new experiment

• Comment Comments
• Save Article Read Later Read Later

High-Temperature Superconductivity Understood at Last

September 21, 2022

Superconductors like the cuprate material shown here expel magnetic fields in a way that allows magnets to float above them.

Dmitry Veselov/Shutterstock

Introduction

For decades, a family of crystals has stumped physicists with its baffling ability to superconduct — that is, carry an electric current without any resistance — at far warmer temperatures than other materials.

Now, an experiment years in the making has directly visualized superconductivity on the atomic scale in one of these crystals, finally revealing the cause of the phenomenon to nearly everyone’s satisfaction. Electrons appear to nudge each other into a frictionless flow in a manner first suggested by a venerable theory nearly as old as the mystery itself.

“This evidence is really beautiful and direct,” said Subir Sachdev , a physicist at Harvard University who builds theories of the crystals, known as cuprates, and was not involved in the experiment.

“I’ve worked on this problem for 25 years, and I hope I have solved it,” said J. C. Séamus Davis , who led the new experiment at the University of Oxford. “I’m absolutely thrilled.”

The new measurement matches a prediction based on the theory, which attributes cuprate superconductivity to a quantum phenomenon called superexchange. “I’m amazed by the quantitative agreement,” said André-Marie Tremblay , a physicist at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada and the leader of the group that made the prediction last year.

The research advances the perennial ambition of the field: to take cuprate superconductivity and strengthen its underlying mechanism, in order to design world-changing materials capable of superconducting electricity at even higher temperatures. Room-temperature superconductivity would bring perfect efficiency to everyday electronics, power lines and more, although the objective remains a distant one.

“If this class of theory is correct,” Davis said, referring to the superexchange theory, “it should be possible to describe synthetic materials with different atoms in different locations” for which the critical temperature is higher.

Physicists have struggled with superconductivity since it was first observed in 1911. The Dutch scientist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and collaborators cooled a mercury wire to about 4 kelvins (that is, 4 degrees above absolute zero) and watched with astonishment as the electrical resistance plummeted to zero. Electrons deftly wended their way through the wire without generating heat when they collided with its atoms — the origin of resistance. It would take “a lifetime of effort,” Davis said, to figure out how.

Building on key experimental insights from the mid-1950s, John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer published their Nobel Prize-winning theory of this conventional form of superconductivity in 1957. “BCS theory,” as it’s known today, holds that vibrations moving through rows of atoms “glue” electrons together. As a negatively charged electron flies between atoms, it draws the positively charged atomic nuclei toward it and sets off a ripple. That ripple pulls in a second electron. Overcoming their fierce electrical repulsion, the two electrons form a “Cooper pair.”

“It is true trickery of nature,” said Jörg Schmalian , a physicist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. “This Cooper pair is not supposed to happen.”

A new experiment led by the condensed matter physicist Séamus Davis at the University of Oxford all but settles the origin of high-temperature superconductivity, a puzzle Davis has worked on for 25 years.

Domnick Walsh

When electrons couple up, further quantum trickery makes superconductivity unavoidable. Normally, electrons can’t overlap, but Cooper pairs follow a different quantum mechanical rule; they act like particles of light, any number of which can pile onto the head of a pin. Many Cooper pairs come together and merge into a single quantum mechanical state, a “superfluid,” that becomes oblivious to the atoms it passes between.

BCS theory also explained why mercury and most other metallic elements superconduct when cooled close to absolute zero but stop doing so above a few kelvins. Atomic ripples make for the feeblest of glues. Turn up the heat, and it jiggles atoms and washes out the lattice vibrations.

Then in 1986, IBM researchers Georg Bednorz and Alex Müller stumbled onto a stronger electron glue in cuprates: crystals consisting of sheets of copper and oxygen interspersed between layers of other elements. After they observed a cuprate superconducting at 30 kelvins, researchers soon found others that superconduct above 100 , and then above 130 kelvins .

The breakthrough launched a widespread effort to understand the tougher glue responsible for this “high-temperature” superconductivity. Perhaps electrons bunched together to create patchy, rippling concentrations of charge. Or maybe they interacted through spin, an intrinsic property of the electron that orients it in a particular direction, like a quantum-size magnet.

