High Energy Physics and Computational Science

Monday, June 30, 2025

Physicists Catch Light in 'Imaginary Time' in Scientific First

For the first time, researchers have seen how light behaves during a mysterious phenomenon called 'imaginary time'.

When you shine light through almost any transparent material, the gridlock of electromagnetic fields that make up the atomic alleys and side streets will add a significant amount of time to each photon's commute.

This delay can tell physicists a lot about how light scatters, revealing details about the matrix of material the photons must navigate. Yet until now, one trick up the theorist's sleeve for measuring light's journey invoking imaginary time has not been fully understood in practical terms.

An experiment conducted by University of Maryland physicists Isabella Giovannelli and Steven Anlage has now revealed precisely what pulses of microwave radiation (a type of light that exists outside the visible spectrum) do while experiencing imaginary time inside a roundabout of cables.

Their work also demonstrates how imaginary numbers can describe a very real and measurable process.

Imaginary numbers are mathematically convenient tools for solving equations that describe physical phenomena. Handy as they are, they're as abstract as the square root of a negative number, having no practical equivalence in our everyday experience of reality.

For pulses of light waves dilly-dallying through a chunk of matter, imaginary numbers have helped solve transmission time delays, but the exact behaviors responsible for their role have never been systematically examined in experiments.

Technically, single photons of light can only ever move at a single, constant speed. Yet interactions with surrounding electromagnetic fields can delay a wave's overall journey in complex ways. In the context of light pulses, the actions of collections of waves can be sped up and slowed down in a similar manner.

This means a pulse of light waves can be negative, technically moving faster than its individual photons. Positive and negative values both real and imaginary can paint a picture of the photonic traffic conditions making up a material.

The experiment's apparatus consisted of a pair of coaxial cables connected in a circle, representing a simple and well-understood network of pathways for pulses of microwave light to travel through. They also made use of cutting-edge oscilloscopes that could detect incredibly small shifts in frequency.

By tinkering with the pulses and measuring the effects, Giovannelli and Anlage could untangle exactly how the patterns of waves within each pulse change with respect to values predicted by real and imaginary components of their equations.

"It's sort of like a hidden degree of freedom that people ignored," Anlage explained to Karmela Padavic-Callaghan at New Scientist.

"I think what we've done is bring it out and give it a physical meaning."

The imaginary numbers weren't describing some bizarre microwave daydream, but rather a tiny shift in the carrier wave's frequency as it passes through a material thanks to the way the transmitted pulse was absorbed.

Where previously this figure was ignored as, well, imaginary, it can now be connected to the physical operations that allow pulses of light waves to move quicker than the very photons they're composed of.

Website: International Research Awards on High Energy Physics and Computational Science.

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Friday, June 27, 2025

Discovery of 'mini halo' points to how the early universe was formed

Astronomers have uncovered a vast cloud of energetic particles a "mini halo" surrounding one of the most distant galaxy clusters ever observed, marking a major step forward in understanding the hidden forces that shape the cosmos.

The mini-halo is at a distance so great that it takes light 10 billion years to reach Earth, making it the most distant ever found, doubling the previous distance known to science.

The discovery demonstrates that entire galaxy clusters, among the largest structures in the universe, have been immersed in high-energy particles for most of their existence.

Such a mini-halo consists of highly energetic, charged particles in the vacuum between galaxies in a cluster, which together emanate radio waves which can be detected from Earth.

The researchers analyzed data from the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope, a vast network of over 100,000 small antennas spanning eight European countries.

While studying a galaxy cluster named SpARCS1049, the researchers detected a faint, widespread radio signal. They found that it did not emanate from individual galaxies, but from a vast region of space filled with high-energy particles and magnetic fields.

Stretching over a million light-years, this diffuse glow is a telltale sign of a mini-halo, a structure astronomers have only been able to observe in the nearby universe up until now.

"It's as if we've discovered a vast cosmic ocean, where entire galaxy clusters are constantly immersed in high-energy particles," said Hlavacek-Larrondo.

Timmerman added, "It's astonishing to find such a strong radio signal at this distance. It means these energetic particles and the processes creating them have been shaping galaxy clusters for nearly the entire history of the universe."

