Supervoid Found in Pool Pocket of the Universe Containing no Perceivable Light or Matter

""Astronomers from the University of Hawaii who have recently been studying what they believed was the largest detected structure in the universe have only actually found a 1.8 billion light year wide open space, not a "structure."

The Astronomers where trying to figure out why galaxies were missing from a portion of the sky being observed that was expected to have about 10,000 galaxies.

What can now be known as a "supervoid" was distinctive for its unexpected emptiness, it is "the largest individual structure ever identified by humanity,"said the studies leader István Szapudi of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Szapudi's research team was looking at the region that was lately found to be an area where the cosmic microwave background radiation is much cooler than the average background temperatures that surround. Astronomers have named this phenomenon a "Cold Spot."

The existence of such a large, cold area was unpredictable as most models of the evolution of the universe determine that after the Big Bang, there were some hot and cold regions in the early days of the universe, but nothing on the scale of this Cold Spot.

Researchers argue that this could be some kind of Cold Spot or empty hole because they say that their "supervoid" is sucking energy out of the cosmic radiational background that travels around it.

This supervoid is located 3 billion light years from Earth and was found in analyzing data from the Pan-STARRS1 telescope located on Maui in Hawaii and from NASA's Wide Field Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite.

The supervoid is unexpected given the usual even distribution of the universe at the scale the empty region occupies, the researchers say.

"This is the greatest supervoid ever discovered," says Kovács. "In combination of size and emptiness, our supervoid is still a very rare event. We can only expect a few supervoids this big in the observable universe.""

http://www.natureworldreport.com/2015/04/20/astronomers-stumble-upon-eerie-section-of-universe-containing-absolutely-nothing/

Quantum Entaglement Light Photon Created to Contain Thousands of Atoms for Advanced Atomic Time Keeping

Physicists from MIT and the University of Belgrade have developed a new technique that can successfully entangle 3,000 atoms using only a single photon. The results, published today in the journal Nature, represent the largest number of particles that have ever been mutually entangled experimentally.

The researchers say the technique provides a realistic method to generate large ensembles of entangled atoms, which are key components for realizing more-precise atomic clocks.

“You can make the argument that a single photon cannot possibly change the state of 3,000 atoms, but this one photon does — it builds up correlations that you didn’t have before,” says Vladan Vuletic, the Lester Wolfe Professor in MIT’s Department of Physics, and the paper’s senior author. “We have basically opened up a new class of entangled states we can make, but there are many more new classes to be explored.”

Vuletic’s co-authors on the paper are Robert McConnell, Hao Zhang, and Jiazhong Hu of MIT, as well as Senka Cuk of the University of Belgrade.

Atomic entanglement and timekeeping

Entanglement is a curious phenomenon: As the theory goes, two or more particles may be correlated in such a way that any change to one will simultaneously change the other, no matter how far apart they may be. For instance, if one atom in an entangled pair were somehow made to spin clockwise, the other atom would instantly be known to spin counterclockwise, even though the two may be physically separated by thousands of miles.

The phenomenon of entanglement, which physicist Albert Einstein once famously dismissed as “spooky action at a distance,” is described not by the laws of classical physics, but by quantum mechanics, which explains the interactions of particles at the nanoscale. At such minuscule scales, particles such as atoms are known to behave differently from matter at the macroscale.

Scientists have been searching for ways to entangle not just pairs, but large numbers of atoms; such ensembles could be the basis for powerful quantum computers and more-precise atomic clocks. The latter is a motivation for Vuletic’s group.

Today’s best atomic clocks are based on the natural oscillations within a cloud of trapped atoms. As the atoms oscillate, they act as a pendulum, keeping steady time. A laser beam within the clock, directed through the cloud of atoms, can detect the atoms’ vibrations, which ultimately determine the length of a single second.

“Today’s clocks are really amazing,” Vuletic says. “They would be less than a minute off if they ran since the Big Bang — that’s the stability of the best clocks that exist today. We’re hoping to get even further.”

The accuracy of atomic clocks improves as more and more atoms oscillate in a cloud. Conventional atomic clocks’ precision is proportional to the square root of the number of atoms: For example, a clock with nine times more atoms would only be three times as accurate. If these same atoms were entangled, a clock’s precision could be directly proportional to the number of atoms — in this case, nine times as accurate. The larger the number of entangled particles, then, the better an atomic clock’s timekeeping.

Picking up quantum noise

Scientists have so far been able to entangle large groups of atoms, although most attempts have only generated entanglement between pairs in a group. Only one team has successfully entangled about 100 atoms — the largest mutual entanglement to date, and only a small fraction of the whole atomic ensemble.

Now Vuletic and his colleagues have successfully created a mutual entanglement among 3,000 atoms, virtually all the atoms in the ensemble, using very weak laser light — down to pulses containing a single photon. The weaker the light, the better, Vuletic says, as it is less likely to disrupt the cloud. “The system remains in a relatively clean quantum state,” he says.