The late Philip Anderson, an American Nobel laureate and all-around legend in condensed matter physics, put forth a theory just months after high-temperature superconductivity was discovered. At the heart of the glue, he argued, lay a previously described quantum phenomenon called superexchange — a force arising from electrons’ ability to hop. When electrons can hop between multiple locations, their position at any one moment becomes uncertain, while their momentum becomes precisely defined. A sharper momentum can be a lower momentum, and therefore a lower-energy state, which particles naturally seek out.

The upshot is that electrons seek situations in which they can hop. An electron prefers to point down when its neighbor points up, for instance, since this distinction allows the two electrons to hop between the same atoms. In this way, superexchange establishes a regular up-down-up-down pattern of electron spins in some materials. It also nudges electrons to stay a certain distance apart. (Too far, and they can’t hop.) It’s this effective attraction that Anderson believed could form strong Cooper pairs.

Experimentalists long struggled to test theories like Anderson’s, since material properties that they could measure, like reflectivity or resistance, offered only crude summaries of the collective behavior of trillions of electrons, not pairs.

“None of the traditional techniques of condensed matter physics were ever designed to solve a problem like this,” said Davis.

Super-Experiment

Davis, an Irish physicist with labs at Oxford, Cornell University, University College Cork and the International Max Planck Research School for Chemistry and Physics of Quantum Materials in Dresden, has gradually developed tools to scrutinize cuprates on the atomic level. Earlier experiments gauged the strength of a material’s superconductivity by chilling it until it reached the critical temperature where superconductivity began — with warmer temperatures indicating stronger glue. But over the last decade, Davis’ group has refined a way to prod the glue around individual atoms.

They modified an established technique called scanning tunneling microscopy, which drags a needle across a surface, measuring the current of electrons leaping between the two. By swapping the needle’s normal metallic tip for a superconducting tip and sweeping it across a cuprate, they measured a current of electron pairs rather than individuals. This let them map the density of Cooper pairs surrounding each atom — a direct measure of superconductivity. They published the first image of swarms of Cooper pairs in Nature in 2016.

That same year, an experiment by Chinese physicists provided a major piece of evidence supporting Anderson’s superexchange theory: They showed that the easier it is for electrons to hop between copper and oxygen atoms in a given cuprate, the higher the cuprate’s critical temperature (and thus the stronger its glue). Davis and his colleagues sought to combine the two approaches in a single cuprate crystal to more conclusively reveal the nature of the glue.

The “aha” moment came in a group meeting over Zoom in 2020, he said. The researchers realized that a cuprate called bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide (BSCCO, or “bisko,” for short) had a peculiar feature that made their dream experiment possible. In BSCCO, the layers of copper and oxygen atoms get squeezed into a wavy pattern by the surrounding sheets of atoms. This varies the distances between certain atoms, which in turn affects the energy required to hop. The variation causes headaches for theorists, who like their lattices tidy, but it gave the experimentalists exactly what they needed: a range of hopping energies in one sample.

They used a traditional scanning microscope with a metal tip to stick electrons onto some atoms and pluck them from others, mapping the hopping energies across the cuprate. They then swapped in a cuprate tip to measure the density of Cooper pairs around each atom.

The two maps lined up. Where electrons struggled to hop, superconductivity was weak. Where hopping was easy, superconductivity was strong. The relationship between hopping energy and Cooper pair density closely matched a sophisticated numerical prediction from 2021 by Tremblay and colleagues, which argued that this relationship should follow from Anderson’s theory.

Superexchange Super Glue

Davis’ finding that hopping energy is linked with superconductivity strength, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , strongly implies that superexchange is the super glue enabling high-temperature superconductivity.

“It’s a nice piece of work because it brings a new technique to further show that this idea has legs,” said Ali Yazdani , a physicist at Princeton University who has developed similar techniques to study cuprates and other exotic instances of superconductivity in parallel with Davis’ group.

But Yazdani and other researchers caution that there’s still a chance, however remote, that glue strength and ease of hopping move in lockstep for some other reason, and that the field is falling into the classic correlation-equals-causation trap. For Yazdani, the real way to prove a causal relationship will be to harness superexchange to engineer some flashy new superconductors.

“If it’s finished, let’s increase T c ,” he said, referring to the critical temperature.

Superexchange isn’t a new idea, so plenty of researchers have already thought about how to fortify it , perhaps by further squishing the copper and oxygen lattice or experimenting with other pairs of elements. “There are already predictions on the table,” Tremblay said.

