Latest news with #cosmicrays
South China Morning Post
5 days ago
- Science
- South China Morning Post
God's play? Chinese scientists catch cosmic rays meddling in quantum computer operation
Researchers in China said they have found the first evidence that subatomic particles from cosmic rays may be affecting the efficiency of widely used error correction techniques that are an essential element of fault-tolerant quantum computing. The scientists monitored superconducting quantum chips alongside fundamental subatomic particles – called muons – produced by cosmic rays , as well as gamma ray-induced particle disturbances known as quasiparticle bursts. 'We directly observed quasiparticle bursts leading to correlated errors that are induced solely by muons and separated the contributions of muons and gamma rays,' they said in a paper published last month by the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications. The findings could be significant for the scaling of quantum processors and the design of fault-tolerant quantum computing systems, which can function properly even if faults or errors are present, the scientists said. According to the team – from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences and Nanjing Normal University – the proposed detection method could also be applied in cosmic ray and dark matter particle detection. Unlike traditional computing's unit of information that exists either as 0 or 1, its quantum counterpart relies on quantum bits or qubits that can exist in a multidimensional state, making possible more advanced and secure tasks. However, errors can occur simultaneously in multiple qubits. On a small scale, these multiqubit correlated errors can be reduced with optimised error correction methods, though the efficacy of these strategies diminishes in larger-scale computing.
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Physicists can't explain mysterious radio wave emissions in Antarctica
For nearly two decades, balloons carrying highly sensitive atmospheric instruments have drifted more than 25 miles above one of the world's most remote regions. The floating array is the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment, a project overseen by an international group of researchers tasked with measuring some of the universe's oldest and hardest-to-detect cosmic rays. Specifically, the team is hunting for neutrinos—particles with no charge that also possess the smallest known subatomic mass. But according to their recent report, ANITA has repeatedly picked up some truly weird signals that defy explanation. 'The [radio pulses] appear inconsistent with the standard model of particle physics,' the study's authors wrote for the journal Physical Review Letters. Neutrino signals are everywhere, and originate from high-energy sources like our sun, supernovae, and the Big Bang. Billions of the particles are passing through a space the size of your thumbnail at any given time—but that doesn't make them easy to find. That's because they generally don't interact with their surroundings, meaning trying to find them is similar to searching for subatomic needles in a cosmic haystack. 'This is [a] double-edged sword problem,' Penn State University associate professor of physics, astronomy, and astrophysics and study co-author Stephanie Wissel said in a statement. '[But] if we detect them, it means they have traveled all this way without interacting with anything else. We could be detecting a neutrino coming from the edge of the observable universe.'Neutrinos travel at nearly the speed of light, and tracing them back to their sources can offer more data than even some of today's most powerful space telescopes. Wissel has spent years codesigning experiments to identify neutrinos, and that's where systems like ANITA come into play. Once deployed, ANITA's radio antenna balloons are pointed back down to the ice where there is very little chance of signal interference. Wissel and colleagues then wait for radio emissions as neutrinos interact with the Earth's frozen surface. The team is particularly focused on tau neutrinos. These are specifically affected by the Antarctic ice and subsequently release secondary subatomic particles called tau leptons during emission events known as air showers. Although invisible to the human eye, Wissel likens the showers to waving a sparkler in one direction as the sparks shoot away from it. Despite their infinitesimal size, physicists distinguish between ice and air shower emissions, identify particle attributes, and even trace them back to their origin site. But that's only if they obey the known laws of physics—and a handful of particles aren't doing that in Antarctica. 'The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,' said Wissel. Further calculations indicated the anomalies would have needed to pass through and potentially interact with thousands of miles of rock to get to them. This should mean that their signals were undetectable—and yet ANITA still flagged them. Researchers then cross-referenced these readings with other detector projects but didn't find anything to help explain the data, leading them to classify them as 'anomalous.' Although some experts have suggested the signals could relate to the universe's elusive dark matter, there currently aren't enough follow-up observations to explain the weirdness. But if nothing else, the team is pretty confident the signals aren't their intended targets. 'It's an interesting problem because we still don't actually have an explanation for what those anomalies are, but what we do know is that they're most likely not representing neutrinos,' she added. Wissel's team is currently designing a new aerial neutrino detector called the Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO). Larger and more fine-tuned than ANITA, PUEO should be even better at flagging. In the process, it may also help to solve the identity of the physics-defying signals. 'My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs near ice and also near the horizon that I don't fully understand… [but] we haven't been able to find any of those yet either,' said Wissel. 'So, right now, it's one of these long-standing mysteries.'
