Tag Archives: Albert Einstein

Café Scientifique on March 29, 2016 *(cancelled)* and a fully booked talk on April 14, 2016 in Vancouver, Canada

There are two upcoming science events in Vancouver.

Café Scientifique

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*Cancellation notice received via email March 29, 2016 at 1430 hours PDT:

Our sincerest apologies, but we have just received word that The Railway Club is shutting it’s doors for good, effective immediately.  Unfortunately, because of this tonight’s event is cancelled.  We will do our best to re-schedule the talk in the near future once we have found a new venue.

The Tues., March 29, 2016 (tonight) Café Scientifique talk at 7:30 pm,  Café Scientifique, in the back room of The Railway Club (2nd floor of 579 Dunsmuir St. [at Seymour St.]), has one of the more peculiar descriptions for a talk that I’ve seen for this group. From a March 1, 2016 announcement (received via e-mail),

Our speaker for the evening will be Dr. Jerilynn Prior.  Prior is Professor of Endocrinology and Metabolism at the University of British Columbia, founder and scientific director of the Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research (CeMCOR), director of the BC Center of the Canadian Multicenter Osteoporosis Study (CaMOS), and a past president of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research.  The title of her talk is:

 

Is Perimenopause Estrogen Deficiency?

Sorting engrained misinformation about women’s midlife reproductive transition

43 years old with teenagers a full-time executive director of a not for profit is not sleeping, she wakes soaked a couple of times a night, not every night but especially around the time her period comes. As it does frequently—it is heavy, even flooding. Her sexual interest is virtually gone and she feels dry when she tries.

Her family doctor offered her The Pill. When she took it she got very sore breasts, ankle swelling and high blood pressure. Her brain feels fuzzy, she’s getting migraines, gaining weight and just can’t cope. . . .

What’s going on? Does she need estrogen “replacement”?  If yes, why when she’s still getting flow? Does The Pill work for other women? What do we know about the what, why, how long and how to help symptomatic perimenopausal women?

This description seems more appropriate for a workshop on women’s health for doctors and/or women going through ‘the change’.

Unveiling the Universe Lecture Series

This is a fully booked event but I suppose there’s always the possibility of a ticket at the last minute. From the 100 Years of General Relativity: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, Gravitational Waves and Interstellar on the University of British Columbia (UBC) website,

We invite you to join us for an evening with renowned theoretical physicist Kip Thorne.

100 years ago, Albert Einstein formulated his wildly successful general theory of relativity—a set of physical laws that attribute gravity to the warping of time and space. It has been tested with high precision in the solar system and in binary pulsars and explains the expansion of the universe. It even predicts black holes and gravitational waves. When combined with quantum theory, relativity provides a tentative framework for understanding the universe’s big-bang birth. And the equations that made Einstein famous have become embedded in our popular culture via, for example, the science fiction movie Interstellar.

In a captivating talk accessible to science enthusiasts of all ages, Professor Kip Thorne will use Interstellar to illustrate some of relativity’s deepest ideas, including black holes and the recent discovery of gravitational waves.

Professor Thorne of the California Institute of Technology is one of the world’s foremost experts on the astrophysics implications of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, including black holes—an expertise he used to great effect as scientific advisor to the movieInterstellar. Thorne was also one of the three principal scientists (with Rainer Weiss and Ron Drever) behind the LIGO experiment that recently detected gravitational waves, an achievement most expect will earn them a Nobel Prize.

Here are the details from the event page,

Speaker:

Dr. Kip Thorne

Event Date and Time:

Thu, 2016-04-14 19:0020:30

Location:

Science World (1455 Quebec St )

Local Contact:

Theresa Liao

Intended Audience:

Public

Despite the fact that are no tickets, here’s the registration link (in the hope they make a waiting list available) and more logistics,

Free Registration Required

Doors Open at 6:00PM
Lecture begins at 7:00pm

This event is organized by Science World, TRIUMF, and the UBC Department of Physics & Astronomy. It is part of UBC’s Centennial Celebration.

Sadly, I did not receive details and a link for registration in a more timely fashion although I was able to give readers a heads-up in a Jan. 22, 2016 posting. (scroll down about 25% of the way down).

Happy International Women’s Day March 8, 2016!

The UK’s Medical Research Council’s Clinical Science Centre and  Imperial College have found an interesting way to celebrate   International Women’s Day 2016 according to a March 8, 2016 posting by Stuart Clark for the Guardian (Note: Links have been removed),

Tonight [March 8, 2016] at the Royal Society, London, around a dozen women will be presented with Suffrage Science awards. Organised by the Medical Research Council’s Clinical Science Centre, Imperial College, they honour women’s contributions to science and are timing to coincide with International Women’s Day.

One of today’s awardees is Pippa Goldschmidt. She is being honoured for her work in science communication. With a PhD in astronomy, …

Her latest project is editing the short story collection I Am Because You Are. These stories all take their inspiration from Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which is currently celebrating its 100th anniversary.

What can fiction bring to science?