Of course, sketching atomic blueprints and designing materials that do what researchers want isn’t quick or easy. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that even bespoke cuprates will achieve critical temperatures much higher than those of the cuprates we already know. The strength of superexchange could have a hard ceiling, just as atomic vibrations seem to. Some researchers are investigating candidates for entirely different and potentially even stronger types of glue. Others leverage unearthly pressures to shore up the traditional atomic vibrations.

But Davis’ result could energize and focus the efforts of chemists and materials scientists who aim to lift cuprate superconductors to greater heights.

“The creativity of people who design materials is limitless,” Schmalian said. “The more confident we are that a mechanism is right, the more natural it is to invest further into this one.”

Get highlights of the most important news delivered to your email inbox

Comment on this article

Quanta Magazine moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (New York time) and can only accept comments written in English. 

Next article

New experiment hints that a particle breaks the known laws of physics

A heavier sibling of an electron, known as a muon, is challenging the "Standard Model" of all the particles in the universe.

In a landmark experiment, scientists have found fresh evidence that a subatomic particle is disobeying one of science’s most watertight theories, the Standard Model of particle physics. The gap between the model’s predictions and the particle’s newly measured behavior hints that the universe may contain unseen particles and forces beyond our current grasp.

In a seminar on Wednesday, researchers with Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, announced the first results of the Muon g-2 experiment, which since 2018 has measured a particle called the muon, a heavier sibling of the electron that was discovered in the 1930s.

Like electrons, muons have a negative electric charge and a quantum property called spin, which causes the particles to act like tiny, wobbling tops when placed in a magnetic field. The stronger the magnetic field, the faster a muon wobbles.

The Standard Model, developed in the 1970s, is humankind’s best mathematical explanation for how all the particles in the universe behave and predicts the frequency of a muon’s wobbling with extreme precision. But in 2001, the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, found that muons seem to wobble slightly faster than the Standard Model predicts.

Now, two decades later, Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment has done its own version of the Brookhaven experiment—and it has seen the same anomaly. When researchers combined the two experiments’ data, they found that the odds of this discrepancy simply being a fluke are roughly 1 in 40,000, a sign that extra particles and forces could be affecting the muon’s behavior.

“This has been a long time coming,” says University of Manchester physicist Mark Lancaster , a member of the Muon g-2 collaboration, a team of more than 200 scientists from seven countries. “Many of us have been working on it for decades.”

"This is really our equivalent of a Mars rover landing," added Fermilab scientist Chris Polly , who worked on the Muon g-2 experiment as well as the earlier Brookhaven experiment.

By the strict standards of particle physics, the results aren’t a “discovery” just yet. That threshold won’t be reached until the results achieve a statistical certainty of five sigma, or a 1-in-3.5 million chance that a random fluctuation caused the gap between theory and observation, rather than a true difference.

The new results—which will be published in the scientific journals Physical Review Letters , Physical Review A & B , Physical Review A,   and Physical Review D —are based on just 6 percent of the total data the experiment is expected to collect. If Fermilab’s results stay consistent, reaching five sigma could take a couple of years. “The attitude to take is sort of cautious optimism,” says Nima Arkani-Hamed , a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who wasn’t involved with the research.

Already, Fermilab’s results amount to the biggest clue in decades that physical particles or properties exist beyond the Standard Model. If this disagreement with the Standard Model persists, then the work “is Nobel Prize-worthy, without question,” says Free University of Brussels physicist Freya Blekman , who wasn’t involved with the research.

A model of everything

The Standard Model is arguably the most successful scientific theory, capable of stunningly accurate predictions of how the universe’s fundamental particles behave. But scientists have long known that the model is incomplete. It’s missing a description of gravity, for one, and it says nothing about the mysterious dark matter that seems to be strewn throughout the cosmos .

To figure out what lies beyond the Standard Model, physicists have long tried to push it to its breaking point in lab experiments. However, the theory has stubbornly passed test after test, including years of high-energy measurements at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which in 2012 found a particle that had been predicted by the Standard Model: the Higgs boson , which plays a key role in giving mass to some other particles.

Unlike the LHC, which smashes particles together to make new kinds of particles, Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment measures known particles to extreme precision, searching for subtle deviations from Standard Model theory.

“The LHC, if you like, is almost like smashing two Swiss watches into each other at high speed. The debris comes out, and you try to piece together what’s inside,” Lancaster says. “We’ve got a Swiss watch, and we watch it tick very, very, very, very painstakingly and precisely, to see whether it’s doing what we expect it to do.”

