks to the new technology, the image of a rotating globe was created. The work of the Japanese research team was described in the journal "Optics Express".

Video on Youtube https://youtu.be/O1fHIcPXEjE

German Future Prize 2020: EUV developers from TRUMPF, ZEISS and Fraunhofer nominated!

The office of the Federal President today announced the nominees for the German Future Prize 2020 in the Hall of Honor of the Deutsches Museum in Munich. In the circle of the best - the three projects for the final round of the Federal President's Prize for Technology and Innovation - is a team of experts from TRUMPF, ZEISS and Fraunhofer IOF: With their project "EUV lithography - New light for the digital age", Dr. . Peter Kurz, ZEISS Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology (SMT) division, Dr. Michael Kösters, TRUMPF Lasersystems for Semiconductor Manufacturing, and Dr. Sergiy Yulin, Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Mechanics IOF in Jena, nominated.

© German Future Prize / Ansgar Pudenz

The team of experts in front of the world's most powerful pulsed industrial laser, which is used to generate light to enable EUV lithography (from left): Dr. Peter Kurz, ZEISS SMT Division, Dr. Michael Kösters, TRUMPF Lasersystems for Semiconductor Manufacturing and Dr. Sergiy Yulin, Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Mechanics IOF

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Causal future prognosis in a Minkowski space-time

Estimating future events is a difficult task. Unlike humans, machine learning approaches are not regulated by a natural understanding of physics. In the wild, a plausible sequence of events is subject to the rules of causality, which cannot simply be derived from a finite training set. In this paper, researchers (Imperial College London) propose a novel theoretical framework to carry out causal predictions of the future by embedding spatiotemporal information in a Minkowski spacetime. They use the concept of the cone of light from the special theory of relativity to restrict and traverse the latent space of the anarbitrary model. They demonstrate successful applications in causal image synthesis and the prediction of future video images on an image data set. Its framework is architecture and task independent and has strong theoretical guarantees for causal capabilities.

Testing of infusions using an optoacoustic sensor system

The Laser-Laboratorium Göttingen eV wins this year's tender for GO-Bio initially from the BMBF.

The project "Optoacoustic sensor system for monitoring infusions" (Oase) of the Photonic Sensor Technology department made it into the first of two phases of the Go-Bio inital funding measure. In this highly competitive tender by the BMBF, 41 of 178 project ideas with recognizable innovation potential were approved for the exploratory phase.

Unexpected electrical current that could stabilize fusion reactions

Scientists have discovered that electrical currents can form in ways that were previously unknown. The new findings could enable researchers to better bring the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars to Earth.

For a planar electrostatic wave interacting with a single species in a collision-free plasma, conservation of momentum implies conservation of current. However, when multiple species interact with the wave, they can exchange an impulse, resulting in a current drive. A simple, general formula for this driven current is derived in the work of the physicists. As examples, they show how currents can be driven for Langmuir waves in electron-positron-ion plasmas and for ion-acoustic waves in electron-ion plasmas.

Penning trap mass measurements of the deuteron and the HD + molecule ion

The mass of the deuteron is said to be 0,1 billionth of a percent less than the value stored in specialist literature! More than 100 years after the discovery of the atomic nucleus, it is still unclear how heavy individual specimens are. The research team led by Sascha Rau from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg succeeded in making an excellent “update”.

Source picture: Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics

The masses of the lightest atomic nuclei and the electron mass are linked, and their values influence observations in atomic physics, molecular physics and neutrino physics, as well as in metrology. The most accurate values for these fundamental parameters come from Penning Fallen mass spectrometry, which achieves relative mass uncertainties on the order of 10E (-11). However, redundancy checks using data from various experiments reveal significant inconsistencies in the masses of the proton, deuteron, and helion (the core of helium-3), suggesting that the uncertainty of these values may have been underestimated.

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