Science is too often a closed book for many people, they study it at school and are bored by it, or find it difficult or irrelevant to their lives. But fiction has this incredible ability to reflect and examine all aspects of the real world, and writing fiction about science is a great way of opening it up to new audiences, and helping to demystify it.

Science is also heavily reliant on literary concepts, such as metaphors, to get its points across; we often hear the phrases ‘the Universe is like an expanding balloon’, or ‘DNA is like an alphabet’. So I think fiction and science have more in common with each other than may first appear.

Should you be able to attend, I’d be delighted to hear more about the event.

Next, I have a March 8, 2016 article by Lauren J. Young on Inverse.com (Note: Links have been removed),

Women have achieved a lot throughout history. That’s why today, on March 8, thousands of events are taking place in more than 40 countries across the world to celebrate International Women’s Day. This year’s theme is Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step it up for Gender Equality, alluding to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals — a 15-year plan for growth and development in all countries including gender equality and education for all.

International Women’s Day dates back to February 28, 1909, when the Socialist Party of America observed it for the first time in the United States, and two years later, the leader of the Women’s Office for Germany’s Social Democratic Party, Clara Zetkin, expanded the idea internationally. It gained support by the United Nations in 1975, which strengthened the movement.

International Women’s Day is also a day to celebrate science: The United Nations created an interactive timeline documenting some of the most significant contributions made by women. Here are the three:

In Ancient Greece, Agnodice was one of the first female gynecologists. She risked her life to practice medicine even though women who were caught were sentenced to death.

You can find the UN timeline here.

Finally, the UN has a separate International Day of Women and Girls in Science celebrated on Feb. 11 (presumably of each year).

Complex networks to provide ‘grand unified theory’

Trying to mesh classical physics and quantum physics together in one theory which accounts for behaviour on the macro and quantum scales has occupied scientists for decades and it seems that mathematicians have discovered a clue so solving the mystery. A Sept. 13, 2015 news item on Nanotechnology Now describes the findings,

Mathematicians investigating one of science’s great questions — how to unite the physics of the very big with that of the very small — have discovered that when the understanding of complex networks such as the brain or the Internet is applied to geometry the results match up with quantum behavior.

A Sept. 9, 2015 Queen Mary University of London press release, which originated the news item, describes the collaboration between Queen Mary and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology mathematicians,

The findings, published today (Thursday) in Scientific Reports, by researchers from Queen Mary University of London and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, could explain one of the great problems in modern physics.

Currently ideas of gravity, developed by Einstein and Newton, explain how physics operates on a very large scale, but do not work at the sub-atomic level. Conversely, quantum mechanics works on the very small scale but does not explain the interactions of larger objects like stars. Scientists are looking for a so called ‘grand unified theory’ that joins the two, known as quantum gravity.

Several models have been proposed for how different quantum spaces are linked but most assume that the links between quantum spaces are fairly uniform, with little deviation from the average number of links between each space. The new model, which applies ideas from the theory of complex networks, has found that some quantum spaces might actually include hubs, i.e. nodes with significantly more links than others, like a particularly popular Facebook user.

Calculations run with this model show that these spaces are described by well-known quantum Fermi-Dirac, and Bose-Einstein statistics, used in quantum mechanics, indicating that they could be useful to physicists working on quantum gravity.

Dr Ginestra Bianconi, from Queen Mary University of London, and lead author of the paper, said:

“We hope that by applying our understanding of complex networks to one of the fundamental questions in physics we might be able to help explain how discrete quantum spaces emerge.

“What we can see is that space-time at the quantum-scale might be networked in a very similar way to things we are starting to understand very well like biological networks in cells, our brains and online social networks.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Complex Quantum Network Manifolds in Dimension d > 2 are Scale-Free by Ginestra Bianconi & Christoph Rahmede. Scientific Reports 5, Article number: 13979 (2015) doi:10.1038/srep13979 Published online: 10 September 2015

This is an open access paper.

Quantum and classical physics may be closer than we thought

It seems that a key theory about the boundary between the quantum world and our own macro world has been disproved and I think the July 21, 2015 news item on Nanotechnology Now says it better,

Quantum theory is one of the great achievements of 20th century science, yet physicists have struggled to find a clear boundary between our everyday world and what Albert Einstein called the “spooky” features of the quantum world, including cats that could be both alive and dead, and photons that can communicate with each other across space instantaneously.

For the past 60 years, the best guide to that boundary has been a theorem called Bell’s Inequality, but now a new paper shows that Bell’s Inequality is not the guidepost it was believed to be, which means that as the world of quantum computing brings quantum strangeness closer to our daily lives, we understand the frontiers of that world less well than scientists have thought.

In the new paper, published in the July 20 [2015] edition of Optica, University of Rochester [New York state, US] researchers show that a classical beam of light that would be expected to obey Bell’s Inequality can fail this test in the lab, if the beam is properly prepared to have a particular feature: entanglement.

