Fermilab Finds Feeble Fifth Force (Maybe)

[Music] foreign to this week's science news today we'll talk about the myON anomaly at fermilab say goodbye to LK 99 here from scientists who say that the sun is brighter than we thought look at a new ion trap talk about a code blob plans for a new space station delay with NASA's trip to the moon freeze Rays the smallest traffic light ever and of course the telephone will ring physicists at fermilab in the United States have made a better measurement of the Magnetic Moment of the muon and it confirms the anomaly they had previously measured the myON is one of the particles in the standard model of particle physics it's unstable and decays within a few microseconds the neon has a magnetic moment that tells you how fast the particle spins in magnetic field without Quantum effects the Magnetic Moment of the muon usually denoted G should be two this businesses are interested in the quantum contribution that's often just called the G minus two the G minus 2 of the myON can be predicted from the standard model already in 2001 an experiment at Brookhaven found that the measured value of the muon G minus 2 deviates from that predicted by the standard model though it wasn't a huge deviation in 2021 a follow-up experiment at fermulup confirmed the earlier result raising the statistical significance to 4.2 Sigma these experiments are basically rings of magnets in which the muons go in circles until they Decay which is a good metaphor for life in general one then measures the momentum of the Decay products from which one can infer the G minus 2. the additional data that the fermilab group has collected since the headlines two years ago have now decreased the uncertainty of the measurement and increase the significance to 5 Sigma that's less than a one in three million chance of it being a fluctuation this discrepancy between the prediction from the standard model and the data could mean that something is missing in the standard model maybe new particles or other new physics this is why you might have seen headlines this week about fifth forces which seems to be the term that the media has adopted for new physics if you wonder what A fifth force is I made a video about this last year however in the past few years there have been several papers saying that something might be a Miss with the prediction from the standard model instead calculating the Magnetic Moment to the required High Precision is difficult and at the moment different methods give somewhat different results and you don't need to know much math to see that if two ways to calculate the same thing give different results that's not good so the new data tell us that it's very unlikely the tension comes from a measurement error it's almost certainly a problem with the theory and that could mean new physics or a problem with the calculation I guess the fifth fourth headlines will go around in circles a few more times before they Decay the claim of the supposed room temperature superconductor LK 99 from the Korean group has been pretty much laid to rest about a dozen or so replication experiments have found that while the material has complicated magnetic properties it's not superconducting at room temperature there have been some claims that it's superconducting around 100 Kelvin but even if that was the case it wouldn't be particularly remarkable nevertheless I think this has been a very interesting episode and why it's not going to change the world it'll without doubt give rise to a lot of follow-up work to see if related materials may have the desired property after all in brief I'm sorry about the revolution has been postponed physicists at Michigan State University have looked at the Sun and founded it amidst gamma rays of energies up to several Terror electron volts that's almost as much as the large head and collider pumps into proton collisions gamma rays are electromagnetic radiation just like light in the visible spectrum but with much higher energy or shorter wavelength irrespectively the sunlight that we see with our own eyes has an energy of about one electron volt per photon the gamma rays they observed coming from the Sun have about 1 trillion electron volts that's even higher energy is than x-rays NASA's fermi-space telescope had already collected data on gamma ray emissions from the Sun up to about 0.4 Tera election volt this new measurement now comes from the high out attitude water shrink of observatory in Mexico and continues to even higher energies at this Observatory they don't measure gamma rays directly but they measure the radiation that's created when these gamma rays hit the upper atmosphere they then create a particle shower the same way that cosmic rays do and these particles can be measured when they interact with the water in these big tanks they can figure out which ones came from the Sun by their timing and arrival Direction in the new paper now the team reports on data they collected during six years they say they found a signal of gamma rays from the Sun at energies exceeding a Terra electron board with more than Six Sigma significance basically this means they're very sure it's real in this figure the red band is where they say the gamma-ray missions from the summer the horizontal axis is the energy and the vertical axis is Loosely speaking a measure for the no number of particles the blue band is an extrapolation of the spectrum from Fermi as you can see it will be higher the scientists say that's because fermi's measurements were during a solar minimum this means that somewhat counter-intuitively the emissions of gamma rays seem to be higher during a minimum just