The science behind RHCs liver thread

Like the old question of whether grass is green - it depends whose eyes (if any) you view it.

 

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/nasa-spacecraft-just-rewritten-everything-knew-jupiter-114047179.html

Looks like it's been painted by Van Gogh.

 

Data from the LHC converted to piano music
May 30, 2017
For almost a decade, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been enabling scientists to develop a greater understanding of – and, in some cases, rewrite – the laws of physics.

 

Physicists accelerate plans for a new Large Hadron Collider three times as big
May 31, 2017 by Joe Dodgshun, From Horizon Magazine

please log in to view this image

The next particle accelerator will be three times larger than the LHC, with double-strength magnets enabling researchers to smash particle beams together with a power equivalent to 10 million lightning strikes. Credit: CERN
An international league of scientists is kicking off the decades-long process of developing the successor to the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator.


More than 500 scientists gathered in Berlin, Germany, from 29 May to 2 June to discuss the future of particle physics. The event was organised by the Future Circular Collider (FCC) Study, an international collaboration of physicists, and focused on developing the next Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will be seven times more powerful.

Hosted by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the LHC is at the forefront of particle research and accelerates high-energy particle beams around a 27-kilometre looped tunnel. It collides these particles to release extreme levels of energy, and in doing so, seeks to reveal the elusive building blocks of the universe.

In 2012, the LHC confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson—the last unseen elemental particle in the Standard Model of physics, the one giving mass to all matter in our universe. But finding the Higgs boson ended up leaving physicists with more questions than answers.

EuroCirCol, a four-year European-funded study, is now investigating future experiments and the technology needed to get there. The project is laying the foundation for a particle accelerator three times larger than the LHC, with double-strength magnets enabling researchers to smash particle beams together with a power of up to 100 tera electron Volts—an acceleration of particles roughly equivalent to 10 million lightning strikes.

According to Professor Michael Benedikt, leader of the FCC, this energy leap could let us spot previously unobserved particles even heavier than the Higgs boson, which would give a deeper insight into the laws that govern the universe.

"When you look into things like the movement of galaxies, we see that we can only understand and explain about 5 % of what we observe," says Prof. Benedikt, who is also the project coordinator of EuroCirCol.

"But with questions like the so-called problem of dark matter, which is linked to the fact that galaxies and stars are not moving as you would expect them to, the only explanation we have is that there must be matter we do not see which distorts the movement accordingly."

Another question bound to be asked is why a new collider is needed when construction of the LHC, the world's largest science facility, was only finished in 2008 and cost around EUR 4 billion.

For a start, the LHC is not sitting idle. It's hunting for further particles and signatures of physics until the mid-2020s, after which it should be upgraded for ten years with a boosted rate of particle collisions.

And the fact that the LHC officially took almost 30 years to create, from initial planning through to flicking the switch, means researchers already have to start plotting for its successor.

Professor Carsten P. Welsch, head of physics at the University of Liverpool, says that mankind wanting to understand the underlying principles of nature is not the only driver behind such science.

please log in to view this image

The proposed site for the Future Circular Collider includes an 80-100 km long circular tunnel. Credit: CERN
"The beauty of physics is that we have these two strands," said Prof. Welsch, who is also the communications coordinator for EuroCirCol. "On the one hand it's asking those very fundamental questions, but on the other hand, it's not forgetting that there is almost always a direct link to applications that benefit society immediately."

Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web in 1989, but the LHC also led to other breakthroughs like hadron therapies for treating cancer and medical imaging advances.

According to Prof. Welsch, the next LHC could lead to more radiation-resistant materials that can carry greater power, which is applicable to future nuclear reactors and power networks.

"Likewise, the high-field magnets will find direct applications in hospitals where technologies like MRI scans can improve on their resolutions with increased magnetic field strengths."