A July 21, 2015 University of Rochester news release, which originated the news item, reveals more about the boundary and the research,

Not only does Bell’s test not serve to define the boundary, the new findings don’t push the boundary deeper into the quantum realm but do just the opposite. They show that some features of the real world must share a key ingredient of the quantum domain. This key ingredient is called entanglement, exactly the feature of quantum physics that Einstein labeled as spooky. According to Joseph Eberly, professor of physics and one of the paper’s authors, it now appears that Bell’s test only distinguishes those systems that are entangled from those that are not. It does not distinguish whether they are “classical” or quantum. In the forthcoming paper the Rochester researchers explain how entanglement can be found in something as ordinary as a beam of light.

Eberly explained that “it takes two to tangle.” For example, think about two hands clapping regularly. What you can be sure of is that when the right hand is moving to the right, the left hand is moving to the left, and vice versa. But if you were asked to guess without listening or looking whether at some moment the right hand was moving to the right, or maybe to the left, you wouldn’t know. But you would still know that whatever the right hand was doing at that time, the left hand would be doing the opposite. The ability to know for sure about a common property without knowing anything for sure about an individual property is the essence of perfect entanglement.

Eberly added that many think of entanglement as a quantum feature because “Schrodinger coined the term ‘entanglement’ to refer to his famous cat scenario.” But their experiment shows that some features of the “real” world must share a key ingredient of Schrodinger’s Cat domain: entanglement.

The existence of classical entanglement was pointed out in 1980, but Eberly explained that it didn’t seem a very interesting concept, so it wasn’t fully explored. As opposed to quantum entanglement, classical entanglement happens within one system. The effect is all local: there is no action at a distance, none of the “spookiness.”

With this result, Eberly and his colleagues have shown experimentally “that the border is not where it’s usually thought to be, and moreover that Bell’s Inequalities should no longer be used to define the boundary.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Shifting the quantum-classical boundary: theory and experiment for statistically classical optical fields by Xiao-Feng Qian, Bethany Little, John C. Howell, and J. H. Eberly. Optica Vol. 2, Issue 7, pp. 611-615 (2015) •doi: 10.1364/OPTICA.2.000611

This paper is open access.

A divisive scientific/philosophical debate that changed everything: Einstein vs. Bergson on the nature of time

A feud between a scientist and a philosopher—this seems like the setup for a joke but it’s not. According to a May 26, 2015 news item on phys.org, the book ‘The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time‘ chronicles a seminal debate and conflict that reverberates to this day,

Two of the 20th century’s greatest minds, one of them physicist Albert Einstein, came to intellectual blows one day in Paris in 1922. Their dispute, before a learned audience, was about the nature of time – mostly in connection with Einstein’s most famous work, the theory of relativity, which marks its centennial this year.

One immediate result of the controversy: There would be no mention of relativity in Einstein’s Nobel Prize, awarded a few months later.

One long-term result: a split between science and the humanities that continues to this day.

A May 26, 2015 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign news release, which originated the news item, provides some insight into a fascinating story,

The philosopher in the title, and Einstein’s adversary that day, was Henri Bergson, a French philosopher who was much more famous at the time than the German-born Einstein. Presidents and prime ministers carefully read Bergson’s work, and his public lectures often were filled to capacity. He was perhaps the pre-eminent public intellectual of his time, Canales [said.

Bergson did not challenge Einstein’s scientific claims about relativity, including the then-startling claim of time dilation, in which time slows down for objects traveling at higher speeds, Canales said.

What he challenged instead was Einstein’s interpretation of those claims, saying it went beyond science and was “a metaphysics grafted upon science.” He said that Einstein’s theory did not consider time as it was lived in human experience, the aspects of time that could not be captured by clocks or formulas.

Einstein quickly dismissed the philosopher’s criticism. To an audience that day of mostly philosophers, he made the incendiary statement that “the time of the philosophers does not exist.”

In the aftermath, Bergson published a book in which he thoroughly laid out his criticism of Einstein’s relativity and his theory of time. Both men and their supporters also spread their views through publications and letters, some of which employed “highly effective backbiting,” Canales said.

Bergson and Einstein also seemed to be on opposite ends of almost every pertinent issue of the time, from war and peace to race and faith, she said. “They seemed to take opposite stances in everything.”

Einstein supporters claimed that Bergson, though a gifted mathematician, did not completely understand Einstein’s theory. Bergson thought his theory of time was misunderstood by Einstein.

Bergson’s influence has been most prominent in novels and film, in their use of narrative twists and breaks and in time-shifting between past and future, Canales said. He also has had support among scientists, among them leading physicists who had helped develop relativity, as well as experts on quantum mechanics.

It was Einstein’s ideas that gained prominence, however, in part because later research only reinforced the science of relativity, but also because Bergson was effectively discredited by scientists, Canales said. Outside of philosophy, Bergson has been largely forgotten and is rarely even mentioned in Einstein biographies.

Canales said her book tells a “backstory of the rise of science” in the 20th century. It’s a story of “misunderstanding and mistrust,” she said.

“I took a pessimistic view of human nature and of our capacity to understand each other, and I think that view actually illuminates why so many humanists cannot talk to scientists, and scientists cannot talk to humanists.”

