How to Bend A Diamond

by Adwaith.B.S(2016-2019)

adwaithbalachandran123@gmail.com

 

Diamond is the hardest natural material, but now scientists have shown that it can bend and stretch, much like rubber, and even elastically snap back into shape — even if it only happens with diamonds that are very small. Such flexibility could open up a wide new range of applications for diamond, the researchers say.

Diamond is extraordinarily hard, meaning it excels at resisting any change to its shape — that’s why a diamond can cut through softer materials and will only be scratched by another diamond. However, diamond is not especially tough — when enough force is applied to it to change its shape, it doesn’t usually bend, it breaks.

Bend Like A Diamond

Still, previous research found that, in theory, the diamond should be able to flex a bit. The key was to create pure crystals of diamond without any microscopic flaws or variations that would make them brittle.

An international team of researchers took thin films of artificial diamonds and etched out needles just 300 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, long.. They next pressed down on these slivers with a diamond probe and watched what happened using a scanning electron microscope.

The scientists found their diamond needles could bend and stretch by up to 9 percent without breaking and rebound back to their original shape after the pressure was removed. These results approach what the research team’s computer models suggested was the diamond’s theoretical limit of flexibility. By contrast, an ordinary diamond in bulk form breaks well below strain levels of even 1 percent.

“The hardest natural material, diamond, which is commonly believed to be undeformable, can be bent and stretched significantly,” said study co-senior author Yang Lu, a materials scientist and mechanical engineer at the City University of Hong Kong. “A diamond needle could be severely bent almost 30 degrees and, more importantly, fully recover.”

Mind-bending

The unexpected improved durability of diamond could lead to many new applications. For instance, robust and cost-effective microscopic diamond needles could help deliver genes or drugs into cells, Lu said.

In addition, when a diamond is flexed, it could stretch and squeeze the molecular bonds in ways that could significantly alter its electronic, thermal, optical, magnetic and chemical properties, said study co-senior author Subra Suresh, president of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. The researchers suggested that further experiments flexing diamond might discover new behaviors for novel applications, “such as a more powerful or colorful laser or maser,” Lu said.

Controlling how sensitive diamonds are to magnetic fields could also have a variety of sensor applications, said study co-senior author Ming Dao, a materials scientist and mechanical engineer at MIT. For example, a diamond with altered magnetic properties could find use in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans.

The scientists detailed their findings in the April 20 issue of the journal Science.

Quantum weirdness in ‘chicken or egg’ paradox

by Adwaith.B.S(2016-2019)

adwaithbalachandran123@gmail.com

Source:

 University of Queensland 

 

The “chicken or egg” paradox was first proposed by philosophers in Ancient Greece to describe the problem of determining cause-and-effect.  

 Now, a team of physicists from The University of Queensland and the NÉEL Institute has shown that, as far as quantum physics is concerned, the chicken and the egg can both come first.Dr. Jacqui Romero from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems said that in quantum physics, cause-and-effect is not always as straightforward as one event causing another.

“The weirdness of quantum mechanics means that events can happen without a set order,” she said.

“Take the example of your daily trip to work, where you travel partly by bus and partly by train.

“Normally, you would take the bus then the train, or the other way round.

“In our experiment, both of these events can happen first,” Dr. Romero said.

“This is called `indefinite causal order’ and it isn’t something that we can observe in our everyday life.”

To observe this effect in the lab, the researchers used a setup called a photonic quantum switch.

UQ’s Dr. Fabio Costa said that with this device the order of events — transformations on the shape of light — depends on polarisation.

“By measuring the polarisation of the photons at the output of the quantum switch, we were able to show the order of transformations on the shape of light was not set.”

“This is just a first proof of principle, but on a larger scale indefinite causal order can have real practical applications, like making computers more efficient or improving communication.”
The research was published in Physical Reviews Letters by the American Physical Society.

Equinox Explained: Why Earth’s Seasons Will Change on Sunday

by Sidhi.S.L.Nair(2016-2019)

Sidnair017@gmail.com

The seasons will change this Sunday (Sept. 22), with the Northern Hemisphere moving into autumn and the South emerging from winter into spring.