Future physics

Prof. Benedikt is confident the accelerator design concepts "will lead to the performance we want and need". A prototype of the advanced cryogenic beam vacuum system required for the FCC is already being tested in Germany, but whatever the final concept, Prof. Benedikt says 2018 will shape technical requirements and feed into the FCC study to kick off preparations.

The formidable feat of creating the next LHC would require global cooperation, heavy funding and researchers still active in 20 years, by which point Prof. Welsch reckons he'll have retired.

Which is why he says much of the FCC event is dedicated to outreach; tempting schools and the public with proton football, an interactive LHC tunnel, and augmented reality accelerators.

Prof. Welsch says the latter allows anyone to make their own virtual particle accelerator using a smartphone app that turns paper cubes printed with QR codes into high-tech components.

"I put a paper box on the table, the camera and app see it as an ion particle source sitting on my office table—similar to Pokémon Go—and here I can see particles flying all over my desk. Adding a second box, I can see how a magnet bends my particles and so on."

He says such outreach is vital for not only bringing the next generations into science but ensuring anyone can still connect to and get excited by more specialised research.

"We've had seven-year-old kids, who, when asked what they're doing, tell their mothers they are deflecting charged particles using dipole magnets."

Heavy ****

 

LIGO snags another set of gravitational waves
Spacetime vibrations arrive from black hole collision 3 billion light-years away
BY
EMILY CONOVER
11:00AM, JUNE 1, 2017

please log in to view this image

THREE OF A KIND Scientists have made a third detection of gravitational waves. A pair of black holes, shown above, fused into one, in a powerful collision about 3 billion light-years from Earth. That smashup churned up ripples in spacetime that were detected by the LIGO experiment.

AURORE SIMONNET/SONOMA STATE, MIT, CALTECH, LIGO

• Email
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Reddit
• Google+

SPONSOR MESSAGE
For a third time, scientists have detected the infinitesimal reverberations of spacetime: gravitational waves.

Two black holes stirred up the spacetime wiggles, orbiting one another and spiraling inward until they fused into one jumbo black hole with a mass about 49 times that of the sun. Ripples from that union, which took place about 3 billion light-years from Earth, zoomed across the cosmos at the speed of light, eventually reaching the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, LIGO, which detected them on January 4.

“These are the most powerful astronomical events witnessed by human beings,” Michael Landry, head of LIGO’s Hanford, Wash., observatory, said during a news conference May 31 announcing the discovery. As the black holes merged, they converted about two suns’ worth of mass into energy, radiated as gravitational waves.

Story continues after graphic

Place in space
Based on the time that signals arrived at each of LIGO’s two detectors, scientists were able to determine regions on the sky from which the gravitational waves came. LIGO’s three detections are shown, plus a fourth possible detection that was not strong enough to confirm. Lines indicate probabilities that the signal originated within each region. Outermost curves indicate 90 percent, while inner curves indicate 10 percent.

please log in to view this image

LEO SINGER/LIGO, CALTECH, MIT; AXEL MELLINGER (MILKY WAY IMAGE)


LIGO’s two detectors, located in Hanford and Livingston, La., each consist of a pair of 4-kilometer-long arms. They act as outrageously oversized rulers to measure the stretching of spacetime caused by gravitational waves. According to Einstein’s theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity, massive objects bend the fabric of space and create ripples when they accelerate — for example, when two objects orbit one another. Gravitational ripples are tiny: LIGO is tuned to detect waves that stretch and squeeze the arms by a thousandth of the diameter of a proton. Black hole collisions are one of the few events in the universe that are catastrophic enough to produce spacetime gyrations big enough to detect.

The two black holes that spawned the latest waves were particularly hefty, with masses about 31 and 19 times that of the sun, scientists report June 1 in Physical Review Letters. LIGO’s first detection, announced in February 2016, came from an even bigger duo: 36 and 29 times the mass of the sun (SN: 3/5/16, p. 6). Astrophysicists don’t fully understand how such big black holes could have formed. But now, “it seems that these are not so uncommon, so clearly there’s a way to produce these massive black holes,” says physicist Clifford Will of the University of Florida in Gainesville. LIGO’s second detection featured two smaller black holes, 14 and eight times the mass of the sun (SN: 7/9/16, p. 8).