Canales said she sought to give an even-handed treatment to the two men and their views. In the process, however, she also sought to rehabilitate Bergson.

Just as Bergson was painted by some as anti-science, Canales said she knows she takes a similar risk in trying to give him his due in the dispute with Einstein, though it is not her intent. Being against science in the modern world, “makes no sense,” she said. “Clearly we should be for science.”

But we also need to think about science critically, Canales said. “We’re not taught to see science as it really is, as it really is practiced, as it really is done.” She said she hopes her book might help scientists and others understand the place of science “in more realistic terms.”

Canales’ book was published by Princeton University Press May 26, 2015. ‘The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time’ can be purchased here.

I expect anyone who reads this blog is likely to be familiar with Einstein but perhaps less so with Bergson. Here’s more about Bergson from his Wikipedia entry (Note: Links have been removed),

Henri-Louis Bergson (French: [bɛʁksɔn]; 18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that the processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality. Bergson had a long affair with musicologist Janet Levy which led to her article “A Source of Musical Wit and Humor.” This was a well-regarded article used by many later writers.

He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature “in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented”.[2] In 1930 France awarded him its highest honour, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d’honneur.

Entangling thousands of atoms

Quantum entanglement as an idea seems extraordinary to me like something from of the fevered imagination made possible only with certain kinds of hallucinogens. I suppose you could call theoretical physicists who’ve conceptualized entanglement a different breed as they don’t seem to need chemical assistance for their flights of fancy, which turn out to be reality. Researchers at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the University of Belgrade (Serbia) have entangled thousands of atoms with a single photon according to a March 26, 2015 news item on Nanotechnology Now,

Physicists from MIT and the University of Belgrade have developed a new technique that can successfully entangle 3,000 atoms using only a single photon. The results, published today in the journal Nature, represent the largest number of particles that have ever been mutually entangled experimentally.

The researchers say the technique provides a realistic method to generate large ensembles of entangled atoms, which are key components for realizing more-precise atomic clocks.

“You can make the argument that a single photon cannot possibly change the state of 3,000 atoms, but this one photon does — it builds up correlations that you didn’t have before,” says Vladan Vuletic, the Lester Wolfe Professor in MIT’s Department of Physics, and the paper’s senior author. “We have basically opened up a new class of entangled states we can make, but there are many more new classes to be explored.”

A March 26, 2015 MIT news release by Jennifer Chu (also on EurekAlert but dated March 25, 2015), which originated the news item, describes entanglement with particular attention to how it relates to atomic timekeeping,

Entanglement is a curious phenomenon: As the theory goes, two or more particles may be correlated in such a way that any change to one will simultaneously change the other, no matter how far apart they may be. For instance, if one atom in an entangled pair were somehow made to spin clockwise, the other atom would instantly be known to spin counterclockwise, even though the two may be physically separated by thousands of miles.

The phenomenon of entanglement, which physicist Albert Einstein once famously dismissed as “spooky action at a distance,” is described not by the laws of classical physics, but by quantum mechanics, which explains the interactions of particles at the nanoscale. At such minuscule scales, particles such as atoms are known to behave differently from matter at the macroscale.

Scientists have been searching for ways to entangle not just pairs, but large numbers of atoms; such ensembles could be the basis for powerful quantum computers and more-precise atomic clocks. The latter is a motivation for Vuletic’s group.

Today’s best atomic clocks are based on the natural oscillations within a cloud of trapped atoms. As the atoms oscillate, they act as a pendulum, keeping steady time. A laser beam within the clock, directed through the cloud of atoms, can detect the atoms’ vibrations, which ultimately determine the length of a single second.

“Today’s clocks are really amazing,” Vuletic says. “They would be less than a minute off if they ran since the Big Bang — that’s the stability of the best clocks that exist today. We’re hoping to get even further.”

The accuracy of atomic clocks improves as more and more atoms oscillate in a cloud. Conventional atomic clocks’ precision is proportional to the square root of the number of atoms: For example, a clock with nine times more atoms would only be three times as accurate. If these same atoms were entangled, a clock’s precision could be directly proportional to the number of atoms — in this case, nine times as accurate. The larger the number of entangled particles, then, the better an atomic clock’s timekeeping.

It seems weak lasers make big entanglements possible (from the news release),

Scientists have so far been able to entangle large groups of atoms, although most attempts have only generated entanglement between pairs in a group. Only one team has successfully entangled 100 atoms — the largest mutual entanglement to date, and only a small fraction of the whole atomic ensemble.

Now Vuletic and his colleagues have successfully created a mutual entanglement among 3,000 atoms, virtually all the atoms in the ensemble, using very weak laser light — down to pulses containing a single photon. The weaker the light, the better, Vuletic says, as it is less likely to disrupt the cloud. “The system remains in a relatively clean quantum state,” he says.