The celestial event that marks this transition is called an “equinox,” and it happens twice every year, around March 21 and Sept. 21. Just what is an equinox, and why does it occur?

The Earth moves in two different ways. First, the planet spins on its polar axis — a line through the north and south poles — once every 24 hours, causing the alternation of day and night. Secondly, it moves in its orbit around the sun once every 365.25 days, causing the annual cycle of seasons. The equinox occurs when these two motions intersect.

Because the Earth is so big, its mass has an enormously powerful gyroscopic effect. For this reason, its poles always point in the same direction, although a major earthquake can cause tiny wobbles in this axis. Most importantly, the Earth’s motion around the sun has absolutely no effect on the direction the poles are pointing, which has very important consequences for Earth Seasons.

Astronomers mark the positions of objects in the sky relative to the Earth’s poles of rotation (those are the red lines you see in the picture). The most important line is the celestial equator, which divides the sky into the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

The Earth’s pole of rotation is tilted 23.4 degrees relative to the plane of its orbit. This tilt is always toward the same point in the sky, called the celestial pole, no matter where in its orbit around the sun the Earth happens to be.

This tilt makes it appear to observers on Earth’s surface that the sun is moving across the sky at an angle to the celestial equator. This is marked by the green line in the image, called the “ecliptic” because eclipses happen along this line.

Twice a year, the sun crosses the celestial equator, moving from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere, or vice versa. These two crossings are very important for the inhabitants of Earth, because they mark the change in the direction the sun’s rays fall on Earth.

Specifically, on Sunday, the sun will move from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere. It will pass overhead everywhere along the Earth’s equator on that date, and the sun will rise exactly in the east and set exactly in the west. Day and night will also be of roughly equal length. (“Equinox” is derived from the Latin for “equal night.”)

After Sunday, the sun will shine more on the southern half of our planet and less on the northern half. Summer will be over in the Northern Hemisphere, and fall will have arrived. Winter will be over in the south, and spring will begin.

The sun will continue on its path southward for the next three months, reaching its southernmost point on Dec. 21, the date of the “solstice.” In the Northern Hemisphere, the days will become shorter, the nights longer, and the temperatures colder during this three-month trek, all as a result of the sun’s being south of the celestial equator.

 

It’s always important to remember that this is part of a cycle, and that after Dec. 21 the sun will start moving northward again, and spring will be on its way.

 

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NASA tracks the rain behind Kerala floods

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has released a video created using satellite data that provide an estimate of the intense rainfall over India in the past week and show the spread of the resulting severe flooding in Kerala and parts of Karnataka.

Rainfall accumulations from August 13 to 20 show two bands of heavy rain across India, NASA said in a statement on Wednesday.

The first band appears much broader and extends across the northern part of the peninsula with weekly rainfall totals ranging from over 5 inches towards the western half of the peninsula to as much as 14 inches over parts of the eastern half towards the Bay of Bengal. The first band is associated with the general monsoon circulation.

 

The second band appears more concentrated and intense and is closely aligned with the southwest coast of India and the Western Ghats where onshore flow was enhanced by an area of low pressure embedded within the general monsoon. Weekly rainfall totals in this band are generally over 10 inches with embedded areas exceeding 16 inches. The maximum estimated value from the data in this band is 18.5 inches, NASA said.

Another contributing factor to the heavy rain along the southwest coast of India is the Western Ghats. The Western Ghats, with many peaks over 2,000 meters, is well positioned to enhance rainfall along the west coast of India as they intercept the moisture-laden air being drawn in off the warm waters of the northern Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea as part of the southwest monsoon circulation.

The Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM is used to estimate precipitation from a combination of passive microwave sensors, including microwave sensor and infrared data. The data are generated every half an hour, thereby allowing scientists to track rainfall across the globe almost in real time. GPM is the Global Precipitation Measurement mission core satellite. GPM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Agency, JAXA.

