Lifeboat Foundation

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek explores the secrets of the cosmos. Read previous columns here.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs particle. Now we can see it in perspective.

To understand its significance, imagine an ocean planet where intelligent fish evolve and start to make theories of how things move. They do experiments and deduce equations but it is a messy hodgepodge, because the fish, taking their ever-present environment for granted, think of their ocean as “empty space.” After decades of work, though, some realize that by postulating that “empty space” is a medium—ocean—that has mass and motion of its own, you can account for everything using simple, elegant laws (namely, Newton’s laws). Next, the fish start to wonder what their hypothetical ocean is made of. They boil some ocean, do some sophisticated spectroscopy, and ultimately identify water molecules. Imagined beauty guided them to concrete truth.

In November 2021, while the municipal utility in Marburg, Germany, was performing scheduled maintenance on a hot water storage facility, engineers glued 18 solar panels to the outside of the main 10-meter-high cylindrical tank. It’s not the typical home for solar panels, most of which are flat, rigid silicon and glass rectangles arrayed on rooftops or in solar parks. The Marburg facility’s panels, by contrast, are ultrathin organic films made by Heliatek, a German solar company. In the past few years, Heliatek has mounted its flexible panels on the sides of office towers, the curved roofs of bus stops, and even the cylindrical shaft of an 80-meter-tall windmill. The goal: expanding solar power’s reach beyond flat land. “There is a huge market where classical photovoltaics do not work,” says Jan Birnstock, Heliatek’s chief technical officer.

Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) such as Heliatek’s are more than 10 times lighter than silicon panels and in some cases cost just half as much to produce. Some are even transparent, which has architects envisioning solar panels not just on rooftops, but incorporated into building facades, windows, and even indoor spaces. “We want to change every building into an electricity-generating building,” Birnstock says.

Heliatek’s panels are among the few OPVs in practical use, and they convert about 9% of the energy in sunlight to electricity. But in recent years, researchers around the globe have come up with new materials and designs that, in small, labmade prototypes, have reached efficiencies of nearly 20%, approaching silicon and alternative inorganic thin-film solar cells, such as those made from a mix of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium (CIGS). Unlike silicon crystals and CIGS, where researchers are mostly limited to the few chemical options nature gives them, OPVs allow them to tweak bonds, rearrange atoms, and mix in elements from across the periodic table. Those changes represent knobs chemists can adjust to improve their materials’ ability to absorb sunlight, conduct charges, and resist degradation. OPVs still fall short on those measures. But, “There is an enormous white space for exploration,” says Stephen Forrest, an OPV chemist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

A wild theory suggests that consciousness may explain quantum mechanics, by forcing the subatomic particles to choose one concrete outcome.

In theory, it could mitigate the effects of global warming; but experts are wary.

Make Sunsets, a California-based startup, released weather balloons that carried sulfur particles into the stratosphere which possibly burst there, releasing the chemical, MIT Technology Review.

Continue reading “US startup wants to inject sulfur into the atmosphere to cool down the Earth” »

Lasers have been used to throw and catch extremely cold, single atoms. The technique could be used to assemble quantum computers in the future.

Ordinarily, to measure an object we must interact with it in some way. Whether it’s by a prod or a poke, an echo of sound waves, or a shower of light, it’s near impossible to look without touching.

In the world of quantum physics, there are some exceptions to this rule.

Researchers from Aalto University in Finland propose a way to ‘see’ a microwave pulse without the absorption and re-emission of any light waves. It’s an example of a special interaction-free measurement, where something is observed without being rattled by a mediating particle.

Scientists from the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) have presented roughly 1.5 years of observational data, calculating new limits on the lifetime of heavy dark matter particles that have masses between 10⁵ and 10⁹ giga-electron volts.

The study, titled “Constraints on heavy decaying dark matter from 570 days of LHAASO observations,” was recently published in Physics Review Letters.

The gravitational model of the Milky Way shows that there is a very high density of dark matter in the galactic center, and the gamma rays produced by the decay of this dark matter will radiate from the galactic center to the surroundings for hundreds of light-years or even thousands of light-years. However, for a long time, the observation of ultra-high-energy gamma rays produced by heavy dark matter has been complicated by the presence of other background radiation.

Recently, a start-up company called Make Sunsets has begun releasing chemicals into the stratosphere as a form of geoengineering that is intended to help climate change. However, many are very hesitant about the startup and the result of what they are doing.

For perspective, geoengineering is when chemical particles are released into the stratosphere to manipulate the weather or climate. The theory is that when sulfur is released into the atmosphere that it mimics a natural process that occurs after volcanoes and that by doing this intentionally, we could ease global warming.

While it isn’t difficult to do this, it is very controversial. The reason for this is that it could potentially have dangerous side effects. Additionally, because some regions could endure worse side effects, it could cause issues across international lines.

What were the first moments of the Universe like? It’s a mystery that scientists have been trying to unravel for decades. The ALICE collaboration at CERN is a specialist in the subject: this detector (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) was designed to study quark-gluon plasma, a phase of matter that would have existed just after the Big Bang. And the team recently succeeded in recreating and characterizing this very first hypothetical material, using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).