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Then upon further investigation...1/19/07

perfect liquid -

http://www.discover.com/issues/jan-06/features/physics/

Big Bang Reenacted In the Laboratory

Physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in New York announced in April that they had re-created the searing-hot mix of exotic particles that filled the universe during the first few microseconds after the Big Bang. Their experiment implies that the cosmos started out not as a hot, dense cloud of gas but as a strangely sublime, friction-free liquid.

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http://www.discover.com/issues/jan-07/features/physics/#16

Quantum Teleportation Leaps Toward Reality

It's not exactly "Beam me up, Scotty," but for the first time scientists have teleported information between light and atoms, hastening the long-awaited advent of ultrafast quantum computers and unbreakable encryption schemes. Quantum teleportation is the process of making a subatomic particle's physical state vanish from one place and appear in another, a little like Captain Kirk's transporter. What makes this possible is a bizarre phenomenon known as entanglement, in which a pair of particles have complementary characteristics, such as two electrons spinning in opposite directions. The irreducible uncertainty of quantum mechanics makes it impossible to predict the state of a given electron, but because the two particles are entangled, measuring the state of one automatically determines the state of the other, regardless of how far apart they are.

In order to teleport a state between light and atoms, Eugene Polzik and his colleagues at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, in collaboration with Ignacio Cirac of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Germany, entangled a light beam with a magnetized gas of cesium atoms. The researchers then encoded the state they wanted to teleport into the light beam with laser pulses. By separating the entangled quantum information from the light beam and uncovering the laser message, the team was able to teleport the complementary state to the atoms at a distance of half a yard. "For the first time," Polzik says, quantum teleportation "has been achieved between light—the carrier of information—and atoms." This was also the first time that it was done with a macroscopic atomic object acting as the target. Scientists had previously teleported states only between pairs of photons or pairs of atoms. But a practical quantum computer, Polzik notes, requires the transfer of information between a data stream, such as light, and a stored quantum state, such as the atoms in a hard drive.

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 http://www.discover.com/issues/apr-92/features/timetravelredux26/

a superpeak would correspond to his being hurtled into the future. A supertrough, on the other hand, would correspond to time running backward.

How exactly does this last part work? It’s just a consequence of quantum mechanics, one which has no classical analogue, says Aharonov patiently. Sometimes you get a particular interference pattern that corresponds to going backward in time.

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http://www.discover.com/issues/feb-04/cover/?page=5

Although they bounced apart after the collision, the two membranes will exert a force on each other that's analogous to gravity, and they will ultimately meet in another crash, triggering another Big Bang. The cycle of such collisions would be eternal.

Toward the end of one cosmic era, space has expanded to such an extent that galaxies have drifted very far apart. After about a trillion years, most of the stars have burned out, and our universe is nearly empty. But this is not the end of the story. The continued attraction between the neighboring membranes draws them together again, setting the stage for another colossal collision and an ekpyrotic rebirth of our universe. The cycle of collisions between membranes continues into eternity.

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strangelets -

There are three ways that a particle accelerator could hypothetically end our world. It could spawn a planet-swallowing black hole; it could create strangelets, weird matter that alters all matter around it; or it could rip apart the structure of space and change the laws of physics. Researchers concluded that cosmic rays—natural high-energy particles—are much more likely to cause such disasters than a particle experiment is.