Scientists ‘teleport’ a quantum gate

by Abhijith.A.D(2016-2019)

https://www.facebook.com/abhijith.vjmd

Date:

 September 5, 2018

Source:

 Yale University

Summary:

 Researchers have demonstrated one of the key steps in building the architecture for modular quantum computers: the ‘teleportation’ of a quantum gate between two qubits, on demand.

 

Yale University researchers have demonstrated one of the key steps in building the architecture for modular quantum computers: the “teleportation” of a quantum gate between two qubits, on demand.

The key principle behind this new work is quantum teleportation, a unique feature of quantum mechanics that has previously been used to transmit unknown quantum states between two parties without physically sending the state itself. Using a theoretical protocol developed in the 1990s, Yale researchers experimentally demonstrated a quantum operation, or “gate,” without relying on any direct interaction. Such gates are necessary for quantum computation that relies on networks of separate quantum systems — an architecture that many researchers say can offset the errors that are inherent in quantum computing processors.

Through the Yale Quantum Institute, a Yale research team led by principal investigator Robert Schoelkopf and former graduate student Kevin Chou is investigating a modular approach to quantum computing. Modularity, which is found in everything from the organization of a biological cell to the network of engines in the latest SpaceX rocket, has proved to be a powerful strategy for building large, complex systems, the researchers say. A quantum modular architecture consists of a collection of modules that function as small quantum processors connected into a larger network.

Modules in this architecture have a natural isolation from each other, which reduces unwanted interactions through the larger system. Yet this isolation also makes performing operations between modules a distinct challenge, according to the researchers. Teleported gates are a way to implement inter-module operations.

“Our work is the first time that this protocol has been demonstrated where the classical communication occurs in real-time, allowing us to implement a ‘deterministic’ operation that performs the desired operation every time,” Chou said.

Fully useful quantum computers have the potential to reach computation speeds that are orders of magnitude faster than today’s supercomputers. Yale researchers are at the forefront of efforts to develop the first fully useful quantum computers and have done pioneering work in quantum computing with superconducting circuits.

Quantum calculations are done via delicate bits of data called qubits, which are prone to errors. In experimental quantum systems, “logical” qubits are monitored by “ancillary” qubits in order to detect and correct errors immediately. “Our experiment is also the first demonstration of a two-qubit operation between logical qubits,” Schoelkopf said. “It is a milestone toward quantum information processing using error-correctable qubits.”

E C G Sudarshan;Physicist who missed Nobel, although his work won one

 

Born in Pallam, Kerala in 1931, Sudarshan obtained his Masters from Madras Christian College, and worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, before moving to the University of Rochester in New York for his PhD. It was while working for his PhD dissertation that Sudarshan produced the first of his many important contributions to physics.

At least two of his scientific contributions deserved a Nobel Prize. In fact, one of them did get a Nobel, but he was not the recipient. Theoretical physicist E C George Sudarshan, who did pioneering work in a variety of areas like elementary particle physics, quantum field theory, and quantum optics, between 1950s and 1970s, died on May 14 in Texas, the United States, where he was a professor since 1969. He was 86.

“Sudarshan was the most brilliant theoretical physicist of Indian origin in the contemporary period,” fellow physicist T Padmanabhan, a professor at the Pune-based Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, said.
“His research spanned a wide range of topics and in each of them, he could make deep and brilliant contributions of fundamental nature,” he added.

It had been shown a couple of years earlier that the weak nuclear force, the one that is experienced by sub-atomic particles at tiny sub-atomic distances and is responsible for the radioactive decay of certain material, violated what is called parity symmetry, which the other three fundamental forces of nature — strong nuclear force, electromagnetic force, and gravitation — follow.

“Suppose, a physical event is seen to occur in nature. It was believed that the mirror image of the event was also a possible event. But it was shown that under the influence of weak force, this is not so,” explained scientist N Mukunda, who did his PhD under Sudarshan. Sudarshan extended this finding in his PhD thesis and showed that the weak force acts only on particles with a particular orientation, called ‘left-handed’.