Sizing up gravitational waves
LIGO’s three gravitational wave sightings all came from merging black holes. But those mergers varied in mass, distance and the amount of energy radiated in gravitational waves.

First detection
Date: September 14, 2015
Mass of first black hole: 36.2 solar masses
Mass of second black hole: 29.1 solar masses
Merged mass: 62.3 solar masses
Energy radiated as gravitational waves: 3 solar masses
Distance from Earth: 1.4 billion light-years

Second detection
Date: December 26, 2015
Mass of first black hole: 14.2 solar masses
Mass of second black hole: 7.5 solar masses
Merged mass: 20.8 solar masses
Energy radiated as gravitational waves: 1 solar mass
Distance from Earth: 1.4 billion light-years

Third detection
Date: January 4, 2017
Mass of first black hole: 31.2 solar masses
Mass of second black hole: 19.4 solar masses
Merged mass: 48.7 solar masses
Energy radiated as gravitational waves: 2 solar masses
Distance from Earth: 2.9 billion light-years

Weighty black holes are difficult to explain, because the stars that collapsed to form them must have been even more massive. Typically, stellar winds steadily blow away mass as a star ages, leading to a smaller black hole. But under certain conditions, those winds might be weak — for example, if the stars contain few elements heavier than helium or have intense magnetic fields (SN Online: 12/12/16). The large masses of LIGO’s black holes suggest that they formed in such environments.

Scientists also disagree about how black holes partner up. One theory is that two neighboring stars each explode and produce two black holes, which then spiral inward. Another is that black holes find one another within a dense cluster of stars, as massive black holes sink to the center of the clump (SN Online: 6/19/16).

The new detection provides some support for the star cluster theory: The pattern of gravitational waves LIGO observed hints that one of the black holes might be spinning in the opposite direction from its orbit. Like a cosmic do-si-do, each black hole in a pair twirls on its own axis as it spirals inward. Black holes that pair up as stars are likely to have their spins aligned with their orbits. But if the black holes instead find one another in the chaos of a star cluster, they could spin any which way. The potentially misaligned black hole LIGO observed somewhat favors the star cluster scenario. The measurement is “suggestive, but it’s not definite,” says astrophysicist Avi Loeb of Harvard University.

Scientists will need more data to sort out how the black hole duos form, says physicist Emanuele Berti of the University of Mississippi in Oxford. “Probably the truth is somewhere in between.” Various processes could contribute to the formation of black hole pairs, Berti says.

As with previous detections of gravitational waves, the scientists used their measurements to test general relativity. For example, while general relativity predicts that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, some alternative theories of gravity predict that gravitational waves of different energies travel at different speeds. LIGO scientists found no evidence of such an effect, vindicating Einstein once again.

Now, with three black hole mergers under their belts, scientists are looking forward to a future in which gravitational wave detections become routine. The more gravitational waves scientists detect, the better they can test their theories. “There are already surprises that make people stop and revisit some old ideas,” Will says. “To me that’s very exciting.”

 

Important news


Please don’t put ground-up wasp nests in your vagina
Seriously, your vajayjay is just fine.

By Sara Chodosh Yesterday at 12:30pm

please log in to view this image

Oak galls.

Pixabay

This should go without saying, but because it apparently doesn’t, here goes: don’t stick random items into your vagina. Tampons, certified body-safe sex toys, physician-approved devices, and certain bodily appendages should really be the only things that go in there.


“But what if I have weird discharge or a funny smell?” Great question. Contrary to what Gwenyth Paltrow would like you to believe, some doctors actually do know how to treat vaginal problems. Just think about how great we are at treating yeast infections. You can pop down to your local pharmacy and grab a three-day pack of Monistat and boom—infection gone. Most other infections can be easily resolved with a short course of antibiotic cream that your doctor can prescribe. And yet people insist on shoving other items up there, like their vaginas are walls at which to throw medicinal spaghetti.

