Showing posts with label science reserch. Show all posts
Tweet Share Share Share Share Share

October 04, 2017
Congratulations to Weiss, Barish, Thorne (and all their colleagues)!
gravitational waves_blue_image_spiral_513e616e71e718e6

Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne have won the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics. The three are members of the LIGO-Virgo detector collaboration that discovered gravitational waves.
"This year's prize is about a discovery that shook the world," said the Nobel committee representative during a news conference in Stockholm on Tuesday.
One half of the prize went to Weiss, born in Berlin and now a US citizen, who is a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The other half was split by Barish, a Nebraska native, and Thorne, who was born in Utah. Both work at the California Institute of Technology.
"When we first discovered them back in September 2015 many of us didn't believe it," said Weiss, on the phone to the Stockholm conference.
It took months for the scientists to convince themselves that they had in fact heard gravitational waves, he said.
The Nobel committee has awarded a prize in physics 111 times since 1901. Last year, three researchers won for their work in the field of topology.
Topology, as The Washington Post reported, is the study of state changes more intricate than the pivot from liquid to solid.
The 2016 laureates discovered exotic transformations that turn matter into superconductors or frictionless liquids, able to swirl in a never-slowing vortex.
Winners of the Nobel Prize in physics join a rarefied group that counts Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Niels Bohr as members. More recent laureates include University of Manchester scientists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who won the 2010 prize. They performed groundbreaking experiments with graphene, a lattice of carbon a single atom thick.
In 2013, François Englert and Peter Higgs won for predicting a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, the existence of which was confirmed by the Large Hadron Collider in 2012.
Who will win a Nobel physics prize is often anyone's guess; the selection process is notoriously secretive.

But that does not curb speculation. The detection of black hole gravitational waves has been floated as a contender both this year and last. This year, the predictions came true.
A team of more than a thousand scientists, researchers and technicians, making up the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, discovered the first gravitational ripple in space-time in September 2015.
Detectors have sensed three other gravitational waves since then, all from merging black holes.
The LIGO team, plus the Italian Virgo detector, announced the most recent cosmic distortion discovery in September.
The Nobel Prize in chemistry will be announced on Wednesday, the literature prize on Thursday and the peace prize on Friday.
An award in economics, not one of the original prizes but now conducted in memory of Alfred Nobel, will be announced Monday.
2017 © The Washington Post

This article was originally published by The Washington Post.
Read more »
Tweet Share Share Share Share Share

January 22, 2017


For the first time, researchers have filmed light creating a ‘sonic boom’ - officially known as a photonic Mach cone - using a new type of ultra-speed camera that can capture an incredible trillion frames per second in just one take.
A Mach cone is created when something travels faster than the waves it’s emitting - this often happens when a plane is travelling faster than the speed of sound, producing an ultra-loud boom. But not many people know light can do the same.
So how exactly do you create a 'photonic boom'? At first thought, it seems ludicrous that light could also have a Mach cone. After all, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum – about 300,000 kilometres per second.
But light can be slowed down, and as such it can slip faster though some material than others. Which is how the team were able to create the photonic Mach cone.
In this experiment, a team of researchers led by optical engineer Jinyang Liang from Washington University created a channel between two plates of silicone rubber and powdered aluminium oxide. They filled the gap with a dry-ice fog, and then fired a 7 picosecond laser pulse which scattered off the suspended particles.
Given the light passed more slowly through the walls of the tunnel than the fog, it created the photonic Mach cone you can see below:
content-1484668613-liang5hrJinyang Liang and Lihong V. Wang
While other techniques have been used to capture these light cones, this is the first time a single instance of one has been filmed in real time, and in order to do it, the researchers had to create a whole new type of ultrafast camera.
High speed video isn’t all that new. In 2011, Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a camera that could capture a pulse of light making its way through a plastic bottle.
They used technology called a ‘streak camera’, which sweeps out an image in such a way that it converts the sequence into spatial information. The team filmed 500 images taken a trillionth of a second apart, showing light scatter as it passed lengthways through the bottle.
For the process to work, however, the scene has to be imaged over and over again to build up enough data. This isn’t exactly useful for capturing events which don’t conveniently repeat.
Instead, Liang and his team found a way to do away with multiple takes. Still using a streak camera they captured three views of the same event. One view captured a sequence of images, the remaining two recorded the timing of each shot. This way they could effectively tag each image, keeping them in order.
To test it out, they filmed the ‘photonic boom’ for the first time.
The real benefits to such technology, however, could be found in medicine.
"Our camera is fast enough to watch neurons fire and image live traffic in the brain," Liang explained to Live Science.
"We hope we can use our system to study neural networks to understand how the brain works."

Read more »
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
Powered by Blogger.