The muon is just about the perfect particle to monitor for signs of new physics. It survives long enough to be studied closely in the lab—though still only millionths of a second—and while the muon is expected to behave a lot like the electron, it’s 207 times more massive, which provides an important point of comparison.

You May Also Like

How do you kill hard-to-reach tumors? Particle physics is on the case.

What is the multiverse—and is there any evidence it really exists?

The world’s most powerful telescope is rewriting the story of space and time

For decades, researchers have taken a close look at how muons’ magnetic wobbles are affected by the influence of other known particles. On the quantum scale—the scale of individual particles—slight energy fluctuations manifest as pairs of particles that pop in and out of existence, like suds in a vast bubble bath.

According to the Standard Model, as muons mingle with this foamy background of “virtual” particles, they wobble roughly 0.1 percent faster than you’d expect. This extra boost to the muon’s wobble is known as the anomalous magnetic moment.

The Standard Model’s prediction is only as good as its inventory of the universe’s particles, however. If the universe contains additional heavy particles, for example, they would tweak the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon—possibly even enough to measure in the lab.

Studying the muon is “almost the most inclusive probe of new physics,” says Muon g-2 team member Dominik Stöckinger , a theorist at Germany’s Dresden University of Technology.

Muon beams and magnetic fields

The Muon g-2 experiment starts with a beam of muons, which scientists make by smashing pairs of protons together and then carefully filtering through the subatomic debris. This muon beam then enters a 14-ton magnetic ring that originally was used in the Brookhaven experiment, shipped by barge and truck from Long Island to Illinois in 2013. As the muons go round and round this storage ring, which has a uniform magnetic field, the wobbling muons decay into particles that smack into a set of 24 detectors along the track’s inner wall. By tracking how often these decay particles hit the detectors, researchers can figure out how quickly their parent muons were wobbling—a bit like figuring out a distant lighthouse’s rotation speed by watching it dim and brighten.

Muon g-2 is trying to measure the muon’s anomalous magnetic moment to an accuracy of 140 parts per billion, four times better than the Brookhaven experiment. At the same time, scientists had to make the best Standard Model prediction possible. From 2017 to 2020, 132 theorists led by the University of Illinois’s Aida El-Khadra worked out the theory’s prediction of muon wobble with unprecedented accuracy—and it was still lower than the measured values.

Because the experiment’s stakes are so high, Fermilab also took steps to eliminate bias. The experiment’s key measurements rely on the precise time that its detectors pick up signals, so to keep the scientists honest, Fermilab shifted the experiment’s clock by a random number. This change tweaked the data by an unknown amount that would be corrected for only after the analysis was complete.

The only records of this clock-shifting random number were on two handwritten pieces of paper that were kept in locked cabinets at Fermilab and the University of Washington in Seattle. In late February, these envelopes were opened and revealed to the team, which let them figure out the experiment’s true results on a live Zoom call.

“We were all really ecstatic, excited, but also shocked—because deep down, I think we’re all a little bit pessimistic,” says Muon g-2 team member Jessica Esquivel , a postdoctoral researcher at Fermilab.

New physics?

The new Fermilab results provide an important clue to what might lie beyond the Standard Model—but theorists trying to find new physics don’t have endless space to explore. Any theory that tries to explain Muon g-2’s results must also account for the lack of new particles discovered by the LHC.

In some of the proposed theories that thread this needle, the universe contains several types of Higgs bosons, not just the one included in the Standard Model. Other theories invoke exotic “leptoquarks” that would cause new kinds of interactions between muons and other particles. But because many of these theories’ simplest versions have been ruled out already, physicists “have to kind of think in unconventional ways,” Stöckinger says.

Coincidentally, news of the Fermilab results comes two weeks after another lab—CERN’s LHCb experiment—found independent evidence of misbehaving muons. The experiment monitors short-lived particles called B mesons and tracks how they decay. The Standard Model predicts that some of these decaying particles spit out pairs of muons. But LHCb has found evidence that these muon-spawning decays occur less often than predicted, with odds of a fluke in the experiment at roughly one in a thousand.

Like Fermilab, LHCb needs more data before claiming a new discovery. But even now, the combination of the two results has physicists “jumping up and down,” El-Khadra says.

