SpaceX’s ascent from commercial launch provider to indispensable national security asset marks one of the most significant shifts in America’s defense industrial base in decades. As Elon Musk’s company extends […]
The post Beyond launch: SpaceX’s expanding role in U.S. defense appeared first on SpaceNews.
Virgin Galactic says production of its new suborbital spaceplanes remains on track to allow commercial flights to begin in the middle of next year as it contemplates restarting ticket sales.
The post Virgin Galactic says production of new spaceplanes on track appeared first on SpaceNews.
The sudden loss of a large U.S. Department of Defense contract has added to Eutelsat’s geostationary challenges as the French operator shifts greater focus to its low Earth orbit OneWeb constellation.
The post Eutelsat’s DoD setback adds to GEO headwinds as LEO growth builds appeared first on SpaceNews.
A House hearing about how NASA is dealing with the threat posed by asteroid impacts turned into a discussion about impacts of budget cuts.
The post House hearing on asteroid threats also takes up budget threats appeared first on SpaceNews.
Norway signed the Artemis Accords May 15, a sign that the new administration continues to advance the document outlining best practices for responsible space exploration.
The post Norway signs Artemis Accords appeared first on SpaceNews.
Booz Allen’s Chris Bogdan: If the Pentagon tries to develop Golden Dome through its traditional procurement system, it will likely fail
The post Space Force officials say it’s too early to pin down Golden Dome costs appeared first on SpaceNews.
Join us on June 10 for an exclusive one-on-one conversation with Representative George Whitesides (D-CA), a freshman congressman representing California’s 27th District. Whitesides brings years of experience to Capitol Hill, having previously served as NASA’s Chief of Staff and as CEO of Virgin Galactic.
The post Live – A Conversation with Rep. George Whitesides appeared first on SpaceNews.
In this week's episode of Space Minds Mamta Patel Nagaraja - NASA's former associate chief scientist-offers an insider's look at how science priorities are set, what gets cut and what the future holds for research aboard the ISS and beyond.
The post The cost of shrinking space science appeared first on SpaceNews.
Many creative industries rely on cutting-edge digital technologies, so it is not surprising that this sector could easily become an early adopter of quantum computing.
In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast I am in conversation with James Wootton, who is chief scientific officer at Moth Quantum. Based in the UK and Switzerland, the company is developing quantum-software tools for the creative industries – focusing on artists, musicians and game developers.
Wootton joined Moth Quantum in September 2024 after working on quantum error correction at IBM. He also has long-standing interest in quantum gaming and creating tools that make quantum computing more accessible. If you enjoyed this interview with Wootton, check out this article that he wrote for Physics World in 2018: “Playing games with quantum computers“.
This article forms part of Physics World‘s contribution to the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ), which aims to raise global awareness of quantum physics and its applications.
Stayed tuned to Physics World and our international partners throughout the next 12 months for more coverage of the IYQ.
Find out more on our quantum channel.
The post Quantum computing for artists, musicians and game designers appeared first on Physics World.
In the American economy, property rights are so fundamental to commercial activities that we often take them for granted. Without these fundamental tenets of society, development and commerce would be […]
The post Accelerating investment in the final frontier: leveraging administrative approvals to bolster commercial space development appeared first on SpaceNews.
SAN FRANCISCO – Solar energy startup Solestial raised $17 million in Series A funding to expand manufacturing of silicon photovoltaics for space applications. The Tempe, Arizona startup also announced May […]
The post Solestial banks $17 million and welcomes new CEO appeared first on SpaceNews.
Companies and organizations can spend years developing experiments and other payloads for a space mission. Those payloads are then subjected to risks beyond the control of their owners. A launch […]
The post How IM-2 payload operators made the most of the mission’s landing issues appeared first on SpaceNews.
The head of the European Space Agency called on Europe to increase overall spending on space as he prepares a new three-year budget for the agency.
The post Aschbacher calls on Europe to increase space spending appeared first on SpaceNews.
Five-body recombination, in which five identical atoms form a tetramer molecule and a single free atom, could be the largest contributor to loss from ultracold atom traps at specific “Efimov resonances”, according to calculations done by physicists in the US. The process, which is less well understood than three- and four-body recombination, could be useful for building molecules, and potentially for modelling nuclear fusion.
A collision involving trapped atoms can be either elastic – in which the internal states of the atoms and their total kinetic energy remain unchanged – or inelastic, in which there is an interchange between the kinetic energy of the system and the internal energy states of the colliding atoms.