Two likely explanations

There are two likely explanations behind the formation of the mini-halo. One is that there are supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies within a cluster that can eject streams of high-energy particles into space. However, astronomers are still trying to understand how these particles would be able to migrate away from the black hole to create such a gigantic cloud of particles, while maintaining so much of their energy.

The second explanation is cosmic particle collisions. This is when charged particles within the hot plasma of the galaxy cluster collide at near-light speeds, smashing apart into the highly energetic particles that can be observed from Earth.

This new discovery provides a rare look at what galaxy clusters were like just after they formed, the astronomers say. It not only shows that galaxy clusters have been infused with these high-energy particles for billions of years more than previously known, but it also allows astronomers to study where these high-energy particles come from.

It suggests that black holes and/or high-energy particle collisions have been enriching the environment of galaxy clusters much earlier than expected, keeping them energized over billions of years.

With newer telescopes being developed, such as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), scientists will be able to detect even fainter signals and further explore the role of magnetic fields, cosmic rays, and energetic processes in shaping the universe, the astronomers say.

"We are just scratching the surface of how energetic the early universe really was," said Hlavacek-Larrondo. "This discovery gives us a new window into how galaxy clusters grow and evolve, driven by both black holes and high-energy particle physics."

Website: International Research Awards on High Energy Physics and Computational Science.

Thursday, June 26, 2025

Vera C Rubin Observatory reveals its first spectacular images of the cosmos

The first spectacular images from the Vera C Rubin Observatory have been released today showing millions of galaxies and Milky Way stars and thousands of asteroids in exquisite detail.

Based in Cerro Pachón in the Andes, the Vera C Rubin Observatory contains the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) the largest camera ever built. Taking almost two decades to build, the 3200 megapixel instrument forms the heart of the observatory’s 8.4 m Simonyi Survey Telescope.

The image above is of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulas. This picture combines 678 separate images taken by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in just over seven hours of observing time. It reveals otherwise faint or invisible details, such as the clouds of gas and dust that comprise the Trifid nebula (top right) and the Lagoon nebula, which are several thousand light-years away from Earth.

The image below is of the Virgo cluster. It shows a small section of the Virgo cluster, featuring two spiral galaxies (lower right), three merging galaxies (upper right) and several groups of distant galaxies.

Star mapper

Later this year, the Vera C Rubin Observatory, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, will begin a decade-long survey of the southern hemisphere sky.

The LSST will take a complete picture of the southern night sky every 3-4 nights. It will then replicate this process over a decade to produce almost 1000 full images of sky.

This will be used to plot the positions and measure the brightness of objects in the sky to help improve our understanding of dark matter and dark energy. It will examine 20 billion galaxies as well as produce the most detailed star map of the Milky Way, imaging 17 billion stars and cataloguing some six million small objects within our solar system including asteroids.

Cosmic pioneer

The observatory is named in honour of the US astronomer Vera C. Rubin. In 1970, working with Kent Ford Jr, they observed that outer stars orbiting in the Andromeda galaxy were all doing so at the same speed.

Examining more galaxies still, they found that their rotation curves the orbital speed of visible stars within the galaxy compared with their radial distance to the galaxy centre contradicted Kepler’s law.

They also found that stars near the outer edges of the galaxies were orbiting so fast that they should be falling apart.

Rubin and Ford Jr’s observation led them to predict that there was some mass, dubbed “dark matter”, inside the galaxies responsible for the anomalous motions, something their telescopes couldn’t see but was there in quantities about six times the amount of the luminous matter present.

Website: International Research Awards on High Energy Physics and Computational Science.

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Breakthrough theory links Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics

For over 100 years, two theories have shaped our understanding of the universe: quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity.

For over 100 years, two theories have shaped our understanding of the universe: quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity. One explains the tiny world of particles; the other describes gravity and the fabric of space. But despite their individual success, bringing them together has remained one of science’s greatest unsolved problems.

Now, a team of researchers at University College London has introduced a bold new idea. Rather than tweaking Einstein’s theory to fit into quantum rules, they suggest flipping the script. Their model, called a “postquantum theory of classical gravity,” aims to rethink the deep link between gravity and the quantum world.