The next step is to replicate the results. Fermilab’s findings are based on the experiment’s first run, which ended in mid-2018. The team is currently analyzing two additional runs’ worth of data. If these data resemble the first run, they could be enough to make the anomaly a full-blown discovery by the end of 2023.

Theorists also are beginning to poke and prod at the Standard Model’s prediction, especially the parts that are notoriously tricky to calculate. New supercomputer methods called lattice simulations should help, but early results—including one published in Nature   alongside the Fermilab results—slightly disagree with some of the values that El-Khadra’s team included in its theoretical calculation. It will take years to sift through these subtle differences and see how they affect the hunt for new physics.

For Lancaster and his colleagues, the years of work ahead are well worth it—especially given how far they’ve come.

“When you go and tell people, I’m going to try to measure something to better than one part per million, they sometimes look at you a little bit odd … and then when you say, it’s gonna take 10 years, they go, You must be mad,” he says. “I think the message is: persevere.”

Related Topics

• PARTICLE ACCELERATOR

Astronomers have discovered the oldest and farthest supernova ever

How fast is the universe really expanding? The mystery deepens.

What if aliens exist—but they're just hiding from us? The Dark Forest theory, explained

Noise pollution harms more than your hearing

What’s out there? Why humanity keeps pushing the cosmic frontier.

• Perpetual Planet
• Environment

History & Culture

• History Magazine
• History & Culture
• Race in America
• Mind, Body, Wonder
• Adventures Everywhere
• Paid Content
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Your US State Privacy Rights
• Children's Online Privacy Policy
• Interest-Based Ads
• About Nielsen Measurement
• Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
• Nat Geo Home
• Attend a Live Event
• Book a Trip
• Inspire Your Kids
• Shop Nat Geo
• Visit the D.C. Museum
• Learn About Our Impact
• Support Our Mission
• Advertise With Us
• Customer Service
• Renew Subscription
• Manage Your Subscription
• Work at Nat Geo
• Sign Up for Our Newsletters
• Contribute to Protect the Planet

Copyright © 1996-2015 National Geographic Society Copyright © 2015-2024 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved

Ambitious new dark matter-hunting experiment delivers 1st results

"If you think about it like a radio, the search for dark matter is like tuning the dial to search for one particular radio station. Our method is like doing a scan of 100,000 radio stations."

A new experiment designed to search the cosmos for its most mysterious "stuff," dark matter, has delivered its first results. 

While the Broadband Reflector Experiment for Axion Detection (BREAD) developed by the University of Chicago and the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab hasn't turned up dark matter particles just yet, the new results place a tighter constraint on the type of characteristics scientists can expect such particles to have. The BREAD experiment itself also served up an exciting new recipe that could be used in the hunt for dark matter — a relatively inexpensive one that doesn't take up a vast amount of space. 

BREAD takes a "broadband" approach to search for hypothetical dark matter particles called " axions " and associated " dark photons " across a larger set of possibilities than other experiments, albeit with slightly less precision.

"If you think about it like a radio, the search for dark matter is like tuning the dial to search for one particular radio station, except there are a million frequencies to check through," University of Chicago scientist and BREAD project co-leader David Miller said in a statement . "Our method is like doing a scan of 100,000 radio stations, rather than a few very thoroughly."

Related: What is dark matter?

A small experiment to tackle a big problem

Dark matter represents a huge problem for scientists because, despite the fact it makes up around 85% of the matter in the universe and its influence prevents galaxies from flying apart as they spin, we have little idea what it is made of.

That is in part because dark matter is effectively invisible ; it doesn't seem to interact with light, neither emitting nor reflecting standard photons. That lack of electromagnetic interaction suggests that dark matter isn't composed of the protons, neutrons and electrons that comprise "normal matter" objects like stars, planets, moons, our bodies and the cat next door.

Get the Space.com Newsletter

Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!

Though our telescopes can't detect dark matter directly, the stuff does affect stars, galaxies, and even light via its interactions with gravity . So astronomers can tell that something is there — they just don't know what it is. Knowing what to look for and exactly where to look is a different matter.

"We’re very confident that something is there, but there are many, many forms it could take," said Miller.

This confusion has sent scientists on the hunt for different particles with strange properties that could comprise dark matter. One such candidate is the axion , a hypothetical particle with an extremely small mass. Should axions exist, they may interact with a so-called dark photon just as everyday matter interacts with "ordinary" photons. This interaction could occasionally prompt the creation of a visible photon under certain circumstances. 

