In this week’s special CEO Series edition of Space Minds, we're at the World Space Business Week in Paris. In today's episode, SpaceNews editor Mike Gruss talks with Mina Mitry, CEO of Kepler Communications.
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SpaceX expects to begin testing direct-to-device services using newly acquired spectrum from EchoStar as soon as the end of next year.
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Viasat and Space42 have agreed to pool their Mobile Satellite Services spectrum, aiming to provide direct-to-device services from the world’s largest coordinated block of D2D frequencies within three years.
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The deal underscores NGA’s push to fold commercial satellite data and artificial intelligence into U.S. national security workflows.
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SES announced plans Sept. 16 to deploy a satellite co-developed with manufacturing startup K2 Space early next year, marking the start of a more iterative approach to upgrading its MEO broadband constellation.
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The company delivered 84 terminals to York Space and Northrop Grumman for the military constellation known as the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture
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PARIS – Astro Digital announced plans Sept. 16 to purchase and distribute power from Florida startup Star Catcher’s future space-based energy grid. The goal is to enable ESPA-class satellites like Astro Scale’s Corvus XL to obtain more power than they could generate on their own. “Demand is growing exponentially for small satellites that can do […]
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The first-ever “space–time crystal” has been created in the US by Hanqing Zhao and Ivan Smalyukh at the University of Colorado Boulder. The system is patterned in both space and time and comprises a rigid lattice of topological solitons that are sustained by steady oscillations in the orientations of liquid crystal molecules.
In an ordinary crystal atomic or molecular structures repeat at periodic intervals in space. In 2012, however, Frank Wilczek suggested that systems might also exist with quantum states that repeat at perfectly periodic intervals in time – even as they remain in their lowest-energy state.
First observed experimentally in 2017, these time crystals are puzzling to physicists because they spontaneously break time–translation symmetry, which states that the laws of physics are the same no matter when you observe them. In contrast, a time crystal continuously oscillates over time, without consuming energy.
A space–time crystal is even more bizarre. In addition to breaking time–translation symmetry, such a system would also break spatial symmetry, just like the repeating molecular patterns of an ordinary crystal. Until now, however, a space–time crystal had not been observed directly.
In their study, Zhao and Smalyukh created a space–time crystal in the nematic phase of a liquid crystal. In this phase the crystal’s rod-like molecules align parallel to each other and also flow like a liquid. Building on computer simulations, they confined the liquid crystal between two glass plates coated with a light-sensitive dye.
“We exploited strong light–matter interactions between dye-coated, light-reconfigurable surfaces, and the optical properties of the liquid crystal,” Smalyukh explains.
When the researchers illuminated the top plate with linearly polarized light at constant intensity, the dye molecules rotate to align perpendicular to the direction of polarization. This reorients nearby liquid crystal molecules, and the effect propagates deeper into the bulk. However, the influence weakens with depth, so that molecules farther from the top plate are progressively less aligned.
As light travels through this gradually twisting structure, its linear polarization is transformed, becoming elliptically polarized by the time it reaches the bottom plate. The dye molecules there become aligned with this new polarization, altering the liquid crystal alignment near the bottom plate. These changes propagate back upward, influencing molecules near the top plate again.
This is a feedback loop, with the top and bottom plates continuously influencing each other via the polarized light passing through the liquid crystal.
“These light-powered dynamics in confined liquid crystals leads to the emergence of particle-like topological solitons and the space–time crystallinity,” Smalyukh says.
In this environment, particle-like topological solitons emerge as stable, localized twists in the liquid crystal’s orientation that do not decay over time. Like particles, the solitons move and interact with each other while remaining intact.
Once the feedback loop is established, these solitons emerge in a repeating lattice-like pattern. This arrangement not only persisted as the feedback loop continued, but is sustained by it. This is a clear sign that the system exhibits crystalline order in time and space simultaneously.
Having confirmed their conclusions with simulations, Zhao and Smalyukh are confident this is the first experimental demonstration of a space–time crystal. The discovery that such an exotic state can exist in a classical, room-temperature system may have important implications.
“This is the first time that such a phenomenon is observed emerging in a liquid crystalline soft matter system,” says Smalyukh. “Our study calls for a re-examining of various time-periodic phenomena to check if they meet the criteria of time-crystalline behaviour.”
Building on these results, the duo hope to broaden the scope of time crystal research beyond a purely theoretical and experimental curiosity. “This may help expand technological utility of liquid crystals, as well as expand the currently mostly fundamental focus of studies of time crystals to more applied aspects,” Smalyukh adds.
The research is described in Nature Materials.