The researchers first cooled a cloud of atoms, then trapped them in a laser trap, and sent a weak laser pulse through the cloud. They then set up a detector to look for a particular photon within the beam. Vuletic reasoned that if a photon has passed through the atom cloud without event, its polarization, or direction of oscillation, would remain the same. If, however, a photon has interacted with the atoms, its polarization rotates just slightly — a sign that it was affected by quantum “noise” in the ensemble of spinning atoms, with the noise being the difference in the number of atoms spinning clockwise and counterclockwise.

“Every now and then, we observe an outgoing photon whose electric field oscillates in a direction perpendicular to that of the incoming photons,” Vuletic says. “When we detect such a photon, we know that must have been caused by the atomic ensemble, and surprisingly enough, that detection generates a very strongly entangled state of the atoms.”

Vuletic and his colleagues are currently using the single-photon detection technique to build a state-of-the-art atomic clock that they hope will overcome what’s known as the “standard quantum limit” — a limit to how accurate measurements can be in quantum systems. Vuletic says the group’s current setup may be a step toward developing even more complex entangled states.

“This particular state can improve atomic clocks by a factor of two,” Vuletic says. “We’re striving toward making even more complicated states that can go further.”

This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Entanglement with negative Wigner function of almost 3,000 atoms heralded by one photon by Robert McConnell, Hao Zhang, Jiazhong Hu, Senka Ćuk & Vladan Vuletić. Nature 519 439–442 (26 March 2015) doi:10.1038/nature14293 Published online 25 March 2015

This article is behind a paywall but there is a free preview via ReadCube Access.

This image illustrates the entanglement of a large number of atoms. The atoms, shown in purple, are shown mutually entangled with one another. Image: Christine Daniloff/MIT and Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT

This image illustrates the entanglement of a large number of atoms. The atoms, shown in purple, are shown mutually entangled with one another.
Image: Christine Daniloff/MIT and Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT

High-order Brownian motion observed

A Nov. 17, 2014 news item on ScienceDaily highlights a new technique for observing Brownian motion,

For the first time, scientists have vividly mapped the shapes and textures of high-order modes of Brownian motions–in this case, the collective macroscopic movement of molecules in microdisk resonators–researchers at Case Western Reserve University report.

To do this, they used a record-setting scanning optical interferometry technique, described in a study published today in the journal Nature Communications.

The new technology holds promise for multimodal sensing and signal processing, and to develop optical coding for computing and other information-processing functions by exploiting the spatially resolved multimode Brownian resonances and their splitting pairs of modes.

A Nov. 17, 2014 Case Western Reserve University news release on EurekAlert, which originated the news item, provides more information about the technique and the research,

Interferometry uses the interference of light waves reflected off a surface to measure distances, a technique invented by Case School of Applied Science physicist Albert A. Michelson (who won the Nobel prize in science in 1907). Michelson and Western Reserve University chemist Edward Morley used the instrument to famously disprove that light traveled through “luminous ether” in 1887, setting the groundwork for Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

The technology has evolved since then. The keys to Feng’s new interferometry technique are focusing a tighter-than-standard laser spot on the surface of novel silicon carbide microdisks.

The microdisks, which sit atop pedestals of silicon oxide like cymbals on stands, are extremely sensitive to the smallest fluctuations arising from Brownian motions, even at thermodynamic equilibrium. Hence, they exhibit very small oscillations without external driving forces. These oscillations include fundamental and higher modes, called thermomechanical resonances.

Some of the light from the laser reflects back to a sensor after striking the top surface of the silicon dioxide film. And some of the light is refracted through the film and reflected back on a different path, causing interference in the light waves.

The narrow laser spot scans the disk surface and measures movement, or displacement, of the disk with a sensitivity of about 7 femtometers per square-root of a hertz at room temperature, which researchers believe is a record for interferometric systems. To put that in perspective, the width of a hair is about 40 microns, and a femtometer is 100 million times smaller than a micron.

Although higher frequency modes have small motion amplitudes, the technology enabled the group to spatially map and clearly visualize the first through ninth Brownian modes in the high frequency band, ranging from 5.78 to 26.41 megahertz.

In addition to detecting the shapes and textures of Brownian motions, multimode mapping identified subtle structural imperfections and defects, which are ubiquitous but otherwise invisible, or can’t be quantified most of the time. This capability may be useful for probing the dynamics and propagation of defects and defect arrays in nanodevices, as well as for future engineering of controllable defects to manipulate information in silicon carbide nanostructures

The high sensitivity and spatial resolution also enabled them to identify mode splitting, crossing and degeneracy, spatial asymmetry and other effects that may be used to encode information with increasing complexity. The researchers are continuing to explore the capabilities of the technology.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Spatial mapping of multimode Brownian motions in high-frequency ​silicon carbide microdisk resonators by Zenghui Wang, Jaesung Lee & Philip X. -L. Feng. Nature Communications 5, Article number: 5158 doi:10.1038/ncomms6158 Published 17 November 2014

This paper is behind a paywall.