Precise Time:

http://scienceblog.com/77507/thousands-of-atoms-entangled-with-a-single-photon/#AwsqjGt7EjiqpmwC.97

Exotic States of Matter Reveal Plasma Secrets Through Particle Jets at Cern

""When the LHC accelerator at the world's largest laboratory in CERN, Geneva, collided two lead ions travelling at nearly the speed of light, for a fraction of a second ordinary matter was transformed into the most exotic state of matter known to physics: quark-gluon plasma. Analysis of the streams of particles penetrating the plasma has led to new findings about the properties of the plasma, and was recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters by the international team of physicists working at the ATLAS detector.

Immediately following the Big Bang and the formation of space-time, the Universe was filled with matter of extraordinary properties. Quarks and gluons, today only found bound within protons and neutrons, bounced about freely, comprising a homogenous 'soup'. This exceptional state of matter, appearing only at temperatures of billions of degrees, has been recreated by physicists at the LHC accelerator by colliding heavy lead ions.

Study of the quark-gluon plasma poses an enormous challenge. It appears only rarely during collisions, in extremely minute quantities, and then only for a fraction of a second. It immediately begins to expand under its own pressure, rapidly cools and transforms itself into an avalanche of ordinary particles. Modern physics has no tools at its disposal to directly observe quarks and gluons. We cannot simply proceed with the usual methods of measurement, like inserting a thermometer into the plasma and waiting a few minutes for the results. Much more refined methods are needed.

"Fortunately detectors like the ATLAS detector have suceeded in recording the decay products of particles which have interacted in the quark-gluon plasma. By carefully analysing the properties of those particles, we can come to guarded conclusions about the features of the plasma," says Prof. Barbara Wosiek of the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków, Poland, who coordinated and approved the analysis of data gathered by the ATLAS detector in 2011. The analysis was performed by a team from Columbia University.

Most of the information we have on the quark-gluon soup is provided by particles that disperse sideways as the result of a collision. As they move in this specific direction, crosswise to the initial direction of flight of the lead nuclei, it makes it relatively easy to distinguish them from thousands of other particles and assures that they resulted from the early stage of the collision. If so, immediately after the collision they had to traverse through the quark-gluon cloud, to then collapse into a concentrated narrow stream of particles, known as jets.

"These initially produced particles lose energy while going through the hot, dense plasma soup, which leads to extinguishing the high-energy jets. Through our analysis we go about reconstructing jets of an extremely high energy level, reaching 400 gigaelectronvolts," adds Prof. Wosiek.

After gathering the data on the reconstructed jets in the collision of lead nuclei, the team of physicists can correlate and compare the results with those obtained from proton-proton collisions. The idea behind such a comparison is quite simple. From a precise enough theoretical consideration it is expected that quark-gluon plasma will not arise in a proton-proton collision. In turn, theoretical models of heavy ions in collision predict the formation of dense plasma in a head-on ion-ion collision of extremely high energy. Comparison of results from the data analysis of both types of collisions enables evaluation of how the jets are disturbed by the presence of plasma.""

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150311124649.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fspace_time%2Fbig_bang+%28Big+Bang+News+--+ScienceDaily%29

Dangerous Ideas In Science Cosmology: This year (2015), debates in physics circles starting to bewilder

Cosmology is the study of the universe as a whole: its structure, its origins and its fate. Fundamental physics is the study of reality's bedrock entities and their interactions. With these job descriptions it's no surprise that cosmology and fundamental physics share a lot of territory. You can't understand how the universe evolves after the Big Bang (a cosmology question) without understanding how matter, energy, space and time interact (a fundamental physics question). Recently, however, something remarkable has been happening in both these fields that's raising hackles with some scientists. As physicists George Ellis and Joseph Silk recently put it in Nature:

"This year, debates in physics circles took a worrying turn. Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the observed Universe, some researchers called for a change in how theoretical physics is done. They began to argue — explicitly — that if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it need not be tested experimentally, breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical."

The root of the problem rests with two ideas/theories now central for some workers in cosmology (even if they remain problematic for physicists as a whole). The first is string theory, which posits that the world is made up not of point particles but of tiny vibrating strings. String theory only works if the universe has many "extra" dimensions of space other than the three we experience. The second idea is the so-called multiverse which, in its most popular form, claims more than one distinct universe emerged from the Big Bang. Instead, adherents claim, there may be an almost infinite (if not truly infinite) number of parallel "pocket universes," each with their own version of physics.


Both string theory and the multiverse are big, bold reformulations of what we mean when we say the words "physical reality." That is reason enough for them to be contentious topics in scientific circles. But in the pursuit of these ideas, something else — something new — has emerged. Rather than focusing just on questions about the nature of the cosmos, the new developments raise critical questions about the basic rules of science when applied to something like the universe as a whole.

Here is the problem: Both string theory and the multiverse posit entities that may, in principle or in practice, be unobservable. Evidence for the extra dimensions needed to make string theory work is likely to require a particle accelerator of astronomical proportions. And the other pocket universes making up the multiverse may lie permanently over our "horizon," such that we will never get direct observations of their existence. It's this specific aspect of the theories that has scientists like Ellis and Silk so concerned. As they put it:

"These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man's-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any."

Finish Reading Article:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2015/01/27/381809832/the-most-dangerous-ideas-in-science?