Einstein said there would be days like this.

This fall scientists announced that they had put a half dozen beryllium atoms into a “cat state.”

No, they were not sprawled along a sunny windowsill. To a physicist, a “cat state” is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive.

These atoms were each spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Moreover, like miniature Rockettes they were all doing whatever it was they were doing together, in perfect synchrony. Should one of them realize, like the cartoon character who runs off a cliff and doesn’t fall until he looks down, that it is in a metaphysically untenable situation and decide to spin only one way, the rest would instantly fall in line, whether they were across a test tube or across the galaxy.

NYTimes

University of Chicago physicists have created a novel state of matter using nothing more than a container of loosely packed sand and a falling marble. They have found that the impacting marble produces a jet of sand grains that briefly behaves like a special type of dense fluid.

PhysOrg

Some superstring-inspired theories of physics ascribe extra dimensions to our reality, dimensions which we can’t perceive with normal senses, but which may be available to gravitational forces, at least. One effect is to make the gravitational force stronger at short distances in our world, and greatly reduce the energy required in a particle accelerator to create a miniature black hole, to the point that the upcoming Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may make them in abundance.

This article now suggests that these baby black holes may warp the surrounding space-time “membrane” (or “brane”) to the extent that it actually wraps around the hole and reconnects, leaving the black hole off in a new, separate, “brane”, effectively creating a tiny new universe in that region.

Scitation via SciScoop

Physicists in Spain and Germany have proposed a technique for sending cold atoms through an array of slits that are much narrower than the de Broglie wavelength of the atoms. The phenomenon, which relies on “surface matter waves”, could be used to make atomic circuits.

PhysWeb

(This is a follow up to a story we posted over a year ago.)

Now you can extend that truism about oil and water to water and itself. Water and water don’t always mix, either.

The textbooks say that water readily comes together with other water, open arms of hydrogen clasping oxygen attached to other OH molecules. This is the very definition of ?wetness.? But scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have observed a first: a single layer of water?ice grown on a platinum wafer?that gives the cold shoulder to subsequent layers of ice that come into contact with it.

?Water-surface interactions are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in many technological applications such as catalysis and corrosion,? said Greg Kimmel, staff scientist at the Department of Energy lab and lead author of a paper to appear Oct. 15 in the advance online edition of Physical Review Letters. ?It was assumed that one end of the water molecule would bind to metal, and at the other end would be these nice hydrogen attachment points for the atoms in next layer of water.?

A theory out of Cambridge University last year suggested that these attachment points, or ?dangling OH’s,? did not exist, that instead of dangling, the OH’s were drawn by the geometry of hexagonal noble-metal surfaces and clung to that.

RedNova

“Imagine you have an orchestra together, but everyone is playing their own tune, until they begin to follow a conductor. In a normal solid, every atom has its own behavior until very close to absolute zero. Then quantum mechanics takes over and dictates everyone to play the same tune.”
oscillator

That’s physics professor Moses Chan’s musical metaphor for his discovery that atoms in a solid can condense into what he likes to call “one giant atom,” a new phase of matter called a supersolid. Together with post-doctoral associate Eun-Seong Kim, Chan found that when a particular isotope of helium gas has frozen into a crystal at a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, part of it exhibits a property only seen before in superfluids: no friction.

To understand frictionless flow, says Chan, think of a bunch of kids sitting on a spinning merry-go-round. Normally, the more kids on the merry-go-round, the harder it is to stop the movement and reverse its direction. Chan and Kim set up an oscillator that spins back and forth like a merry-go-round shifting direction. They found that helium crystals in a normal solid state behaved as expected, with each additional bit of crystal adding to the mass of the “merry-go-round” and increasing the resistance.

However when those same crystals are frozen below 0.2 degrees Kelvin, something unexpected happens: one percent of the solid helium begins to flow without resistance. “It’s as if a portion of the kids on that merry-go-round are sitting on perfectly smooth ball bearings, unaffected by the merry-go-round sliding back and forth underneath them,” explains Chan. This allows the crystal to oscillate faster, as if the crystal has suddenly become lighter?or the kids have lost weight in mid-spin. Chan and Kim knew that the matter had not been lost because the missing mass re-materialized with the slightest rise in temperature, and the oscillation slowed back down to normal.

Penn State via FutureFeeder!

Physicists who work with a concept called string theory envision our universe as an eerie place with at least nine spatial dimensions, six of them hidden from us, perhaps curled up in some way so they are undetectable. The big question is why we experience the universe in only three spatial dimensions instead of four, or six, or nine.

Two theoretical researchers from the University of Washington and Harvard University think they might have found the answer. They believe the way our universe started and then diluted as it expanded ? what they call the relaxation principle ? favored formation of three- and seven-dimensional realities. The one we happen to experience has three dimensions.

EurekAlert via The Daily Grail

Welcome to the fourth dimension. And the fifth, and the sixth. A team of astrophysicists claims to have identified evidence that space is six-dimensional.

Joseph Silk of the University of Oxford, UK, and his co-workers say that these extra spatial dimensions can be inferred from the perplexing behaviour of dark matter. This mysterious stuff cannot be seen, but its presence in galaxies is betrayed by the gravitational tug that it exerts on visible stars.

Silk and his colleagues looked at how dark matter behaves differently in small galaxies and large clusters of galaxies. In the smaller ones, dark matter seems to be attracted to itself quite strongly. But in the large galactic clusters this doesn’t seem to be the case: strongly interacting dark matter should produce cores of dark material bigger than those that are actually there, as deduced from the way the cluster spins.

Nature

A team of researchers from the Ecole Polytechnique F?d?rale de Lausanne (EPFL) has successfully demonstrated, for the first time, that it is possible to control the speed of light ? both slowing it down and speeding it up ? in an optical fiber, using off-the-shelf instrumentation in normal environmental conditions. Their results, to be published in the August 22 issue of Applied Physics Letters, could have implications that range from optical computing to the fiber-optic telecommunications industry.

ScienceBlog

It is usually a good idea to keep water away from electrical equipment but researchers in Japan have discovered a new effect by breaking this rule. Masahide Gunji and Masao Washizu of the University of Tokyo have shown that electric fields can be used to move water droplets around a solid surface. Their work could lead to new ways to perform chemistry experiments much faster than is possible at present (J. Phys. D38 2417).

PhysWeb

Scientists at The University of Manchester have discovered a new class of materials which have previously only existed in science fiction films and books. A team of British and Russian scientists led by Professor Geim have discovered a whole family of previously unknown materials, which are one atom thick and exhibit properties which scientists had never thought possible.

Professor Andre Geim said: “This discovery opens up practically infinite possibilities for applications which people have never even thought of yet. These materials are lightweight, strong and flexible, and there is a huge choice of them. This is not only about smart gadgets. Like polymers whose pervasiveness changed our everyday life forever, one-atom-thick materials could be used in a myriad of routine applications from clothing to computers.”

PhysOrg