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PARIS – Josef Aschbacher, the head of the European Space Agency, said member states are quickly changing how they view space, from its role in geopolitics, to the need for sovereign capabilities to working more closely with their national security counterparts. During a Sept. 15 interview here at World Space Business Week, Aschbacher, the agency’s […]
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EDITOR’S NOTE: Starbase is SpaceX’s massive rocket development site and the home of Starship — the vehicle Elon Musk envisions as humanity’s path to Mars and that many in the U.S. civil space program see as a way back to the moon. But Starbase started as little more than an impossible stretch of empty land […]
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Physicists at Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) claim to have observed the quantum counterpart of the classic Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI), which is the most basic instability in fluids. The effect, seen in a quantum gas of 7Li atoms, produces a new type of exotic vortex pattern called an eccentric fractional skyrmion. The finding not only advances our understanding of complex topological quantum systems, it could also help in the development of next-generation memory and storage devices.
Topological defects occur when a system rapidly transitions from a disordered to an ordered phase. These defects, which can occur in a wide range of condensed matter systems, from liquid crystals and atomic gases to the rapidly cooling early universe, can produce excitations such as solitons, vortices and skyrmions.
Skyrmions, first discovered in magnetic materials, are swirling vortex-like spin structures that extend across a few nanometres in a material. They can be likened to 2D knots in which the magnetic moments rotate about 360° within a plane.
Skyrmions are topologically stable, which makes them robust to external perturbations, and are much smaller than the magnetic domains used to encode data in today’s disk drives. That makes them ideal building blocks for future data storage technologies such as “racetrack” memories. Eccentric fractional skyrmions (EFSs), which had only been predicted in theory until now, have a crescent-like shape and contain singularities – points in which the usual spin structure breaks down, creating sharp distortions as it becomes unsymmetrical.
“To me, the large crescent moon in the upper right corner of Van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’ also looks exactly like an EFS,” says Hiromitsu Takeuchi at Osaka, who co-led this new study with Jae-Yoon Choi of KAIST. “EFSs carry half the elementary charge, which means they do not fit into traditional classifications of topological defects.”
The KHI is a classic phenomenon in fluids in which waves and vortices form at the interface between two fluids moving at different speeds. “To observe the KHI in quantum systems, we need a structure containing a thin superfluid interface (a magnetic domain wall), such as in a quantum gas of 7Li atoms,” says Takeuchi. “We also need experimental techniques that can skilfully control the behaviour of this interface. Both of these criteria have recently been met by Choi’s group.”
The researchers began by cooling a gas of 7Li atoms to near absolute zero temperatures to create a multi-component Bose-Einstein condensate – a quantum superfluid containing two streams flowing at different speeds. At the interface of these streams, they observed vortices, which corresponded to the predicted EFSs.
“We have shown that the behaviour of the KHI is universal and exists in both the classical and quantum regimes,” says Takeuchi. This finding could not only lead to a better understanding of quantum turbulence and the unification of quantum and classic hydrodynamics, it could also help in the development of technologies such as next-generation storage and memory devices and spintronics, an emerging technology in which magnetic spin is used to store and transfer information using much less energy than existing electronic devices.
“By further refining the experiment, we might be able to verify certain predictions (some of which were made as long ago as the 19th century) about the wavelength and frequency of KHI-driven interface waves in non-viscous quantum fluids, like the one studied in this work,” he adds.
“In addition to the universal finger pattern we observed, we expect structures like zipper and sealskin patterns, which are unique to such multi-component quantum fluids,” Takeuchi tells Physics World. “As well as experiments, it is necessary to develop a theory that more precisely describes the motion of EFSs, the interaction between these skyrmions and their internal structure in the context of quantum hydrodynamics and spontaneous symmetry breaking.”
The study is detailed in Nature Physics.
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The Space Data Association has picked Spanish technology provider GMV to upgrade and operate its global space traffic coordination platform starting early next year, the non-profit group of satellite operators announced Sept. 16.
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A loss of attitude control and an open valve contributed to the loss of Isar Aerospace’s first Spectrum rocket in March as the company gears up for a second flight.
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Canada’s Telesat is pitching Lightspeed as a bridge to IRIS² as its LEO broadband constellation is set to come online in 2027, at least three years before Europe’s sovereign multi-orbit network is due to enter service.
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In this week’s special CEO Series edition of Space Minds, we're at the World Space Business Week in Paris. In today's episode, SpaceNews editor Mike Gruss talks with Josef Aschbacher, Director General of the European Space Agency.
The post Inside ESA’s vision with Josef Aschbacher appeared first on SpaceNews.
CEO says years of scaling up production are paying off as Pentagon ramps constellation orders
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Swissto12 has completed the Preliminary Design Review for its first direct-to-device connectivity satellite, the Swiss small geostationary spacecraft manufacturer announced Sept. 15.
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Launch companies are reiterating plans to sharply increase flight rates to meet growing government and commercial demand, even as some fall short of earlier projections.
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EchoStar is looking for ways to expand its communications business as an “asset-light growth company,” CEO Hamid Akhavan said Sept. 15.
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