BREAD is a coaxial dish antenna in the shape of a curved metal tube that can fit on a tabletop. The experiment is designed to catch photons and funnel them to a sensor at one end to search for a subset of possible axions.

The full-scale BREAD experiment will see the equipment sit within a strong magnetic field, which the team says will increase the chances of the conversion of axons to photons. As a proof of principle, the team conducted a BREAD experiment minus the magnets needed to generate this field.

The proto-BREAD experiment ran at the University of Chicago for a month and delivered some interesting data, whetting the team's appetite for the full-scale experiment. The test results showed that BREAD was highly sensitive in the range of frequencies that the team had designed it to probe. 

"This is just the first step in a series of exciting experiments we are planning," BREAD co-leader and Fermilab researcher Andrew Sonnenschein said. "We have many ideas for improving the sensitivity of our axion search."

The test also demonstrated that particle physics can be done on a tabletop as well as in huge particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) , which runs for 17 miles (27 kilometers) deep under the border between France and Switzerland.

"This result is a milestone for our concept, demonstrating for the first time the power of our approach," said Stefan Knirck, the Fermilab postdoctoral scholar who led the development and construction of BREAD. "It is great to do this kind of creative tabletop-scale science, where a small team can do everything from building the experiment to data analysis but still have a great impact on modern particle physics."

— Our universe's smallest galaxies hold the largest star factories. Here's why

— The faintest star system orbiting our Milky Way may be dominated by dark matter

— Dark matter detected dangling from the cosmic web for 1st time  

The next stage of the BREAD experiment will see the apparatus transported to the magnet facility at Argonne National Laboratory. Additionally, facilities like SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, MIT, Caltech, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are working on research and development with the University of Chicago and Fermilab for future recipes of the BREAD experiment.

"There are still so many open questions in science and an enormous space for creative new ideas for tackling those questions," Miller concluded. "I think this is a real hallmark example of those kinds of creative ideas — in this case, impactful, collaborative partnerships between smaller-scale science at universities and larger-scale science at national laboratories."

The team's research is detailed in a paper published late last month in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.

The unexpected behavior of pulsing stars could help us measure the universe

The universe’s biggest explosions made some of the elements we are composed of. But there’s another mystery source out there

Summer solstice 2024 marks the longest day in the Northern Hemisphere

Admin said: The new BREAD experiment, which was designed to search the cosmos for mysterious dark matter, has returned its first results. Ambitious new dark matter-hunting experiment delivers 1st results : Read more

philbundy said: Dark matter is not matter at all it is magnetism and electromagnetic waves are invisible to us. It can be nothing else; I realize pretending to look for it pays the bills, so carry on.

• Papaspud Whenever I see the terms- dark matter, or dark energy as the explanation for something or another that they have no clue about, and are just wildly guessing...I just go back to my roots and translate= Magic! Reply

It was recently pointed out that old, isolated, NSs in the Solar neighborhood could be heated by DM capture , leading to a temperature increase of ∼ 2000 K. At ages greater than ∼ 10 Myr, isolated NSs are expected to cool to temperatures below this, provided they are not reheated by accretion of standard matter or by internal heating mechanisms . Asa result, the observation of a local NS with a temperature O(1000 K) could provide stringent constraints on DM interactions. Importantly, NS temperatures in this range would result in near-infrared emission, potentially detectable by future telescopes.

• Unclear Engineer At this point, both "dark matter" and "dark energy" are really only theoretical place holders in our theories, needed to make the theories fit the observations. Theorists have been free to assume that each does exactly what is needed to make the fits, without doing anything else that would mess-up the fits. Experiments to detect, or if not detect, limit the range of potential parameters for dark matter and dark energy candidates have so far just made the limits somewhat tighter, without any real detections. All we can really say at t his point is that "something" is making our observations differ from our expectations based on the physics that we understand, and use the "dark" names for those "somethings", until we actually find something - or realize that we have been missing something important in the theories. At this point, I think we are going to need a bigger telescope. Reply
• Manix What any of this proves is that we don't understand the univers (and the likes of gravity) as well as we think we do. The fact all these experiments come up empty handed while looking for Dark Matter, says a lot. As Occams Razor goes.. Reply
• Evil Red Smurf There are many theories and nobody knows the truth yet. A theory I like is the following: "Gravity in space-time is like an elastic band, and a star is like a weight hung from the elastic band - The greater the weight that is hung the more stretched the elastic band. When the weight is removed the elastic band returned to its original length and shape. However if the weight hung from the elastic bank is insufficient to snap it, but greater than the elasticity limit of the elastic, then when the weight is removed the elastic does not return to its original shape. Instead it is left with a ripple. The stretch on the elastic is like the gravitational effect of the star on space-time, but with Black Holes this is different, they stretch space-time, and if space-time has an elasticity limit then it may not return to its original ' shape '. Instead space-time is left with a ripple. What is that ripple? It's a fluctuation in space-time that behaves as though there is matter present, but without there being matter present - therefore: no visible matter, no reflected particles, in fact nothing there. But still bending light from distant stars as though there is a body present." Reply
• JCD "Dark Matter" adds another onion layer of unknowing to what I already don't know. I admire those who are determined to investigate such questions. I am not sure I'm up to that level of challenge. Reply
• View All 11 Comments