exactly why that is no one knows the gamma rays are believed to mostly be created above the surface of the sun when cosmic rays scatter there but no one expected that the energies would be so high though I'm pretty sure my gamma-ray emissions are also higher during a minimum sanjian National Laboratories has presented their news advance in the area of quantum Computing the anti-lada Trap it's a type of ion trap a device that's used for Quantum Computing ion traps are little cavities on microchips that hold charged atoms they are one way to create qubits the building blocks of quantum computers sandia's previous ion trap the Roadrunner could accommodate up to 32 cubits the enchilada trap can house an impressive 200. that isn't quite as much as the chip that IBM recently announced with 400 superconducting qubits but it's decent two things that are worth keeping in mind first commercial applications of quantum Computing will need about a million or so qubits so there's some way to go second the number of qubits isn't the problem you can just keep on lumping them together the problem is to lump them together and still use them I don't know if you've noticed but I've noticed that while IBM announced that 400 Cubit chip at the end of last year until now they haven't told anyone what they can do I find that very interesting there's a Code blob in the Atlantic Ocean and I'm not talking about it at fish the code block is an area of the North Atlantic Ocean that's getting colder even while the rest of the world's oceans get warmer a new study now suggests that changes in Wind patterns are to blame at least partly the code blob has cooled by about half a degree celsius while the rest of the world has warmed by about one and a half degrees this strange observation has previously been attributed to changes in the ocean circulation both the authors of the new paper say that the wind also plays a role over the Atlantic Ocean we have something called the North Atlantic oscillation that's a recurring pressure pattern the wind over the Atlantic ocean usually blows west to east and the North Atlantic oscillation strengthens it and pushes it North this blows away warm air and cools the ocean like if you blow over a cup of hot water there's another set of pressure patterns called the East Atlantic pattern that counteracts this effect but altogether the scientists say the cooling effect wins the major message of the paper I think is that one really has to look at the ocean circulation and the atmospheric circulation together though if this was cosmology someone would claim the code blobs caused by entanglement with a parallel universe I've read there's a lap in the United States working on a freeze ray naturally I had to find out what this was all about the first thing I learned is that the freeze ray is a plasma beam plasma is a state of matter in which the electrons are not bound to atoms that matter takes the form of plasma doesn't necessarily mean it's hot the same way that matter taking the form of a gas doesn't necessarily mean it's hot really depends on the type of matter and cooling stuff by shooting something at it isn't as weird as it sounds laser cooling For example does the same thing for that you shoot a laser at a bunch of atoms so that they absorb and re-emit the light but so that on average they lose energy a similar thing seems to be going on for these plasma beams they help some materials lose energy for their freeze ray the researchers use what's called an atmospheric plasma beam that's basically a sustained discharge in air that plasmorizes molecules if plasmerize isn't a word I really think it should be they initiate this discharge with ionized helium so they push the helium through the air with high voltage and that creates a lot of other ionized molecules that's the atmospheric plasma beam they aim this Beam at a gold plated surface when the plasma struck the surface the resulting interaction made the surface colder than it was before while the effect only lasted a few microseconds the researchers think with more work they can create longer lasting effects before you get over excited though it turns out that this cooling only works for the surfaces of certain materials and The Cools by a few degrees Kelvin at most so I'm afraid you won't get to freeze someone to death anytime soon however this method might come in handy to cool devices in outer space Also the U.S Air Force has given the lab 750 000 US dollars to work on its freeze ray so maybe they know something we don't the successor of the International Space Station starlap is moving to the next phase Voyager space and apples have agreed to go ahead with their plans to build a commercial space station that will succeed the International Space Station ISS while the ISS has served us well it's not the youngest and NASA plans to decommission and deorbit it by 2030 one Voyager got 160 million US dollars for the Starlet project back in 2021 when NASA started to look at replacing the ISS it's about time because China already has its space station Tian gong in low earth orbit and India plans to launch one in 2035. it'll be a while before we get details about starlap but we do know a couple of things to begin with NASA is to be the lead tenant but other nations space agencies may also use it as a base the station will be continuously crewed and it'll host several research labs to conduct experiments in biology Material Science physics and agriculture hopefully growing potatoes on starlap will be easier than Matt demon founded to be on Mars at least it should be comfy because Voyager and Airbus have partnered with the hotel Company Hilton to