For those who would like a little more information about Brownian motion, there’s this from its Wikipedia entry,

Brownian motion or pedesis (from Greek: πήδησις /pɛ̌ːdɛːsis/ “leaping”) is the random motion of particles suspended in a fluid (a liquid or a gas) resulting from their collision with the quick atoms or molecules in the gas or liquid. The term “Brownian motion” can also refer to the mathematical model used to describe such random movements, which is often called a particle theory.

The Wikipedia entry also includes this gif

This is a simulation of Brownian motion of a big particle (dust particle) that collides with a large set of smaller particles (molecules of a gas) which move with different velocities in different random directions. http://weelookang.blogspot.com/2010/06/ejs-open-source-brownian-motion-gas.html Lookang Author of computer model: Francisco Esquembre, Fu-Kwun and lookang - Own work

This is a simulation of Brownian motion of a big particle (dust particle) that collides with a large set of smaller particles (molecules of a gas) which move with different velocities in different random directions. http://weelookang.blogspot.com/2010/06/ejs-open-source-brownian-motion-gas.html
Lookang Author of computer model: Francisco Esquembre, Fu-Kwun and lookang – Own work

On a tangential and amusing note, Brown University celebrating its 250th anniversary this year (2014) commissioned a Brownian Motion composition as part of its commemoration activities (from a Feb. 21, 2014 Brown University news release),

While Brown University and its neighbors celebrate the University’s first 250 years during the Opening Celebration Friday and Saturday, March 7-8, 2014, some new history will be made as well. On Friday night, the Brown University Wind Symphony will present the world premier of Brownian Motion, a piece commissioned for the semiquincentenary.

Written by the composer and saxophonist Patrick Zimmerli, the commission was funded by Edward Guiliano, a 1972 Brown graduate who was president of the Brown Band and founded the Brown Wind Ensemble during his time on College Hill.

Zimmerli admits to feeling excitement when approached with the commission. “I didn’t go to Brown but I have many connections to people who did, and I was really looking forward to the challenge of writing for an undergraduate wind ensemble, something I’d never done before.”

McGarrell [Matthew McGarrell, director of bands at Brown] and Zimmerli met last summer to talk about the commission for the first time. Aside from sending Zimmerli a few pieces to use as models, McGarrell gave the composer free reign over over everything from the feel to the length of the piece.

The resulting composition, which Zimmerli presented to McGarrell at the beginning of January, is dominated by jazz rhythms, with some nods to vernacular musics, including Caribbean and calypso, mixed in.

“The piece has several different moods but overall it is celebratory,” Zimmerli said. “After all it’s a birthday piece. It’s meant to be challenging but fun for the players.”

Listeners with a link to Brown may also find parts of the work familiar. Zimmerli subtly weaves an early melody known as “Araby’s Daughter” — Brown’s Alma Mater — throughout the piece, building on it until it’s played in its full glory by the French horns toward the end.

For inspiration, Zimmerli did extensive research on Brown’s early history and was intrigued to learn that Brown’s founding was initially opposed by a group of preachers who had a mistrust for those who had been formally educated. The result is a theme — “learning is evil,” a nod to those early roots — that winds its way throughout the song.

“Brown is an amazing example of an institution that has been able to evolve and transform itself from within, and I thought that fact should be celebrated,” said Zimmerli.

Other parts of the song inspired the Brownian Motion name.

“There’s a jagged theme toward the beginning of the piece that is a bit cheeky, even subversive. The way it moves and darts around through the instruments unexpectedly is what eventually led me to the actual title of the piece,” Zimmerli said.

“We knew we wanted to make it special concert,” said McGarrell of the program selections. “We wanted to reach both the Brown community in history, through the alumni, through musical representation, and we wanted to reach out to the extended Brown community in Rhode Island and southeastern New England, through history and intercultural outreach.”

The Brown musicians have been hard at work since the end of January learning Brownian Motion. While technically challenging, McGarrell said the students have been appreciating the skill level required and that “morale has remained high within the group.” Zimmerli arrives on campus on Wednesday, March 5, to help put the finishing touches on the performance.

There is a youtube video (over 60 mins.) of the Brownian Motion March 2014 performance.

Seeing quantum entanglement and using quantum entanglement to build a wormhole

Kudos to the team from the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology for the great musical accompaniment on their video showing quantum entanglement in real time,

A Dec. 4, 2013 news item on Nanowerk provides more details,

Einstein called quantum entanglement “spooky action at a distance”. Now, a team from the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology has reported imaging of entanglement events where the influence of the measurement of one particle on its distant partner particle is directly visible (“Real-Time Imaging of Quantum Entanglement”).

The Dec. 4, 2013 Andor news release, which originated the news item, gives more details about the team’s work and about the Andor camera which enabled it,

The key to their success is the Andor iStar 334T Intensified CCD (ICCD) camera, which is capable of very fast (nanosecond) and precise (picosecond) optical gating speeds. Unlike the relatively long microsecond exposure times of CCD and EMCCD cameras which inhibits their usefulness in ultra-high-speed imaging, this supreme level of temporal resolution made it possible for the team to perform a real-time coincidence imaging of entanglement for the first time.