The Independent
04-06-2025
- General
- The Independent
Scientists use giant magnets to solve a 20-year-old dark matter mystery
Physicists are always searching for new theories to improve our understanding of the universe and resolve big unanswered questions. But there's a problem. How do you search for undiscovered forces or particles when you don't know what they look like? Take dark matter. We see signs of this mysterious cosmic phenomenon throughout the universe, but what could it possibly be made of? Whatever it is, we're going to need new physics to understand what's going on. Thanks to a new experimental result published today, and the new theoretical calculations that accompany it, we may now have an idea what this new physics should look like – and maybe even some clues about dark matter. Meet the muon For 20 years, one of the most promising signs of new physics has been a tiny inconsistency in the magnetism of a particle called the muon. The muon is a lot like an electron but is much heavier. Muons are produced when cosmic rays – high-energy particles from space – hit Earth's atmosphere. Roughly 50 of these muons pass through your body every second. Muons travel through solid objects much better than x-rays, so they are useful for finding out what is inside large structures. For example, they have been used to look for hidden chambers in Egyptian and Mexican pyramids; to study magma chambers inside volcanoes to predict volcanic eruptions; and to safely see inside the Fukushima nuclear reactor after it melted down. A tiny crack in physics? In 2006, researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States measured the strength of the muon's magnetism incredibly precisely. Their measurement was accurate to roughly six parts in 10 billion. This is equivalent to measuring the mass of a loaded freight train to ten grams. This was compared to a similarly impressive theoretical calculation. When researchers compared the two numbers, they found a tiny but significant difference, indicating a mismatch between theory and experiment. Had they finally found the new physics they'd been looking for? A better experiment To find a definitive answer, the international scientific community started a 20-year programme to increase the precision of both results. The huge electromagnet from the original experiment was loaded onto a barge and shipped down the east coast of the US and then up the Mississippi River to Chicago. There, it was installed at Fermilab for a completely overhauled experiment. Just this morning, researchers announced they had finished that experiment. Their final result for the strength of the muon's magnetism is 4.4 times more precise, at one-and-a-half parts in 10 billion. And better calculations To keep up, theorists had to make sweeping improvements too. They formed the Muon g-2 Theory Initiative, an international collaboration of more than 100 scientists, dedicated to making an accurate theoretical prediction. They computed the contributions to the muon's magnetism from more than 10,000 factors. They even included a particle called the Higgs boson, which was only discovered in 2012. But there was one last sticking point: the strong nuclear force, one of the universe's four fundamental forces. In particular, computing the largest contribution to the result from the strong nuclear force was no easy feat. Antimatter vs supercomputers It was not possible to compute this contribution in the same way as the others, so we needed a different approach. In 2020, the Theory Initiative turned to collisions between electrons and their antimatter counterparts: positrons. Measurements of these electron–positron collisions provided the missing values we needed. Put together with all the other parts, this gave a result that strongly disagreed with the latest experimental measurement. The disagreement was almost strong enough to announce the discovery of new physics. At the same time, I was exploring a different approach. Along with my colleagues in the Budapest-Marseille-Wuppertal collaboration, we performed a supercomputer simulation of this strong contribution. Our result eliminated the tension between theory and experiment. However, now we had a new tension: between our simulation and the electron–positron results which had withstood 20 years of scrutiny. How could those 20-year-old results be wrong? Hints of new physics disappear Since then, two other groups have produced full simulations that agree with ours, and many more have validated parts of our result. We have also produced a new, overhauled simulation that almost doubles our precision (released as a preprint, which has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal). To ensure these new simulations weren't affected by any preconceptions, they were performed 'blind'. The simulation data was multiplied by an unknown number before being analysed, so we didn't know what a 'good' or 'bad' result would be. We then held a nerve-wracking and exciting meeting. The blinding factor was revealed, and we found out the results of years of work all at once. After all this, our latest result agrees even better with the experimental measurement of the muon's magnetism. But others emerge The Muon g-2 Theory Initiative has moved to using the simulation results instead of the electron-positron data in its official prediction, and the hint of new physics seems to be gone. Except … why does the electron–positron data disagree? Physicists around the globe have studied this question extensively, and one exciting suggestion is a hypothetical particle called a 'dark photon'. Not only could the dark photon explain the difference between the latest muon results and the electron–positron experiments, but (if it exists) it could also explain how dark matter relates to ordinary matter.
