Global Energy Awards

 The mystery of nuclear 'magic numbers' has finally been resolved A special set of numbers has formed the backbone of nuclear physics research for decades, and now we finally know how it arises from the quantum mix of nuclear particles and forces. Nearly 80 years ago, physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer showed that when the nucleus of an atom contains certain numbers of protons and neutrons, such as 50 or 82, it becomes exceptionally stable. In the years since, researchers amassed evidence of more such “magic numbers”, which are found in the most stable, and therefore most abundant, elements in our universe. Global Energy Awards Nomination link: https://globalenergyawards.org/award-nomination/... Visit Our Website: globalenergyawards.org Contact Us: support@globalenergyawards.org

 Physicists Watch a Superfluid Freeze, Revealing a Strange New Quantum State of Matter Physicists have long wondered what happens when a superfluid is cooled even further, and now, experiments in bilayer graphene hint at an unexpected answer. Credit: SciTechDaily.com Physicists have observed a strange new quantum phase in a graphene-based system, where a superfluid appears to freeze into a solid-like state. Cooling usually pushes matter through a simple sequence. A gas condenses into a liquid, and with further cooling the liquid locks into a solid. Helium helped reveal that the quantum world can take a very different route. In the early 20th century, researchers found that helium, when chilled to extreme temperatures, can enter a superfluid state. In that form, it can move without dissipating energy and shows other counterintuitive behaviors, including creeping up and out of containers. That discovery left physicists with an even more intriguing puzzle: if a superfluid is cooled fu...

  A New Way To Cool Quantum Computers Could Change How They’re Built Schematic illustration of the quantum refrigerator in a superconducting quantum circuit. Two microwave channels act as hot and cold heat reservoirs, highlighted by a reddish and a bluish glow, respectively. The heat reservoirs are coupled to an artificial molecule consisting of two qubits. Controlled microwave noise (white zigzag arrows) is injected through the side ports to drive and regulate heat transport. Credit: Simon Sundelin. Quantum technology has the potential to reshape many core areas of society, including drug discovery, artificial intelligence, logistics, and secure communications. Despite this promise, major engineering hurdles still stand in the way of practical applications. One of the most serious challenges is maintaining control over quantum states, which are extremely sensitive and form the foundation of quantum computing. Superconducting quantum computers push this challenge to an extreme. To ...

  Solitons Take Their Lumps in Two Dimensions Solitons are solitary waves that travel like particles without changing shape. They have primarily been observed in settings where the underlying physics is 1D, such as along narrow water channels or inside thin optical fibers, but they can occur in higher dimensions as well. Davide Pierangeli from Sapienza University in Italy and his colleagues have used a structured light beam to become the first to produce a lump soliton, a mathematically exact soliton in two dimensions. Solitary waves are known to occur in higher dimensions, with the most familiar example being “rogue waves” in the ocean. But these waves are not “integrable” solitons, Pierangeli explains. By that he means they are not exact solutions to a nonlinear model describing the wave behavior. “Genuine solitons have an elegant mathematical formulation that makes their behavior deterministic,” he says. Thanks to this property, integrable solitons maintain their shapes and can ...

 Clearest Black Hole Collision Ever Recorded Puts Einstein to the Test For scientists who follow gravitational waves as they arrive from deep space, GW250114 stands out as an extraordinary event. It is the most precise gravitational wave signal ever captured from a pair of merging black holes, offering researchers a rare chance to closely examine Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, known as general relativity. “What’s fantastic is the event is pretty much identical to the first one we observed 10 years ago, GW150914. The reason it’s so much clearer is purely because our detectors have become much more accurate in the past 10 years,” said Cornell physicist Keefe Mitman, a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science in the College of Arts and Sciences. A Global Collaboration Behind the Discovery Mitman is one of the authors of the study that analyzed this signal, titled “Black Hole Spectroscopy and Tests of General Relativity with GW2...

Physicists Perform “Quantum Surgery” To Fix Errors While Computing Quantum computers promise powerful new capabilities, but their sensitivity to errors remains a major obstacle. Researchers have now demonstrated a method for performing quantum operations on protected logical qubits while continuously correcting errors, even during the operation itself. Credit: SciTechDaily.com By combining surface codes with lattice surgery, researchers have shown how logical qubits can be manipulated and entangled while remaining protected from errors.Quantum computers are often described as a glimpse of a faster, more powerful future. The catch is that today’s devices are fragile in a way ordinary computers are not. Their biggest headache is decoherence, the gradual loss of the delicate quantum behavior that makes them useful in the first place. When decoherence sets in, it can trigger two common kinds of mistakes: bit flips and phase flips. A bit flip is the more intuitive problem. A qubit that shou...