“In my view, this was his biggest achievement. It came when he was still a PhD student and it had been missed even by stalwarts like (Nobel laureate and celebrated physicist) Richard Feynman. Feynman, who developed his theory further, later acknowledged the fact that it had originated in Sudarshan’s work,” Urijit Yajnik of IIT Bombay, who too was a PhD student under Sudarshan, said.

The work, which went on to win the Nobel Prize in 2005, was done in 1963 in the field of quantum optics. “It is well known that light has quantum nature. But in many situations when light interacts with matter, for example, when an ordinary bulb lights up a room, light particles, or photons, can be treated in the classical manner. Its quantum effects can be ignored. Sudarshan produced key mathematical and physical results to distinguish between situations in which the quantum nature of light becomes important and situations in which it can be ignored,” Mukunda said about the work that led to the development of laser as a powerful tool in the study of physics.

In 2005, the Nobel Prize was given to Roy Glauber for these very contributions. Sudarshan, who had come up with the findings first, was ignored, “for reasons which could only be non-academic”, as Padmanabhan put it. The choice was criticised and some scientists even sent a protest letter to the Nobel committee.

Sudarshan had several other achievements against his name. He was the first one to propose the theoretical possibility of a particle, later named tachyons, that could travel faster than the speed of light. “There are problems in the existence of such particles. But he showed that theoretically the existence of such particles was not inconsistent with physical laws,” Yajnik said.

HAWKING- THE MASTER OF BLACK HOLES

by Anaswara.J.S.(2016-2019)

anaswarajs@gmail.com

“Most physicists work with equations using pen and paper, but because of his disability, Hawking found it easier to visualize things in his mind.” – Alan Lightman

Despite his profound disability, Stephen Hawking inspired millions around the world. But Hawking, who died on 14-March-2018, Wednesday at the age of 76, made his greatest contributions as a theoretical physicist. His books, papers, and lectures turned generations into armchair cosmologists and transformed our understanding of the universe — especially with regard to  black holes .

The first black hole was discovered in 1971, and we now believe that 100 million or so are sprinkled across the universe. Most astronomers now believe that black holes lie at the center of most, if not all, galaxies, including our own Milky Way.
But at the time of Hawking’s birth in 1942, black holes were little more than a mathematical quirk — a prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1916 theory of general relativity . The term black hole itself wasn’t coined until the 1960s, when scientists began to realize that Einstein’s math actually described real objects — gaping abysses of raw gravitational force so powerful that they suck in dust, gas, and stars and stop light itself from escaping.

In the 1960s, Hawking and fellow British physicist Roger Penrose built on Einstein’s theories to describe the physical characteristics of black holes and showed that when a star collapses it forms an infinitely dense point called a singularity — the birth of a black hole.
Hawking also helped confirm the Big Bang theory. Drawing once again from Einstein’s equations, he and Penrose showed that 13.8 billion years ago the universe emerged violently from a single compressed point no bigger than an atom.

Classically, a black hole should be ‘perfectly cold’ in the sense that it absorbs everything but emits nothing. This is how they were understood in the early 1970s. A black hole like that would radiate no energy, and no matter could escape from it. It would just… exist, cold, silent, and eternal.

When Hawking considered quantum mechanical effects in the mid-70s, he discovered that black holes should, in principle, radiate as if they were thermal objects with a temperature.
“If they radiate energy then their mass will decrease. And he found that as this happens, as they shrink, their temperature goes up and they radiate even faster.” Eventually, perhaps, the black hole would disappear entirely, or shrink to a little nubbin. Without fully reconciling relativity and quantum mechanics in a robust theory of “quantum gravity” (what physicists call a “theory of everything”), the final stage of that black hole evaporation remains a mystery.

The problem is that, according to his calculations, the radiation is perfectly thermal. It doesn’t retain any information about the state of the material that formed the black hole, and this would violate a fundamental rules in quantum mechanics.