The latest spaghetti monstrosity to hit the pages of Etsy and Amazon alike are called oak galls. Galls are abnormal tree growths that form when wasps lay larvae in branches. Surprisingly, some trees find insects growing inside them irritating, so they grow a hard ball around the larva. The little worms then feed off that growth until they emerge. At some point in history, women started grinding up these round protrusions and sticking the powder inside themselves. This might seem like an odd choice of an item to put in your body, but it does have some medicinal properties (maybe…). A few studies have found that oak galls, or manjakani as they’re also known, have some antibacterial properties. Women in India, Malaysia, China, and parts of the Middle East have used them for centuries to treat infections for that reason, because after childbirth it was not uncommon for new mothers to end up with postpartum bacterial infections or other strange vaginal discharge.

Somehow over the years that idea became muddled and we went from “use this antibiotic plant to kill harmful bacteria” to “use this plant to tighten your vagina.” Maybe its use by new mothers became associated with women trying to return their privates to a pre-baby state. It’s unclear. What is clear is that oak galls probably don’t tighten your vagina and even if they do, they have enough potential side effects that you should avoid them anyway. Like douching, trying to clean out your vagina when it has nothing wrong with it just messes up the normal, healthy bacteria living there. Heck, you can get bacterial vaginosis from having sex with a new person, and we’re evolutionarily designed to have sex with people. Vaginal flora can be in a surprisingly delicate balance—don’t go screwing it up with random herbs. Vaginas can mostly take care of themselves.

Inserting ground up bits of oak gall will, at best, do nothing. At worst, it will give you a raging infection. The galls contain intense astringents, which dry out and irritate your vagina. Disturbingly, some of the oak gall sellers advocate for drying out your vagina, as it will increase friction between you and a male partner’s penis. Technically that’s true—it would increase friction. It would increase friction to the point that you could get abrasions inside of your vagina. Is that what you want? Think about how painful rug burn is. Now picture that inside of you. Even if it did help your vaginal muscle tone, internal rug burn doesn’t seem worth it.

Besides, there are other ways to tighten things up if you’re really worried. Kegels, for example, actually do strengthen your pelvic floor muscles and can not only make your vagina feel “tighter,” they can give you better orgasms. And incidentally, having orgasms helps tone your pelvic muscles too. So the choice is yours: have more orgasms or shove an irritant inside of you. It’s a real puzzler.

 

So glad I bought those sandpaper condoms

 

Not sure they're a good idea if you get wood.

 

Einstein’s light-bending by single far-off star detected
Famous effect of general relativity provides accurate mass of distant white dwarf
BY
LISA GROSSMAN
11:15AM, JUNE 7, 2017

please log in to view this image

SEEING BEYOND This 1919 solar eclipse proved that the sun’s gravity can bend spacetime to make other stars’ positions appear shifted. Now astronomers have seen the same effect with distant stars.

F.W. DYSON, A.S. EDDINGTON, C. DAVIDSON

• Email
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Reddit
• Google+

SPONSOR MESSAGE
For the first time, astronomers have seen a star outside of the solar system bend the light from another star. The measurement, reported June 7 in Austin, Texas, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, vindicates both Einstein’s most famous theory and what goes on in the inner lives of stellar corpses.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope watched as a white dwarf passed in front of a more distant star. That star seemed to move in a small loop, its apparent position deflected by the white dwarf’s gravity.

More than a century ago, Albert Einstein predicted that the way spacetime bends around a massive object — the sun, say — should shift the apparent position of stars that appear behind that object. The measurement of this effect during a solar eclipse in 1919 confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity: Mass warps spacetime and bends the path of light rays (SN: 10/17/15, p. 16).

The New York Times hailed it as “one of the greatest — perhaps the greatest — of achievements in the history of human thought.” But even Einstein doubted the light-bending effect could be detected for more distant stars than the sun.

Now, in a study published in the June 9 issue of Science, Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and his colleagues have shown that it can.

“This is an elegant outcome,” says Terry Oswalt at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., who was not involved in the new work. “Einstein would be very proud.”

Story continues below image

please log in to view this image

A TRICK OF THE LIGHT A dense stellar corpse warped spacetime to send light from a background star askew. The solid line from the real star’s position to the Hubble Space Telescope shows the path the light actually took, and the dotted line to the star’s observed position shows where that star seemed to be.
NASA, ESA, A. FIELD/STSCI


While the stars literally aligned to make the measurement possible, this was no lucky accident. Sahu and colleagues scoured a catalog of 5,000 stellar motions to find a pair of stars likely to pass close enough on the sky that Hubble could sense the shift.

There were a few possible candidates, and one of them, called Stein 2051 B, was already a mysterious character.

Located about 18 light-years from Earth, Stein 2051 B is a white dwarf, a common end-of-life state for a sunlike star. When low-mass stars run out of fuel, they puff up into a red giant while fusing helium into carbon and oxygen. Eventually, they slough off outer layers of gas, leaving this carbon-oxygen core — the white dwarf — behind. About 97 percent of the stars in the Milky Way, including the sun, are or someday will be white dwarfs.

White dwarfs are extremely dense. They are prevented from collapsing into a black hole only by the pressure their electrons produce in trying not to be in the same quantum state as each other. This bizarre situation sets strict limits on their sizes and masses: For a given radius, a white dwarf can be only so massive, and only so large for a given mass.

This mass-radius relation was laid out in Nobel prize‒winning work by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in the 1930s, but it has been difficult to prove. The only white dwarfs weighed so far share their orbits with other stars whose mutual motions help astronomers calculate their masses. But some astronomers worry that those companions could have added mass to the white dwarfs, throwing off this precise relationship.

Stein 2051 B also has a companion, but it is so far away that the two stars almost certainly evolved independently. That distance also means it would take hundreds of years to precisely measure the white dwarf’s mass. The best efforts to find a rough mass so far created a conundrum: Stein 2051 B appeared to be much lighter than expected. It would need an exotic iron core to explain it.

Measuring the shift of a background star provides a way to measure the white dwarf’s mass directly. The more massive the foreground star — in this case, the white dwarf — the greater the deflection of light from the background star.

“This is the most direct method of measuring the mass,” Sahu says. “It’s almost like putting somebody on a scale and reading off their weight.”

The white dwarf was scheduled to pass near a background star on March 5, 2014. Sahu’s team made eight observations of the two stars’ positions between October 2013 and October 2015.

The team found that the background star appeared to move in a small ellipse as the white dwarf approached and then moved away from it, exactly as predicted by Einstein’s equations. That suggests its mass is 0.675 times the mass of the sun — well within the normal range for its size.

This first measurement won't be the last, Oswalt says. Several new star surveys are coming online in the next few years that will track the motions of billions of stars at once. That means that even though light-bending alignments are rare, astronomers should catch several more soon.

 

Did you ever see that Einstein and Eddington thing with David Tennant and Andy Sirkis (sp)? Very good science drama doc.

 

Have to say it sounds familiar, but I'm not certain.

 

Smashing article in this month's New Scientist about the Higgs particle and the big bang. Basically postulating that the Higgs brings about mass from plasma/energy, thus driving the expansion of spacetime. (Very iffy summary by me there!). Nevertheless mind-blowing.

 

The most significant mindfuck of the 21st century has to be when quantum physicists such as Sir Roger Penrose began postulating on the possiblity of life after death.

They reckon our consciousness doesn't obey the classical laws of physics but it adheres to the principles of quantum theory exactly. They describe it rather like data on your hard drive: when the drive dies, your data is still there and your consciousness has already been uploaded to the universe, like your files to the Internet.

 

Yes, Red recommended I read Shadows of the Mind, and I read others by Penrose, including the Emporer's New Mind. Sort of ties is with that Wheeler stuff about the Anthropic Principle and 'Our' consciousness somehow creating the 'reality' of our universe. And all this based on the collapse of the wave function in an observed double-slit photon experiment.

Hmmm, I'll leave it to Feynman, himself an exponent of quantum wierdness over classical relativity:

'This is all very confusing, especially when we consider that even though we may consistently consider ourselves to be the outside observer when we look at the rest of the world, the rest of the world is at the same time observing us, and that often we agree on what we see in each other. Does this then mean that my observations become real only when I observe an observer observing something as it happens? This is a horrible viewpoint. Do you seriously entertain the idea that without the observer there is no reality? Which observer? Any observer? Is a fly an observer? Is a star an observer? Was there no reality in the universe before 109 B.C. when life began? Or are you the observer? Then there is no reality to the world after you are dead? I know a number of otherwise respectable physicists who have bought life insurance.

• "On the Philosophical Problems in Quantizing Macroscopic Objects"(ca. 1962-1963) as quoted by Morinigo, Wagner, & Hatfield, Feynman Lectures on Gravitation (2002)

 

Does your tits in, doesn't it I see penicillin was voted the greatest ever British discovery. Then we gave it free to the yanks

 

A New Large Hadron Collider Discovery Adds Strangeness to the Already Strange
By
Amanda Porter
-
June 16, 2017

please log in to view this image

With so many mystifying discoveries in physics as of late, like finding brand new particles and a negative effect mass fluid, the newest data from ALICE is adding strangeness to the top of the pile. ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is one of seven detectors that are a part of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). As explained on the CERN website, ALICE’s purpose is to “study the physics of strongly interacting matter at extreme energy densities, where a phase of matter called quark-gluon plasma forms.” This plasma is a matter that existed solely in the immediate fragments of a second following the Big Bang.

please log in to view this image

A cut-away view of the ALICE detector at CERN’s LHC. Image: By Pcharito – Own work

Recalling what many of us learned in grade school, the most normal matter is made of atoms, which are further composed of neutrons and protons, which themselves are made of quarks. Quarks are held in a state, called confinement, with gluons. They are permanently attached and never seen separately.

Recently released results from CERN shows that using the LHC, lead ions were collided at exaggerated speeds, reaching temperatures 100,000 times higher that the Sun, breaking confinement between quarks and gluons. In radical conditions mimicking the environment of the Big Bang, a quark-gluon plasma formed.

In addition to the quark-gluon plasma, a somewhat expected and understood the result, CERN researchers also observed an increased formation of strange hadrons, which was not expected. Strange Hadrons, a collection of familiar particles called Xi, Omega, Lambda, and Kaon, are so-called because they each contain a strange quark. This discovery is worth mention because, while strange hadrons are an expected outcome of nuclei collision, they have not been created before in proton to proton collisions. CERN has called this aspect “enhanced strangeness production”

please log in to view this image

New results from ALICE at the Large Hadron Collider show so-called strange hadrons being created where none were expected. As the number of proton-proton collisions (the blue lines) increase, the more of these strange hadrons are seen (as shown by the red squares in the graph). (Image: CERN)
A spokesperson for the ALICE collaboration, Frederico Antinori explains the fervor around the discovery: “We are very excited about this discovery. We are again learning a lot about this primordial state of matter. Being able to isolate the quark-gluon-plasma-like phenomena in a smaller and simpler system, such as the collision between two protons, opens up an entirely new dimension for the study of the properties of the fundamental state that our universe emerged from.”

Now that CERN can produce quark-gluon plasma, physicists hope to investigate strong interaction, one of the four fundamental forces, as well as the enhanced strangeness production. Originally predicted in the 1980’s and first observed in the 90’s, also at CERN but with their Super Proton Synchrotron, ALICE at the LHC gives a renewed and better chance to analyze the protein on protein enhanced strangeness production in heavy ion collisions.

According to a CERN press release, “Studying these processes more precisely will be key to better understand the microscopic mechanisms of the quark-gluon plasma and the collective behavior of particles in small systems.”

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...-not-alone-reveals-10-new-earth-size-planets/

 

Apparently global warming is just a #fraud by NASA

#thatwentwell

 

Quantum satellite shatters entanglement record
Intertwined photons were beamed to two Chinese cities 1,200 kilometers apart
BY
EMILY CONOVER
2:00PM, JUNE 15, 2017

please log in to view this image

QUANTUM CONNECTION Using the quantum-communications satellite Micius (illustrated), researchers successfully sent entangled photons to two cities in China. The result paves the way for a future worldwide quantum network.

JIAN-WEI PAN

• 
  
• 
  
• Particles of light born in space have connected two cities via a quantum link about 10 times longer than any created before.

A quantum-communications satellite beamed photons to Earth, separating them by more than 1,200 kilometers. The feat showed that the particles of light can retain a strange type of interconnectedness, known as quantum entanglement, even when flung to opposite ends of a country, researchers from China report in the June 16 Science. The previous distance record was about 100 kilometers (SN: 6/30/12, p. 10). Launched in 2016, the one-of-a-kind satellite is laying the groundwork for a space-based network of quantum communication.

“It’s a huge achievement for quantum entanglement and quantum science,” says physicist Thomas Jennewein of the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Scientists have previously beamed photons up to a satellite and back again (SN Online: 6/5/16), but those particles were not entangled. Until now, no one had distributed entangled particles from space. “China is now clearly taking the world leadership in this area of quantum communication,” Jennewein says.

The technique is expected to have major technological applications. “This experiment is really important for the development of a future quantum internet,” says Anton Zeilinger, a physicist at the University of Vienna. Such a network would allow for ultrasecure communications and could connect quantum computers across the globe (SN: 10/15/16, p. 13).

An ethereal bond between two particles, entanglement is the most essential ingredient of a quantum network. Entangled particles can’t be described independently; instead, they form one unit, even when separated by large distances. Measuring one entangled particle immediately reveals the state of the other. To perform quantum communication, scientists send entangled photons from place to place. But photons can only travel so far through air or optical fibers before the material absorbs the particles, limiting the distance over which communication is possible. In the emptiness of space, however, photons can travel much farther.

Using the satellite, named Micius after an ancient Chinese philosopher, the researchers beamed intertwined photon pairs down to the cities of Delingha in northern China and Lijiang in southern China. There, telescopes aimed at the satellite detected the particles. To confirm that the particles were entangled, and that the weird qualities of quantum mechanics held, the researchers used the photon pairs to perform a Bell test (SN: 9/19/15, p. 12), which analyzes correlations between the two particles. The test reconfirmed the odd physics of the supersmall, at a larger distance than ever before.

To perform the experiment, the researchers had to update their quantum equipment to make it work in space. That technological achievement is amazing, says physicist Harald Weinfurter of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. “It's a huge step from the laboratory experiments to equipment which really works on a satellite,” he says. In space, sensitive components must deal with inhospitable conditions such as fluctuating temperatures and vibrations. Plus, to fit on the satellite, the whole package must be small and lightweight.

Detecting the photons is likewise daunting. Beacon lasers helped researchers point the ground-based telescopes in the right direction to catch the photons, as the satellite zipped past, 500 kilometers above Earth’s surface. The accuracy the researchers achieved is like pinpointing a human hair on the ground from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

In the future, researchers suggest, quantum entanglement will be an important resource for communicating across the globe. “Today we pay bills: electrical bills, water bills,” says coauthor Chao-Yang Lu, a physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. With quantum entanglement such a basic requirement of quantum communication, “maybe someday we will need to pay some entanglement bills.”

 

Could one of the reasons that we've never found communications from advanced civilisations is that they speak to each other through entanglement?