Global Energy Awards

  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...

 The universe may be hiding a fundamentally unknowable quantum secret From the vantage point of quantum physics, the universe may in some ways be fundamentally unknowable. In quantum physics, every object, such as an electron, is matched to a mathematical formula called the wave function. The wave function encodes all the details of an object’s quantum state, which means physicists can predict what an object might do in an experiment by combining its wave function with other equations. But if we accept that the whole world is quantum – and many researchers do – then much larger objects ought to have wave functions, including the whole universe. This is a point of view that was previously argued by, for instance, physics luminaries like Stephen Hawking. Global Energy Awards Nomination link: https://globalenergyawards.org/award-nomination/... Visit Our Website: globalenergyawards.org Contact Us: support@globalenergyawards.org

Scientists Discover Crystals That Spin, Twist, and Heal Themselves These newly discovered spinning crystals twist, break, and heal themselves, revealing a strange new side of solid matter. It may seem hard to believe, but crystals made from spinning components are real. Researchers from Aachen, Düsseldorf, Mainz, and Wayne State University have examined these unusual materials and uncovered a range of surprising behaviors. The crystals can easily split into separate pieces, form unusual internal boundaries, and develop defects that researchers can deliberately influence. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the team describes how a unified theoretical approach can be used to predict new properties in systems governed by what are known as “transverse interaction” forces. Transverse Forces in Materials and Living Systems “Transverse forces” are not limited to laboratory materials. They can appear in engineered systems such as certain magnetic solids, but...

 A Fundamental Quantum Rule May Entangle the Entire Universe At the most fundamental level of physics, nature does not behave locally. Particles separated by vast distances can act not as independent objects, but as components of a single quantum system. Researchers in Poland have now demonstrated that this kind of nonlocal behavior, which stems from the simple fact that particles of the same type are indistinguishable, can be observed experimentally for nearly all possible states of identical particles. According to quantum mechanics, every particle of a given type, such as photons or electrons, is inherently entangled with every other particle of that same type, whether it is nearby or located in a distant galaxy. This counterintuitive idea follows directly from a core principle of the theory: particles of the same type are fundamentally identical. This suggests the existence of a universal source of entanglement that underlies the strange nonlocal properties of the quantum world...