INSPIRING BLACK HOLES

Whatever the truth, Hawking remained convinced that by attempting to understand the universe’s inner workings, humans can learn valuable lessons about themselves. As he explained in a 2015 lecture, black holes offer can their own form of inspiration.
“Black holes are not the eternal prisons they were once thought,” he said. “Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe. If you feel you are trapped in a black hole, don’t give up. There is a way out.”

BLACK HOLE PARADOX

Quantum physics requires that the whole future and past of every particle should be, in principle, possible to figure out and link through a series of chained, causal, probabilistic events. But if a black hole release an undifferentiated soup of particles with their information — their histories — unrecoverably erased, then that requirement is fundamentally broken.

The most dramatic late-career paper Hawking wrote suggested the black holes as they’ve classically been understood don’t exist at all.
In ” Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes ,” published in 2014, he suggested that the “event horizon” around black holes, the point beyond which even light could not escape, doesn’t really exist. Instead, he wrote, there’s simply an “apparent” horizon of trapped light which could fade away and allow the light to escape.

YET TO BE ANSWERED

“The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity,” he wrote.
He also suggested some fundamental conceptual problems with a number of features physicists had attributed to black holes, like “firewalls” around their boundaries that destroy observers who try to enter.

In 2016, Hawking introduced  ” Soft Hair on Black Holes .”
i.e;
The black holes are surrounded by “soft” or zero-energy particles , which he call hair. That hair, he  wrote, stores the lost information of particles emitted by black holes on “holographic plates” beyond the black holes’ boundary regions. So the information, while displaced, is never truly lost.

In  1960, black holes were described  not only by means of the general theory of relativity, but also methods of quantum mechanics. As a result it has become clear that to quantize the classical theory of gravitation in the same way as, for example, classical electrodynamics or mechanics, it won’t turn out. Hawking has gone some other way and has applied thermodynamics to black holes. He systematically applying thermodynamics to black holes, has removed an exact formula of entropy. Black holes radiate — owing to vacuum fluctuations. On the horizon of events couples of virtual particles are formed: one of them, with positive energy, departs from a black hole, another, with negative — falls in it, thereby reducing its weight. Hawking quantitatively calculated a thermal range of a black hole. For example, temperature of a black hole of solar weight — about one million kelvin. It is impossible to distinguish so small temperature from noise by modern astronomical methods.

                                                             R.I.P. Stephen Hawking

Vantablack;Darkest material ever

by Abhijith.A.D(2016-2019)

https://www.facebook.com/abhijith.vjmd

This visual magic is the work of Vantablack, the Darkest material ever made by human.. The ominously named coating, which absorbs virtually all light, was created by British company Surrey nanosystems to help eliminate stray light in satellites and telescopes. It has since gathered a rabid following of artists, designers, and other curious creatives desperate to get their hands on the stuff.

(Normal black vs Vantablack)

IT’S NOT ACTUALLY A COLOR.

 

Let’s get technical for a minute. Color, as we humans know it, is the result of the way light is reflected off of an object and into our eyes. Different light frequencies translate into different colors. Vantablack isn’t a color, but a material. It’s made of a “forest” of tiny, hollow carbon tubes, each the width of a single atom.“A surface area of [1 centimeter squared] would contain around 1000 million nanotubes.” When light hits the tubes, it’s absorbed and cannot escape—which means that actually, Vantablack is the absence of color.

 

YOU CAN’T BUY IT.

Because it’s not a pigment or a paint, you can’t just buy a bucket of it and dip a brush in and slather it onto your walls. The nanotubes that make up Vantablack must be grown in the Surrey NanoSystems lab using a complicated (and patented) process involving several machines, a few layers of different substances, and some extreme heat. From start to finish, applying Vantablack to an object can take up to two days, according to Northam. “I had an inquiry yesterday asking how much would it cost for a kilo of Vantablack pigment,” Northam says. “First of all, I can’t sell you a bucket of Vantablack, but if I could, I don’t think there’d be much on the planet that would be more expensive.” He says that, ounce for ounce, Vantablack is a lot more expensive than both diamond and gold.

 

 

IT DOESN’T FEEL THE WAY IT LOOKS.