Quantum mechanics thrives on probabilities, uncertainty, and the strange behavior of subatomic particles. It’s helped explain the structure of atoms and power modern technology. Meanwhile, general relativity offers a grand view of the universe, where planets and stars bend spacetime and create what we feel as gravity.

But these two worldviews clash at the deepest levels. When scientists try to combine them, the math breaks down. Equations become inconsistent. Models collapse. Despite decades of effort, no unified framework has fully solved the puzzle.

Divide Between Quantum Mechanics and Relativity

What makes the UCL proposal stand out is its refusal to force gravity into a quantum mold. Instead, it explores how classical gravity might interact with quantum systems in entirely new ways. This shift opens a door to theories that haven’t been fully explored before.

“Physicists have often assumed that Einstein’s theory must be modified,” the researchers noted. “But what if the problem isn’t gravity at all? What if it’s the quantum part that needs rethinking?” This provocative question lies at the heart of their approach.

If proven, their work could transform how we view the universe. It offers a new path one that doesn’t aim to crush gravity into quantum form, but instead lets each theory play by its own rules. That simple yet radical idea could help solve one of the most stubborn mysteries in physics.

Website: International Research Awards on High Energy Physics and Computational Science.

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

The Birth of Light: Unveiling the Secrets of the Universe’s First Glimpse of Illumination

How light struggled to break free from the dense early universe, marking the beginning of the cosmos we know today.

Did light shine in the universe’s earliest moments, or was it hidden from view? While this question may seem simple at first, a recent article by Live Science reveals that the reality is far more intricate. Photons, the particles that make up light, existed from the very beginning of the universe, immediately after the Big Bang. However, they were initially trapped in a dense and hot environment. It would take hundreds of thousands of years for these photons to break free from their cosmic confinement. The journey of light through the universe’s early stages is a compelling story of rapid expansion, cooling, and cosmic evolution, ultimately shaping the vast and structured universe we observe today.

After the Big Bang, space itself expanded rapidly, carrying energy and matter across the cosmos. Andrew Layden, chair of physics and astronomy at Bowling Green State University, explains the enormity of this event: “With the Big Bang, space was created and expanded, along with everything in the universe.” In this violent expansion, the universe was overwhelmingly hot, filled with particles moving at incredible speeds. Initially, photons existed in this early universe, but they could not travel freely. This is because the universe was so dense that it acted like a fog, with electrons scattering freely and obstructing light’s journey.

Layden likens this to fog and dew: “Think of fog and dew. Particles in a high-energy state are dispersed like water in fog, and when the energy gets low enough, they can condense out like droplets of dew.” This analogy helps us understand how particles, such as electrons and protons, existed in a high-energy state and how, as the universe cooled, they gradually allowed light to travel without obstruction. The early universe was a “dense soup,” where light was constantly colliding with free-moving electrons, preventing it from traveling far.

Around 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe began to cool. This cooling allowed atomic nuclei and electrons to bond together, a process known as “recombination.” The universe’s temperature dropped enough for electrons to form stable orbits around atomic nuclei, which meant that the soup of free electrons dispersed throughout the early universe began to clear.

“Electrons were moving too fast for atomic nuclei to hold them in orbit around them,” Layden explains. With the reduction in temperature, the free electrons were no longer able to scatter photons. As a result, the first photons in the universe were finally able to escape, marking the first time that light could travel freely. This marked the end of the “opaque” era of the universe and the beginning of an era where light could propagate across space.

Cosmic Microwave Background: The Universe’s First Light

The photons that were freed at this moment became what we now detect as the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The CMB is the leftover radiation from the Big Bang, and it provides us with a snapshot of the early universe. When the universe cooled enough for light to travel freely, it emitted radiation in the infrared to visible wavelengths. Over billions of years, as the universe expanded, this radiation stretched to longer wavelengths, becoming the microwave background we observe today.

The CMB is vital for modern cosmology. It is one of the most important pieces of evidence that supports the Big Bang theory. By studying the CMB, scientists can gain insight into the universe’s early conditions, its rate of expansion, and the distribution of matter across vast distances. This faint radiation provides a blueprint of the universe as it existed when it was only a few hundred thousand years old, offering a window into the universe’s birth and growth.