spooky -

Einstein would not have been amused. Not only did researchers demonstrate last May a phenomenon that the Great One once disparaged as spooky action at a distance, but they proved it happens even at great distances. Worse, they performed the experiment in Switzerland, not far from the patent office where Einstein worked in 1905—the year he explained the quantum nature of light, which laid the foundation for quantum mechanics, which he later found so maddeningly spooky. The spooky action in question involves a voodoolike link between two particles such that a measurement carried out on one has an instantaneous effect on the other, though it be far away—nearly seven miles away, in the experiment done by physicist Nicolas Gisin’s team at the University of Geneva. Gisin and his colleagues borrowed fiber-optic phone lines running from Geneva to two nearby villages. In Geneva, they shone photons into a potassium-niobate crystal, which split each photon into a pair of less energetic photons traveling in opposite directions—one north toward Bellevue and the other southwest to Bernex. At these two destinations, nearly seven miles apart, each photon was fed into a detector. Common sense would suggest that nothing done to the photon in Bellevue could affect the photon in Bernex, or vice versa, but quantum mechanics never had much to do with common sense. For starters, the uncertainty principle says that Gisin cannot simultaneously know both the energy of a photon and the time it left the crystal in Geneva, at least not precisely. Furthermore, quantum mechanics insists that the photons don’t have precise properties until they are measured. To show what he saw as the absurdity of the claim, Einstein proposed a simple thought experiment in 1935, and this became the basis for Gisin’s complicated real one. Einstein believed that the uncertainty principle was just a measurement problem, not a reality problem. His idea, in terms of the Geneva experiment, was that you could learn the energy of one photon by measuring the energy of the other one far away; by the same token, you could learn a photon’s arrival time by measuring that of its distant counterpart. After all, the two photons had to leave Geneva at the same time, and although their energies might not be equal, they have to add up to the energy of the parent photon. Assuming that these measurements could be made, and that they added up in this commonsense way, Einstein would be correct, and reality would be independent of measurement. Or you’d be forced to argue that the Bellevue measurement instantaneously and spookily changes the reality of the photon at Bernex, which to Einstein was an absurd suggestion. The mind game itself was proof enough for Einstein, but in 1964 physicist John Bell turned it into a testable hypothesis. He came up with an equation, called Bell’s inequality, that boiled the question down to a set of measurements of many photons hitting detectors. If energy and arrival time were absolute values, as Einstein believed, then these measurements would be true to Bell’s inequality. If, on the other hand, quantum mechanics was valid after all, and the precise energy and arrival time of a photon did not exist until they were measured, the measurements would violate Bell’s inequality. In Gisin’s experiment, alas, Einstein and common sense were the losers. It’s as if he had flipped a coin at Bellevue, Gisin says, while his colleague had flipped one at Bernex, and each time he grabbed his coin out of the air and saw it was heads up, his colleague’s coin had simultaneously stopped spinning and landed heads up as well. And this happened thousands of times in a row. It is a very strange prediction, Gisin says, and because it is so bizarre, it deserved to be tested. In fact, it had already been tested many times, most notably in 1981 when physicist Alain Aspect from the University of Paris first dazzled his peers by demonstrating the phenomenon. But Aspect separated his photons by only a few meters, and since then some physicists who share Einstein’s reluctance to abandon common sense had speculated that the spooky effect might decline with distance. We have now done it in the lab, and we have done it at 10 kilometers, and we found no significant differences, Gisin says. Common sense, at least in the quantum world, would seem to be a dead horse—but Gisin is planning one more crack at the corpse. He wants to set up a test at an even farther distance—perhaps the 60 miles that separate Geneva and Bern, the site of the patent office where Einstein worked. He even knows when he wants to do it: in 2005, the centennial of Einstein’s pioneering paper.

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evanescence - tending to vanish like vapor,Transient

See february discovery issue page 32

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http://www.discover.com/issues/jan-07/features/physics/?page=2#87

Light Moves in Reverse

Physicists at the University of Rochester have coaxed light into traveling backward—and, weirdly enough, to do so faster than light itself. In a clever tabletop experiment, the researchers sent a pulse of light through a single optical fiber doped with erbium, a metal that alters the speed at which light waves move through the fiber. Just as one light pulse enters, a second pulse appears at the opposite end, as if by magic. This second pulse then splits in two, with half propagating backward and the other half exiting the fiber. The overall effect is that "the pulse appears to leave before it enters," says physicist Robert Boyd, who designed the experiment. No physical laws are violated because the information in the pulse never breaks the light-speed barrier. In recent years physicists have also learned to slow light or to ramp it up past the usual speed of 186,282 miles per second. Confused? This animated Web site may help. Replacing electrical switches with optical buffers that control the speed of light could lead to more efficient high-speed telecommunication networks.