Most Popular

• 2 The speed of sound on Mars is constantly changing, study finds
• 3 June solstice 2024 brings changing seasons to Earth on June 20 — What to know
• 4 The 1st 'major lunar standstill' in more than 18 years is about to occur. Here's how to see it
• 5 A massive black hole may be 'waking up' in a nearby galaxy

Dark matter: our new experiment aims to turn the ghostly substance into actual light

Postdoctoral Fellow of Physics, Stockholm University

Disclosure statement

Andrea Gallo Rosso is a member of the ALPHA collaboration. He receives funding from the Swedish Research Council.

Stockholm University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

View all partners

A ghost is haunting our universe. This has been known in astronomy and cosmology for decades. Observations suggest that about 85% of all the matter in the universe is mysterious and invisible. These two qualities are reflected in its name: dark matter .

Several experiments have aimed to unveil what it’s made of, but despite decades of searching, scientists have come up short. Now our new experiment , under construction at Yale University in the US, is offering a new tactic.

Dark matter has been around the universe since the beginning of time, pulling stars and galaxies together . Invisible and subtle, it doesn’t seem to interact with light or any other kind of matter. In fact, it has to be something completely new.

The standard model of particle physics is incomplete , and this is a problem. We have to look for new fundamental particles . Surprisingly, the same flaws of the standard model give precious hints on where they may hide.

The trouble with the neutron

Let’s take the neutron, for instance. It makes up the atomic nucleus along with the proton. Despite being neutral overall, the theory states that it it made up of three charged constituent particles called quarks . Because of this, we would expect some parts of the neutron to be charged positively and others negatively –this would mean it was having what physicist call an electric dipole moment .

Yet, many attempts to measure it have come with the same outcome: it is too small to be detected. Another ghost. And we are not talking about instrumental inadequacies, but a parameter that has to be smaller than one part in ten billion. It is so tiny that people wonder if it could be zero altogether.

In physics, however, the mathematical zero is always a strong statement. In the late 70s, particle physicistsnRoberto Peccei and Helen Quinn (and later, Frank Wilczek and Steven Weinberg) tried to accommodate theory and evidence .

They suggested that, maybe, the parameter is not zero. Rather it is a dynamical quantity that slowly lost its charge, evolving to zero, after the Big Bang. Theoretical calculations show that, if such an event happened, it must have left behind a multitude of light, sneaky particles.

These were dubbed “axions” after a detergent brand because they could “clear up” the neutron problem. And even more. If axions were created in the early universe, they have been hanging around since then. Most importantly, their properties check all the boxes expected for dark matter. For these reasons, axions have become one of the favourite candidate particles for dark matter.

Axions would only interact with other particles weakly. However, this means they would still interact a bit. The invisible axions could even transform into ordinary particles, including – ironically – photons, the very essence of light. This may happen in particular circumstances, like in the presence of a magnetic field. This is a godsend for experimental physicists.

Experimental design

Many experiments are trying to evoke the axion-ghost in the controlled environment of a lab. Some aim to convert light into axions, for instance, and then axions back into light on the other side of a wall.

At present, the most sensitive approach targets the halo of dark matter permeating the galaxy (and consequently, Earth) with a device called a haloscope. It is a conductive cavity immersed in a strong magnetic field; the former captures the dark matter surrounding us (assuming it is axions), while the latter induces the conversion into light. The result is an electromagnetic signal appearing inside the cavity, oscillating with a characteristic frequency depending on the axion mass.