Most collisions in a dilute quantum gas involve only two atoms, and when physicists were first studying Bose-Einstein condensates (the ultralow-temperature state of some atomic gases), they suppressed inelastic two-body collisions, keeping the atoms in the desired state and preserving the condensate. A relatively small number of collisions, however, involve three or more bodies colliding simultaneously.
“They couldn’t turn off three body [inelastic collisions], and that turned out to be the main reason atoms leaked out of the condensate,” says theoretical physicist Chris Greene of Purdue University in the US.
While attempting to understand inelastic three-body collisions, Greene and colleagues made the connection to work done in the 1970s by the Soviet theoretician Vitaly Efimov. He showed that at specific “resonances” of the scattering length, quantum mechanics allowed two colliding particles that could otherwise not form a bound state to do so in the presence of a third particle. While Efimov first considered the scattering of nucleons (protons and neutrons) or alpha particles, the effect applies to atoms and other quantum particles.
In the case of trapped atoms, the bound dimer and free atom are then ejected from the trap by the energy released from the binding event. “There were signatures of this famous Efimov effect that had never been seen experimentally,” Greene says. This was confirmed in 2005 by experiments from Rudolf Grimm’s group at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
Hundreds of scientific papers have now been written about three-body recombination. Greene and colleagues subsequently predicted resonances at which four-body Efimov recombination could occur, producing a trimer. These were observed almost immediately by Grimm and colleagues. “Five was just too hard for us to do at the time, and only now are we able to go that next step,” says Greene.
In the new work, Greene and colleague Michael Higgins modelled collisions between identical caesium atoms in an optical trap. At specific resonances, five-body recombination – in which four atoms combine to produce a tetramer and a free particle – is not only enhanced but becomes the principal loss channel. The researchers believe these resonances should be experimentally observable using today’s laser box traps, which hold atomic gases in a square-well potential.
“For most ultracold experiments, researchers will be avoiding loss as much as possible – they would stay away from these resonances,” says Greene; “But for those of us in the few-body community interested in how atoms bind and resonate and how to describe complicated rearrangement, it’s really interesting to look at these points where the loss becomes resonant and very strong.” This is one technique that can be used to create new molecules, for example.
In future, Greene hopes to apply the model to nucleons themselves. “There have been very few people in the few-body theory community willing to tackle a five-particle collision – the Schrödinger equation has so many dimensions,” he says.
He hopes it may be possible to apply the researchers’ toolkit to nuclear reactions. “The famous one is the deuterium/tritium fusion reaction. When they collide they can form an alpha particle and a neutron and release a ton of energy, and that’s the basis of fusion reactors…There’s only one theory in the world from the nuclear community, and it’s such an important reaction I think it needs to be checked,” he says.
The researchers also wish to study the possibility of even larger bound states. However, they foresee a problem because the scattering length of the ground state resonance gets shorter and shorter with each additional particle. “Eventually the scattering length will no longer be the dominant length scale in the problem, and we think between five and six is about where that border line occurs,” Greene says. Nevertheless, higher-lying, more loosely-bound six-body Efimov resonances could potentially be visible at longer scattering lengths.
The research is described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Theoretical physicist Ravi Rau of Louisiana State University in the US is impressed by Greene and Higgins’ work. “For quite some time Chris Greene and a succession of his students and post-docs have been extending the three-body work that they did, using the same techniques, to four and now five particles,” he says. “Each step is much more complicated, and that he could use this technique to extend it to five bosons is what I see as significant.” Rau says, however, that “there is a vast gulf” between five atoms and the number treated by statistical mechanics, so new theoretical approaches may be required to bridge the gap.
The post Five-body recombination could cause significant loss from atom traps appeared first on Physics World.
Rep. Seth Moulton: 'I am especially concerned about the rumor that the National Reconnaissance Office, at the direction of OMB, has slashed commercial imagery funding lines in the FY26 budget'
The post Lawmakers raise alarm over rumored cuts to commercial satellite imagery funding appeared first on SpaceNews.
China launched 12 satellites early Wednesday for a pioneering on-orbit computing project led by startup ADA Space and Zhejiang Lab.
The post China launches first of 2,800 satellites for AI space computing constellation appeared first on SpaceNews.
NASA selected Rocket Lab to launch a small NASA astrophysics spacecraft that will study galaxies at ultraviolet wavelengths.
The post Rocket Lab to launch NASA astrophysics smallsat mission appeared first on SpaceNews.
Saudi Arabia's Arabsat signed a deal for broadband capacity from Telesat’s proposed low Earth orbit constellation, a day after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced approval to sell LEO services to maritime and aviation customers in the region.
The post Arabsat seeks Telesat Lightspeed capacity as Starlink expands into Saudi Arabia appeared first on SpaceNews.
Connexion