The Cosmic Dark Ages and the Birth of Stars

After the release of the first light, the universe entered a period known as the cosmic dark ages, which lasted for millions of years. During this period, the universe was filled with gas, but no stars or galaxies had yet formed. It wasn’t until gravity began to act on these gas clouds that the first stars were born. The gravitational pull of gas clouds led them to collapse and form the first generation of stars. By about one billion years after the Big Bang, galaxies filled with stars began to emerge, marking the beginning of the “cosmic dawn.”

The formation of stars was a pivotal moment in the evolution of the universe, leading to the formation of galaxies and the development of complex structures. These early stars not only provided light to the universe but also began the process of synthesizing heavier elements, setting the stage for the creation of planets, moons, and ultimately life as we know it.

To understand the process that kept light trapped in the early universe, we can compare it to what happens inside our Sun. As Srinivasan Raghunathan, a cosmologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, explains, light created by nuclear reactions at the Sun’s core has a difficult time escaping. “You can imagine a photon of light created by nuclear reactions at the center of the sun trying to come out to the sun’s surface,” he said. The Sun’s core is so hot and filled with free electrons that light cannot travel in straight lines. It takes millions of years for light to reach the surface, as it constantly collides with particles along the way.

This phenomenon mirrors the early universe, where light could not escape its dense environment. Just like the photons in the Sun’s core, the photons of the early universe were trapped in a chaotic, hot environment. It wasn’t until the universe cooled and particles began to form stable atoms that light could finally travel freely.

Website: International Research Awards on High Energy Physics and Computational Science.

Monday, June 23, 2025

A spinning universe could crack the mysteries of dark energy and our place in the multiverse

"It would be amazing if a simple rotation of the universe was the origin of dark energy."

The universe seems to be rotating, and if that is the case, then this could have major ramifications for some of the biggest questions in science, including those above. That's according to Polish theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski of the University of New Haven, who is well-known for his theory that black holes act as doorways to other universes.

"Dark energy is one of the most intriguing mysteries of the universe. Many researchers have tried to explain it by modifying equations of general relativity or suggesting the existence of new fields that could accelerate the universe's expansion," Poplawski told Space.com. "It would be amazing if a simple rotation of the universe was the origin of dark energy, especially that it predicts its weakening."

Evidence that the universe is rotating was recently delivered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which found that two-thirds of galaxies are rotating in the same direction. This suggests a lack of randomness and a preferred direction for cosmic rotation.

Additionally, Poplawski pointed out that other astronomical data seem to show that the angle between the most likely axis of the spinning galaxies and the axis of the bulk flow of nearby galaxy clusters is 98 degrees, meaning they are nearly perpendicular in relation to each other. That is something that is in accordance with the hypothesis that the universe is rotating.

A spinning universe isn't the only universe

To understand why a rotating universe implies more than one universe, Poplawski refers to "frames of reference." These are sets of coordinate systems that are integral to physics, which allow motion and rest to be measured.

Imagine two scientists, Terra and Stella. Each is in their own frame of reference, but Terra on Earth, Stella in a spacecraft traveling past our planet. Terra sees Stella's frame of reference (the spacecraft) moving in relation to her own (the Earth), which is at rest. Stella, meanwhile, sees her frame of reference at rest while it is Terra's frame of reference in motion as the Earth races away.

Poplawski pointed out that if the universe is rotating, then its frame of reference is rotating, and that only makes sense if it is rotating in relation to at least one other frame of reference.

"If the universe is rotating, it must rotate relative to some frame of reference corresponding to something bigger," he continued. "Therefore, the universe is not the only one; it is a part of a multiverse."

For Poplawski, the simplest and most natural explanation of the origin of the rotation of the universe is black hole cosmology.

Black hole cosmology suggests that every black hole creates a new baby universe on the other side of its event horizon, the one-way light-trapping surface that defines the outer boundary of a black hole.

The theory replaces the central singularity at the heart of a black hole with "spacetime torsion" that gives rise to repulsive gravity that kick-starts the expansion of a new universe.

"Because all black holes form from rotating objects, such as rotating stars or in the centers of rotating galaxies, they rotate too," Poplawski said. "The universe born in a rotating black hole inherits the axis of rotation of the black hole as its preferred axis."

In other words, our universe may be spinning in a preferred direction because that is the way that the black hole it is sealed within is spinning.