“One of the things that people often say is ‘Can I touch it?’” Northam says. “They expect it to feel like a warm velvet.” Though Vantablack does have a sort of soft, velvety look to it, Northam says that doesn’t translate to physical sensation. When you touch Vantablack, it just feels like a smooth surface. That’s because the nanotubes are so small and thin, they simply collapse under the weight of human touch. Here’s how Northam describes it: “Imagine you have a field of wheat, and instead of the wheat being 3 or 4 feet high, it’s about 1000 feet tall. That is the equivalent scale that we’re talking about for nanotubes. The reason they work is they’re very, very long compared to their diameter. It will stay upright and not blow away in the wind, but if you then try and land a plane on it, you’ll make a dent.” So, Vantablack is pretty susceptible to damage, which is why it can’t yet be applied to unprotected surfaces like cars or high-end gowns—one brush of a hand and the material would lose its magic.

IT HAS ALMOST NO MASS.

While Vantablack is sensitive to touch, it’s super robust against other forces, like shock and vibration. This is due to the fact that each carbon nanotube is individual, and has almost no mass at all. Plus, most of the material is air. “If there’s no mass, there’s no force during acceleration,” Northam says. This makes Vantablack ideal for protected objects that might have to endure a bumpy ride, like a space launch, for example.

IT COULD HAVE A NUMBER OF USES BEYOND ITS ORIGINAL APPLICATION.

The material was originally designed for super technical fields, like space equipment, where its ability to limit stray light makes it ideal for the inside of telescopes. But it could be applied in more everyday objects if the conditions are right. Northam says Surrey NanoSystems has already been approached by a handful of luxury watchmakers interested in incorporating Vantablack into their wrist candy, and high-end car manufacturers want to use it in their dashboard displays for stunning visual appearance. Northam says they also have a few smartphone makers knocking on their door.

Artists are also clamoring to get their hands on Vantablack and make some crazy, mind-boggling works of art. But for now, much to the chagrin of thousands of creatives, only one artist is allowed to work with the material, and that’s sculptor Anish Kapoor. Surrey NanoSystems gave Kapoor the exclusive rights to using Vantablack in “creative arts,” which Northam says translates into anything that’s meant to be observed purely as a work of art. He says the company will continuously reassess this agreement, but as Vantablack is still such a new material, it makes sense that they’d want to have some control over how it’s being used. “I do understand that people would wanna get their hands on this stuff,” Northam says. “But I suspect many would not want to pay the prices for it.”

IT WILL BE A WHILE BEFORE IT’S USED ON CLOTHES.

Vantablack could take the “little black dress” to a whole new level if it can successfully be applied to fabric without compromising its physical properties. Northam says the company is working with fabric, but Vantablack’s foray into fashion is probably a long way off. “I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point we see something along the lines of a black dress,” he says, optimistically, “but we won’t see people walking down the street in it any time soon.”

Super Blue Blood Moon 2018

by Abhijith.A.D(2016-2019)

https://www.facebook.com/abhijith.vjmd

For the first time in 152 years, three lunar events coincided with each other on the night of January 31: a supermoon, a blue Moon and blood moon, making it one of the most rare and beautiful lunar displays in recent years.

(pics by Renjith M R(2016-2019)

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100021785136774)

 

A supermoon occurs when the Moon is unusually close to the Earth which makes it appear larger and brighter in the sky. Out of the 12 or 13 full Moons that occur each year, only three or four achieve supermoon status. 2018 has already been host to two supermoons.

On top of this, a blood Moon is a particularly rare event in which the Moon turns red during an eclipse. This happens when the light from the Sun reflects directly on to the eclipsing Moon. The third event was a blue moon, which is the second full Moon of the month.

Although this display was rare, the UK missed out on the spectacle. Only those in the US, Asia, Australia and Russia got to see the full eclipse. And only parts of China were lucky enough to see the show.

If you missed this Super Blue Blood Moon, make a note in your diary for 2037. This is the next time the three events are likely to coincide. 19 years isn’t so long…

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrydklNpcFI