Scientists teleport info 90 miles across islands

Quantum teleportation is reaching greater distances, and hopes are high that satellites will be able to use the technology.

by Tim Hornyak August 15, 2012 10:00 AM PDT

The European Space Agency's Optical Ground Station in the Canary Islands.(Credit: ESA)

If only we were quantum states, we'd be playing Kirk and Scotty, popping around the universe until the inevitable failure in the transporter circuits.

European and Canadian scientists are pushing the envelope on quantum teleportation after having succeeded in beaming quantum states across some 90 miles in the Canary Islands.

The laser-locked telescopes on the islands of La Palma and Tenerife served as transporter rooms, teleporting information about the state of a pair of "entangled" particles.

The entanglement links the particles such that a change in one is registered in the other despite great distances between them.

Quantum teleportation was first demonstrated in 1997, but distances are growing longer. A Chinese team of researchers also reported teleporting quantum states across a significant distance, 60 miles, in the journal Nature this month.

Related stories

• Physicists connect the dots on quantum computing
• One small step for a man, one giant leap for teleportation

While quantum teleportation is subject to the cosmic speed limit, the speed of light, the technology could be harnessed to create satellite communications networks that are super-secure.

Eavesdropping on such transmissions would instantly alter them, so quantum satellites are being explored as a means to securely send military transmissions or even distribute films.

"Our work proves the feasibility of both ground-based and satellite-based free-space quantum teleportation," the European authors write. "Our experiment represents a crucial step toward future quantum networks in space, which require space to ground quantum communication."

(Via Scientific American)

Atom Smasher Creates New Kind of Matter

By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writer

Source: http://news.yahoo.co…-201132904.html

Collisions between particles inside the Large Hadron Collider atom smasher have created what looks like a new form of matter.

The new kind of matter is called color-glass condensate, and is a liquidlike wave of gluons, which are elementary particles related to the strong force that sticks quarks together inside protons and neutrons (hence they are like "glue").

Scientists didn't expect this kind of matter wouldresult from the typeof particle collisions going on at the Large Hadron Collider at the time. However, it may explain some odd behavior seen inside the machine, which is a giant loop where particles race around underneath Switzerland and France.

When scientists sped up protons (one of the building blocks of atoms) and lead ions (lead atoms, which contain 82 protons each, stripped of their electrons), and crashed them into each other, the resulting explosions liquefied those particles and gave rise to new particles in their wake. Most of these new particles, as expected, fly off in all directions at close to the speed of light. [Photos: The World's Largest Atom Smasher (LHC)]

But recently scientists noticed that some pairs of particles were flying off from the collision point in correlated directions.

"Somehow they fly at the same direction even though it's not clear how they can communicate their direction with one another. That has surprised many people, including us," MIT physicistGunther Roland, whose group led the analysis of the collision data along with Wei Liof Rice University, said in a statement.

A similar flight pattern is seen when two heavy particles, such as lead and lead, crash into each other. In this case, the collisions create what's called quark-gluon plasma — a superhot soup of particles similar tothe state of the universe just after the Big Bang. This soup can sweep particles in the same direction, explaining why their flight directions wouldbe correlated.

But quark-gluon plasma isn't possible with lead-proton collisions, like the ones in the new study. Now researchers think a different state of matter, the color-glass condensate, may act in a similar way. The color-glass condensate's dense swarm of gluons may also sweep particles off in the same direction, suggested Brookhaven National Laboratory physicistRajuVenugopalan, who first predicted the substance, which may also be seen after proton-proton collisions.

The mechanism may depend on a weird quirk of particles called quantum entanglement. Two particles can be entangled so that they retain a connection even after they are separated, and an action on one reverberates on the other.

Entangled gluons in the color-glass condensate could explain how particles flying away from the collision point might share information about their flight direction with each other, Venugopalan said.

The intriguing phenomenon was not expected to result from the LHC's run of proton-lead collisions, which was meant to serve as a reference point for comparison to other types of collisions.

"You don't expect quark-gluon plasma effects" with lead-proton collisions, Rolandsaid. "It was supposed to be sort of a reference run — a run in which you can study background effects and then subtract them from the effects that you see in lead-lead collisions."

The findings will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review B.

Black Hole Found, 17 Billion Times as Massive as Sun

SOURCE: http://abcnews.go.co…Ab3Ulgo.twitter

Nov 29, 2012 12:45pm

The galaxy NGC 1277 as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA/ESA/Andrew C. Fabian.

You would probably not enjoy the galaxy NGC 1277. Never mind that it’s far — 220 million light-years away in the constellation Perseus. The problem is that at its center is a giant, giant black hole, 17 billion times as massive as our sun, so big that scientists calculate it makes up 59 percent of the mass of the galaxy’s disc.

Astrophysicists have long believed that there’s a black hole at the center of our Milky Way, but it probably accounts for something like 0.1 percent of the galaxy’s center. The one in NGC 1277, scientists report in today’s edition of the journal Nature, is the second largest they’ve ever observed, and it upends what they thought about how galaxies form.

Black holes, as you’ll recall, are objects in space so massive that their gravity consumes everything around them — stars, planets, matter, energy, even light. Earthly scientists can only observe their effect on the space around them, not see them directly. Be grateful we’re not close to one. They’re actually useful to astrophysicists in explaining the nice spiral shape of many galaxies — you need something massive in the middle for the stars to circle — but NGC 1277 is an extreme.

“This is a really oddball galaxy,” said Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the team that made the find. “It’s almost all black hole. This could be the first object in a new class of galaxy-black hole systems.” Gebhardt and colleagues at the McDonald Observatory have been calculating the mass of different black holes — no small task considering their powerful gravity.

The researchers put together an animation of how stars in that distant galaxy would behave, whipping around the center to avoid falling in.

What would you see if you lived on a habitable planet in that far-away galaxy and could look toward the center? Probably nothing that makes sense to human eyes. Black holes have such powerful gravity that they distort the space around them.

Here’s hoping your planet is in a nice, stable orbit around a star far from the action. If not, you might be drawn right into the black hole, destroyed so quickly that –

My heart goes out to the families in CT today. What a tragedy. /sad.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':(' />