“The Andor iStar ICCD camera is fast enough, and sensitive enough, to image in real-time the effect of the measurement of one photon on its entangled partner,” says Robert Fickler of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information. “Using ICCD cameras to evaluate the number of photons from a registered intensity within a given region opens up new experimental possibilities to determine more efficiently the structure and properties of spatial modes from only single intensity images. Our results suggest that triggered ICCD cameras will advance quantum optics and quantum information experiments where complex structures of single photons need to be investigated with high spatio-temporal resolution.”

According to Antoine Varagnat, Product Specialist at Andor, “The experiment produces pairs of photons which are entangled so as to have opposite polarisations. For instance, if one of a pair has horizontal polarisation, the other has vertical, and so on. The first photon is sent to polarising glass that transmits photons of one angle only, followed by a detector to register photons which make it through the glass. The other photon is delayed by a fibre, then its entangled property is coherently transferred from the polarisation to the spatial mode and afterwards brought to the high-speed, ultra-sensitive iStar camera.

“The use of the ICCD camera allowed the team to demonstrate the high flexibility of the setup in creating any desired spatial-mode entanglement. Their results suggest that visual imaging in quantum optics not only provides a better intuitive understanding of entanglement but will also improve applications of quantum science,” concludes Varagnat.

Research into quantum entanglement was instigated in 1935 by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, in a paper critiquing quantum mechanics. Erwin Schrödinger also wrote several papers shortly afterwards. Although these first studies focused on the counterintuitive properties of entanglement with the aim of criticising quantum mechanics, entanglement was eventually verified experimentally and recognised as a valid, fundamental feature of quantum mechanics. Nowadays, the focus of the research has changed to its utilization in communications and computation, and has been used to realise quantum teleportation experimentally.

The team’s work is chronicled in this study,

Real-Time Imaging of Quantum Entanglement by Robert Fickler, Mario Krenn, Radek Lapkiewicz, Sven Ramelow & Anton Zeilinger. Scientific Reports 3, Article number: 1914 doi:10.1038/srep01914 Published 29 May 2013

This is an open access paper.

Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Washington (Seattle, Washington state) explore the quantum entanglement phenomenon with an eye to wormholes (from the De.c 3, 2013 University of Washington news release [also on EurekAlter]),

Quantum entanglement, a perplexing phenomenon of quantum mechanics that Albert Einstein once referred to as “spooky action at a distance,” could be even spookier than Einstein perceived.

Physicists at the University of Washington and Stony Brook University in New York believe the phenomenon might be intrinsically linked with wormholes, hypothetical features of space-time that in popular science fiction can provide a much-faster-than-light shortcut from one part of the universe to another.

But here’s the catch: One couldn’t actually travel, or even communicate, through these wormholes, said Andreas Karch, a UW physics professor.

Quantum entanglement occurs when a pair or a group of particles interact in ways that dictate that each particle’s behavior is relative to the behavior of the others. In a pair of entangled particles, if one particle is observed to have a specific spin, for example, the other particle observed at the same time will have the opposite spin.

The “spooky” part is that, as research has confirmed, the relationship holds true no matter how far apart the particles are – across the room or across several galaxies. If the behavior of one particle changes, the behavior of both entangled particles changes simultaneously, no matter how far away they are.

Recent research indicated that the characteristics of a wormhole are the same as if two black holes were entangled, then pulled apart. Even if the black holes were on opposite sides of the universe, the wormhole would connect them.

Black holes, which can be as small as a single atom or many times larger than the sun, exist throughout the universe, but their gravitational pull is so strong that not even light can escape from them.

If two black holes were entangled, Karch said, a person outside the opening of one would not be able to see or communicate with someone just outside the opening of the other.

“The way you can communicate with each other is if you jump into your black hole, then the other person must jump into his black hole, and the interior world would be the same,” he said.

The work demonstrates an equivalence between quantum mechanics, which deals with physical phenomena at very tiny scales, and classical geometry – “two different mathematical machineries to go after the same physical process,” Karch said. The result is a tool scientists can use to develop broader understanding of entangled quantum systems.

“We’ve just followed well-established rules people have known for 15 years and asked ourselves, ‘What is the consequence of quantum entanglement?'”

The researchers have provided an illustration, which looks more like a ‘smiley face’ to me. Are wormholes smiley faces in space,

Alan Stonebraker/American Physical Society This illustration demonstrates a wormhole connecting two black holes.

Alan Stonebraker/American Physical Society
This illustration demonstrates a wormhole connecting two black holes.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the research paper on quantum entanglement and wormholes,

Holographic Dual of an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Pair has a Wormhole by Kristan Jensen and Andreas Karch. Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 211602 (2013) [5 pages] Published 20 November 2013

This paper is behind a paywall.

ETA Dec. 11, 2013: There’s a news item today, Dec. 11, 2013, on Nanowerk which casts an interesting light on Andor,

Nanotechnology specialist Oxford Instruments is to take over Belfast-based scientific camera maker Andor in a £176million deal.
The Andor board last night agreed a 525p a share offer, giving a 31 per cent premium over the closing price before Oxford’s initial 500p a share pitch in November.

