In the Senate hearing considering the confirmation of Jared Isaacman as NASA Administrator, he and Senator Ted Cruz engaged in extensive dialogue about China. They strongly expressed the view that […]
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A few years ago, I wrote in Physics World about various bizarre structures I’d built from tennis balls, the most peculiar of which I termed “tennis-ball towers”. They consisted of a series of three-ball layers topped by a single ball (“the locker”) that keeps the whole tower intact. Each tower had (3n + 1) balls, where n is the number of triangular layers. The tallest tower I made was a seven-storey, 19-ball structure (n = 6). Shortly afterwards, I made an even bigger, nine-storey, 25-ball structure (n = 8).
Now, in the latest exciting development, I have built a new, record-breaking tower with 34 balls (n = 11), in which all 30 balls from the second to the eleventh layer are kept in equilibrium by the locker on the top (see photo a). The three balls in the bottom layer aren’t influenced by the locker as they stay in place by virtue of being on the horizontal surface of a table.
I tried going even higher but failed to build a structure that would stay intact without supporting “scaffolds”. Now in case you think I’ve just glued the balls together, watch the video below to see how the incredible 34-ball structure collapses spontaneously, probably due to a slight vibration as I walked around the table.
Even more unexpectedly, I have been able to make tennis-ball towers consisting of layers of four balls (4n + 1) and five balls too (5n + 1). Their equilibria are more delicate and, in the case of four-ball structures, so far I have only managed to build (photo b) a 21-ball, six-storey tower (n = 5). You can also see the tower in the video below.
The (5n + 1) towers are even trickier to make and (photo c) I have only got up to a three-storey structure with 11 balls (n = 2): two lots of five balls with a sixth single ball on top. In case you’re wondering, towers with six balls in each layer are physically impossible to build because they form a regular hexagon. You can’t just use another ball as a locker because it would simply sit between the other six (photo d).
The post Tennis-ball towers reach record-breaking heights with 12-storey, 34-ball structure appeared first on Physics World.
Members of a NASA safety panel said they were “deeply concerned” about the safety of the aging International Space Station, citing long-running issues and funding shortfalls.
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Even as NASA and its partners on the ISS shift to commercial space stations, NASA’s former deputy administrator believes there will still be a role for multilateral coordination.
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In this week's episode of Space Minds, Bill Nye, CEO of the Planetary Society sits down with host David Ariosto. The conversation starts with Bill's journey but quickly pivots to the proposed science budget cuts at NASA.
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L3Harris announced a $125 million expansion at its space manufacturing site in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
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A key player in the European DeepTech market and a leading Polish space technology company, Creotech Instruments S.A., has signed the largest contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to […]
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The document, titled “Space Warfighting: A Framework for Planners,” outlines how U.S. forces might assert control of the orbital high ground
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The Texas Space Commission has awarded more than $26 million to five companies in the latest round of awards designed to stimulate the state’s space industry.
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This podcast features Alonso Gutierrez, who is chief of medical physics at the Miami Cancer Institute in the US. In a wide-ranging conversation with Physics World’s Tami Freeman, Gutierrez talks about his experience using Elekta’s Leksell Gamma Knife for radiosurgery in a busy radiotherapy department.
This podcast is sponsored by Elekta.
The post Radiosurgery made easy: the role of the Gamma Knife in modern radiotherapy appeared first on Physics World.
A team behind the rescue of two lunar satellites left stranded by a launch anomaly have revealed the challenges they faced in salvaging the mission.
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GPS is not only a cornerstone to our military superiority, it is foundational to our national and global economic stability. In fact, analysts warn that GPS outages could cost our […]
The post Why Resilient GPS (R-GPS) Matters for US Military Superiority: We Must Address GPS Vulnerabilities appeared first on SpaceNews.
A concept from quantum information theory appears to explain at least some of the peculiar behaviour of so-called “strange” metals. The new approach, which was developed by physicists at Rice University in the US, attributes the unusually poor electrical conductivity of these metals to an increase in the quantum entanglement of their electrons. The team say the approach could advance our understanding of certain high-temperature superconductors and other correlated quantum structures.
While electrons can travel through ordinary metals such as gold or copper relatively freely, strange metals resist their flow. Intriguingly, some high-temperature superconductors have a strange metal phase as well as a superconducting one. This phenomenon that cannot be explained by conventional theories that treat electrons as independent particles, ignoring any interactions between them.
To unpick these and other puzzling behaviours, a team led by Qimiao Si turned to the concept of quantum Fisher information (QFI). This statistical tool is typically used to measure how correlations between electrons evolve under extreme conditions. In this case, the team focused on a theoretical model known as the Anderson/Kondo lattice that describes how magnetic moments are coupled to electron spins in a material.
These analyses revealed that electron-electron correlations become strongest at precisely the point at which strange metallicity appears in a material. “In other words, the electrons become maximally entangled at this quantum critical point,” Si explains. “Indeed, the peak signals a dramatic amplification of multipartite electron spin entanglement, leading to a complex web of quantum correlations between many electrons.”
What is striking, he adds, is that this surge of entanglement provides a new and positive characterization of why strange metals are so strange, while also revealing why conventional theory fails. “It’s not just that traditional theory falls short, it is that it overlooks this rich web of quantum correlations, which prevents the survival of individual electrons as the elementary objects in this metallic substance,” he explains.
To test their finding, the researchers, who report their work in Nature Communications, compared their predictions with neutron scattering data from real strange-metal materials. They found that the experimental data was a good match. “Our earlier studies had also led us to suspect that strange metals might host a deeply entangled electron fluid – one whose hidden quantum complexity had yet to be fully understood,” adds Si.
The implications of this work are far-reaching, he tells Physics World. “Strange metals may hold the key to unlocking the next generation of superconductors — materials poised to transform how we transmit energy and, perhaps one day, eliminate power loss from the electric grid altogether.”
The Rice researchers say they now plan to explore how QFI manifests itself in the charge of electrons as well as their spins. “Until now, our focus has only been on the QFI associated with electrons spins, but electrons also of course carry charge,” Si says.
The post Strange metals get their strangeness from quantum entanglement appeared first on Physics World.
The mission, designated NROL-174, lifted off at 3:33 p.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex 8 (SLC-8) at Vandenberg.
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