"A black hole becomes an Einstein-Rosen bridge or a 'wormhole' from the parent universe to the baby universe," Poplawski explained. "Observers in the new universe would see the other side of the parent black hole as a primordial white hole."

Website: International Research Awards on High Energy Physics and Computational Science.

Saturday, June 21, 2025

The Quantum Price of Forgetting: Scientists Finally Measure the Energy Cost of Deleting Information

Researchers at TU Wien and FU Berlin have, for the first time, measured what happens when quantum information is lost, shedding new light on the deep links between quantum physics, thermodynamics, and information theory.

At first glance, heat and information seem like completely unrelated ideas. Heat and energy are cornerstones of thermodynamics, one of the most important areas in physics. Information theory, by contrast, is a mathematical field that explores how data is stored and communicated.

But in the 1960s, physicist Rolf Landauer made a bold claim: deleting information always comes with a cost in energy. In fact, every time you erase data from a storage device, a small amount of heat is released into the environment. This idea, known as the Landauer Principle, revealed a deep connection between thermodynamics and information science.

Now, scientists at TU Wien have taken this one step further. For the first time, they have measured this effect in complex quantum systems made up of many particles. Their experiments show that when a quantum system loses information, when it “forgets” its state, there is a measurable transfer of both energy and entropy to its surroundings.

Deletion costs energy

“The so-called Landauer principle states that deleting information is never free,” says Prof. Jörg Schmiedmayer from the Atomic Institute at TU Wien. “No matter how you store information, no matter how economical and efficient you are, deleting a bit of information always results in at least a certain increase in entropy and thus also in a loss of energy.” This principle plays an important role in quantum computers and sets fundamental limits for information processing based on quantum physics.

But the question now is: What does ‘deleting’ or ‘forgetting’ mean in a physical sense? After all, information can be lost in many different ways. You can erase information written in pencil. You can demagnetize magnetic data carriers. But you can also ask: Doesn’t a physical system also forget information simply by the passage of time?

Reversible and irreversible physics

There are physical systems whose future state follows from their current state in a clear and predictable way. For example, if you know the positions and velocities of all the planets, you can calculate with great precision where the planets will be in three months’ time or where they were three months ago. This means that no information has been lost. No data has been deleted. In the current state of the system, the previous state is still stored in a certain sense. In principle, it can be reconstructed.

In quantum physics, this is also the case in principle but only until the quantum system comes into contact with its environment. When you measure the state of a quantum particle, for example, you inevitably bring it into contact with a measuring device. Information is transferred from the quantum particle to the measuring device, changing the state of the particle in a way that cannot be reversed. Information seeps from the particle into the environment in an irreversible one-way process.

Ultracold atom clouds

At TU Wien, this phenomenon has now been investigated using ultra-cold atom clouds. Several thousand rubidium atoms were cooled and held in place on an atom chip. Then, suddenly, two such atom clouds were dropped, allowing them to spread freely and overlap with each other. “Now we divide the entire system into two parts,” says Amin Tajik, who carried out the experiments. “One part serves as our quantum system, which we analyze. The rest is defined as the environment the environment with which our subsystem interacts.”

By precisely measuring the interference between the two atomic clouds, it is now possible to see how the subsystem interacts with its environment, how information is lost and how entropy is transferred. “There is no measuring device that can directly record these variables simultaneously,” says Stefan Aimet, a theorist at the FU Berlin and member of the theory team that worked in close international collaboration with theorists who modelled the observed phenomenon and quantified the connection between energy and information flows.

A detailed analysis showed that even this complicated multi-particle system adheres to Rolf Landauer’s rules. The deletion of quantum information is indeed accompanied by entropy transfer and energy loss.

“This is an important confirmation that information and quantum physics are indeed intertwined in such an exciting and profound way as Rolf Landauer thought,” says Jens Eisert, head of the theory group at the FU Berlin.

“This also brings us closer to understanding one of the most fundamental questions of quantum physics. What is particularly exciting about this work are the insights into information and heat that are not directly covered by Landauer’s principle, as this is already a valid theorem. But this platform of ultracold atoms allows us to quantitatively explore such profound questions about the measurement process, which will also be important for quantum technologies.”