Yahoo
31-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
The Universe's Most Powerful Cosmic Rays May Finally Be Explained
Somewhere in our galaxy are engines capable of driving atomic fragments to velocities that come within a whisker of lightspeed. The explosive deaths of stars seems like a natural place to search for sources of these highly energetic cosmic bullets, yet when it comes to the most powerful particles, researchers have had their doubts. Numerical simulations by a small international team of physicists may yet save the supernova theory of cosmic ray emissions at the highest of energies, suggesting there is a brief period where a collapsing star could still become the Universe's most extreme accelerator. For more than a century, scientists have scanned the skies for phenomena that may be responsible for the relatively constant showers of atomic nuclei and occasional electrons that pepper our planet. Simply following their trajectory would be like picking up a bottle on the beach and looking to the horizon for its home. The charges of most cosmic rays put them at the mercy of a turbulent ocean of magnetic fields across the galaxy and beyond, leaving researchers to search for other clues. A mere few thousand light years away in our galactic backyard, the historic supernova known as Tycho's star has been studied for signs of physics capable of accelerating charged particles. In 1572, astronomers marveled at the star's sudden brightening, now understood to be the final hoorah of a white dwarf ending its life in a thermonuclear catastrophe. As its core collapsed under its own weight, the burst of heat and radiation slammed into the shell of surrounding gases, generating immense magnetic fields. In 2023 researchers published their analysis on those fields, finding their ability to generate cosmic rays was "significantly smaller" than those expected of existing models. While this doesn't rule out collapsing stars as potential particle accelerators, it does raise questions on just how much power they can provide. Every now and then, Earth is struck by some true monsters – particles that are up to a thousand times more powerful than anything our own technology has been capable of generating. These peta-electronvolt (PeV) energies are the work of hypothetical cosmic engines dubbed PeVatrons. According to astrophysicists Robert Brose from the University of Potsdam in Germany, Iurii Sushch from the Spanish Centre for Energy, Environmental and Technological Research, and Jonathan Mackey from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, dying stars just might be the mysterious PeVatrons scientists have been searching for. For it to work, the dying star first needs to cough up enough material to form a dense shell around itself. Then, at the moment of supernova the rapidly expanding shock wave smashes into this dense environment, generating the necessary magnetic turbulence to whip nuclei and electrons towards PeV-levels of acceleration. The critical element, they claim, is timing – only within its first decade or two is the surrounding shell dense enough to provide the amount of turbulence required for particles to reach the highest of energies. "It is possible that only very young supernova remnants evolving in dense environments may satisfy the necessary conditions to accelerate particles to PeV energies," the team writes. Had Tycho's star held its breath for just another few centuries, astrophysicists may have recorded a shower of cosmic rays at the highest of magnitudes. Perhaps in the near future, the violent end of another nearby star just might give us the opportunity they need to solve the perplexing mystery of PeVatrons once and for all. This research has been accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics. China's Tianwen-2 Launches to Grab First 'Living Fossil' Asteroid Samples Scientists Have Clear Evidence of Martian Atmosphere 'Sputtering' Chance X-Ray Discovery Reveals Mystery Object 15,000 Light Years Away