make sure everyone has a pleasant stay I imagine it'll go like this hello I don't mean to complain but there's no gravity in my room by the way if you prefer reading or listening to watching videos you can now also find us on sub stack at sciencewtg.substack.com and on Spotify and many other podcast apps under the name science with zabina Donald Trump planned to bring Americans back to the Moon by 2024 but NASA had to postpone the landing and at the moment it's unclear when they'll manage to make it happen a senior official from NASA hinted in a press conference last week that the Artemis program whose third mission was supposed to land on the Moon is facing significant delays particularly with the lunar Lambda from SpaceX nessun's Artemis program is a series of progressively challenging missions that might one day establish a permanently manned base on the moon Artemis 1 was originally scheduled for late 2021 but launched with a year delay in November 20 22 it successfully sent a spacecraft around the Moon Artemis 2 was originally planned for August 2023 but it's now tentatively scheduled for late 2024. this second mission should also fly around the moon but this time with a crew on board the plan is that Artemis 3 would land on the moon this mission was originally scheduled for 2024 but it was rescheduled to late 2025. now it looks like it might get even later the success of Artemis 3 hinges on the lunar lander that would safely transport astronauts from the spaceship to the surface of the Moon and back it was supposed to be delivered by Elon musk's company SpaceX the Lander is a variant of the SpaceX Starship vehicle which is a reusable spacecraft that can carry up to 100 tons of cargo however a test for the Starship in April did not work out as planned the two stages fail to properly separate and the company had to detonate the vehicle for safety reasons less than five minutes after start gym-free NASA's associate administrator explained that the agency is now considering the possibility of altering the scope of the mission I think that's a good attitude I might try that myself it's not like I'm late with my tax return I've just altered the scope of the mission hello hi Albert space and time news yes we do have space and time news a company has shipped wine into outer space and says that it ages faster they're now planning to commercialize the idea no I think it's not relativity it's chemistry that's the thing with the molecules I'm very tempted by an overpriced bottle of astronaut Envy but I think I hold out for the moon cheese deluxe as for sergeant famously said one small sip for a man want giant cheese for mankind thanks for calling in according to your new study out of Israel scientists may have found a way to make Nano Crystal switch colors the display you currently use probably uses liquid crystals but some large displays you might see for advertisements already use Nano crystals Nano crystals are kind of like tiny LEDs they're normally used together with liquid crystals to tune brightness at the moment though forgetting different colors in a nano crystal display you need several different crystals it would be much more convenient if we could use one type but switch their color the researchers now claim they found a solution by building a new molecule out of two Nano crystals an electric field can then change the arrangement of the new molecules and that changes the color that they emit since this change is caused by Electric Fields it happens very quickly in just about a nanosecond and the brightness doesn't suffer the use as an example the switch from green to Red so a teeny tiny traffic light basically telling photons when they're allowed to walk it can be hard to keep an overview on what's going on in science if you also sometimes feel it's a little bit overwhelming have a look at Nautilus who've been sponsoring this video Nautilus is a Science magazine that has a digital underprint version and it's just a pleasure to read this for example is the recent special issue on the ocean have a look it's a really high quality print with beautiful graphics and very easy on the eye it's just exactly what I need on a Sunday afternoon in the garden what I particularly like about Nautilus is that they cover all areas of science from astronomy to economics history Neuroscience to philosophy and physics they pick the most relevant topics that you need to know about and really put a lot of effort into crafting their articles well I've written several contributions for Nautilus myself about quantum gravity and black holes and how to make sense of quantum mechanics and so on but more importantly they keep me well informed formed I learned from this recent article for example that telephone scams with deep faked voices are already much more common than I thought you can join Nautilus as a digital only member or get a print subscription in addition to full access to all the stories in Nautilus members receive benefits like Priority Access to events exclusive products and product discounts and of course we have a special offer for our viewers if you use our custom link noted dot us Sabina you'll get 15 of your membership subscription so go and check this out thanks for watching see you next week

Channel: Sabine Hossenfelder

Views: 214,239

Keywords: science without the gobbledygoook, hossenfelder, science, science news, science news sabine, science humor, science funny, NASA, NASA news, Artemis, starlab, atlantic cold blob, fermilab, muon g-2, muon anomaly, muon anomalous magnetic moment, quantum computing, ion trap

Id: 4jtiHhWhpCY

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 15 2023