The two companies have been in talks since July [2013].

Shares in Andor rose 10p to 515p and Oxford Instruments gained 8p to 1566p.

It looks like their Dec. 4, 2013 news release was a leadup to this business news.

Henri (Poincaré), Pablo (Picasso), and Albert (Einstein) walk into a bar

The three (Poincaré, Einstein, and Picasso did not meet together) but I like to think  that if they had met, if would have been in a bar (anyone can think of a punchline to the beginning of that joke, please do let me know). On the 100th anniversary of Henri Poincaré’s death, Arthur I Miller has written an essay which he posted on July 17, 2012 on the Guardian Science blogs,

Today, 17 July 2012, is the centenary of the death of the great French polymath Henri Poincaré, once described as the “last of the universalists”. His achievements span mathematics (he set the basis for chaos theory), physics (his mathematical methods are still used in studying elementary particles), philosophy (his framework for exploring scientific theories is still controversial) and the psychology of creativity (he studied the workings of the unconscious).

Poincaré also acted as a surprising link between Einstein and Picasso, who were both inspired by his best-selling Science and Hypothesis, published in 1902.

Here’s the link between the three men,

Working as a patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, Einstein was at the core of a study group, his “think tank”, one of whom described how Poincaré’s book had “held them spellbound”. In it Poincaré moves from an analysis of scientific theories to analysing perceptions to probing thought itself, transporting the reader in crystal-clear prose to the very frontiers of knowledge. …

But Einstein found Poincaré’s dependence on everyday experience and laboratory data too restricting. In spring 1905, he went one step further. The result was his theory of relativity.

Far from being a stereotypical scientist, Poincaré’s thinking was closer to that of an artist. Édouard Toulouse, a psychologist specialising in creativity, interviewed him in 1897 and wrote that Poincaré’s thought “was spontaneous, little conscious, more like dreaming than rational, seeming most suited to works of pure imagination”.

So it’s hardly surprising that Picasso too was inspired by his work. But how did he hear of him? Picasso had a “think tank”, of avant-garde literati who kept him up to date on the latest developments in science and technology.

Poincaré inspired some of Picasso’s work and a school of painting without ever meeting him, simultaneously inspiring Einstein’s theory of relativity, which Poincaré disagreed with.

I encourage you to read Miller’s essay in full and leave you with this final excerpt,

A highly cultured man, he [Poincaré] was director of l’Académie Française (the pre-eminent French literary academy), as well as President of l’Académie des Sciences, an extraordinary honour.

He once wrote: “It is only through science and art that civilisation is of value.” He straddled two worlds, inspiring both Einstein and Picasso and played a pivotal role in sparking the explosion of creativity in both art and science that set the tenor of the 20th century.

Pull me in—a tractor beam in Singapore

Who hasn’t wanted a tractor beam at one time or another? The notion that beaming a ray of light at something would allow you to bring it closer is very appealing. And, if you’re willing to settle for a particle, you could have  a tractor beam in the near future according to scientists in Singapore. From the May 23, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

Tractor beams are a well-known concept in science fiction. These rays of light are often shown pulling objects towards an observer, seemingly violating the laws of physics, and of course, such beams have yet to be realised in the real world. Haifeng Wang at the A*STAR Data Storage Institute and co-workers have now demonstrated how a tractor beam can in fact be realized on a small scale (see paper in Physical Review Letters: “Single Gradientless Light Beam Drags Particles as Tractor Beams” [behind a paywall]). “Our work demonstrates a tractor beam based only on a single laser to pull or push an object of interest toward the light source,” says Wang.

Coming up in the description of just how Wang’s tractor beam works is my second reference to Albert Einstein today (in the earlier May 23, 2012 posting: Teaching physics visually), form the news item on Nanowerk,

Based on pioneering work by Albert Einstein and Max Planck more than a hundred years ago, it is known that light carries momentum that pushes objects away. In addition, the intensity that varies across a laser beam can be used to push objects sideways, and for example can be used to move cells in biotechnology applications. Pulling an object towards an observer, however, has so far proven to be elusive. In 2011, researchers theoretically demonstrated a mechanism where light movement can be controlled using two opposing light beams — though technically, this differs from the idea behind a tractor beam.

Wang and co-workers have now studied the properties of lasers with a particular type of distribution of light intensity across the beam, or so-called Bessel beams. Usually, if a laser beam hits a small particle in its path, the light is scattered backwards, which in turn pushes the particle forward. What Wang and co-workers have now shown theoretically for Bessel beams is that for particles that are sufficiently small, the light scatters off the particle in a forward direction, meaning that the particle itself is pulled backwards towards the observer. In other words, the behaviour of the particle is the direct opposite of the usual scenario. The size of the tractor beam force depends on parameters such as the electrical and magnetic properties of the particles.

There aren’t too many real life applications for a tractor beam of limited power but the lead scientist, Wang, does suggest it could be helpful in diagnosing malaria at the cellular level.