The system works like a receiving radio. It needs to be properly adjusted to intercept the frequency we are interested in. Practically, the dimensions of the cavity are changed to accommodate different characteristic frequencies. If the frequencies of the axion and the cavity do not match, it is just like tuning a radio on the wrong channel.

Unfortunately, the channel we are looking for cannot be predicted in advance. We have no choice but to scan all the potential frequencies. It is like picking a radio station in a sea of white noise – a needle in a haystack – with an old radio that needs to be bigger or smaller every time we turn the frequency knob.

Yet, those are not the only challenges. Cosmology points to tens of gigahertz as the latest, promising frontier for axion search. As higher frequencies require smaller cavities, exploring that region would require cavities too small to capture a meaningful amount of signal.

New experiments are trying to find alternative paths. Our Axion Longitudinal Plasma Haloscope (Alpha) experiment uses a new concept of cavity based on metamaterials.

Metamaterials are composite materials with global properties that differ from their constituents – they are more than the sum of their parts. A cavity filled with conductive rods gets a characteristic frequency as if it were one million times smaller, while barely changing its volume. That is exactly what we need. Plus, the rods provide a built-in, easy-adjustable tuning system.

We are currently building the setup, which will be ready to take data in a few years. The technology is promising. Its development is the result of the collaboration among solid-state physicists, electrical engineers, particle physicists and even mathematicians.

Despite being so elusive, axions are fuelling progress that no ghost will ever take away.

• Dark matter
• Standard model of particle physics
• Particle physics

Social Media Producer

Student Recruitment & Enquiries Officer

Dean (Head of School), Indigenous Knowledges

Senior Research Fellow - Curtin Institute for Energy Transition (CIET)

Laboratory Head - RNA Biology

A New Experiment Hopes to Solve Quantum Mechanics’ Biggest Mystery

Physicists will try to observe quantum properties of superposition—existing in two states at once—on a larger object than ever before

Ramin Skibba

The quantum revolution never truly ended. Beneath the world of classical physics, at the smallest scales, tiny particles don’t follow the usual rules. Particles sometimes act like waves, and vice versa . Sometimes they seem to exist in two places at once . And sometimes you can’t even know where they are .

For some physicists, like Niels Bohr and his followers, the debates surrounding quantum mechanics were more or less settled by the 1930s. They believed the quantum world could be understood according to probabilities—when you examine a particle, there’s a chance it does one thing and a chance it does another. But other factions, led by Albert Einstein, were never fully satisfied by the explanations of the quantum world, and new theories to explain the atomic realm began to crop up.

Now, nearly a century later, a growing number of physicists are no longer content with the textbook version of quantum physics, which originated from Bohr’s and others’ interpretation of quantum theory, often referred to as the Copenhagen interpretation . The idea is similar to flipping a coin, but before you look at the result, the coin can be thought of as both heads and tails—the act of looking, or measuring, forces the coin to “collapse” into one state or the other. But a new generation of researchers are rethinking why measurements would cause a collapse in the first place.

A new experiment, known as the TEQ collaboration, could help reveal a boundary between the weird quantum world and the normal classical world of billiard balls and projectiles. The TEQ (Testing the large-scale limit of quantum mechanics) researchers are working to construct a device in the next year that would levitate a bit of silicon dioxide, or quartz, measuring nanometers in size—still microscopic, but much larger than the individual particles that scientists have used to demonstrate quantum mechanics previously. How big can an object be and still exhibit quantum behaviors? A baseball won’t behave like an electron—we could never see a ball fly into left field and right field at the same time—but what about a nanoscale piece of quartz?

The renewed effort to pin down how matter behaves on an atomic level is partly driven by interest in technological advancements, such as quantum computers , as well as by increasing support for new theoretical physics interpretations. One of those alternatives is known as the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber theory, or GRW, named after three physicists who fleshed out the theory in the 1980s. In GRW, microscopic particles exist in multiple states at once, known as superposition, but unlike in the Copenhagen interpretation, they can spontaneously collapse into a single quantum state. According to the theory, the larger an object, the less likely it is to exist in superposition, which is why matter on the human scale only exists in one state at any given time and can be described by classical physics.

“In GRW, collapses happen randomly with fixed probability per particle per unit time,” says Tim Maudlin, a philosopher of physics at New York University. In the Copenhagen theory, on the other hand, collapses only happen when a measurement is made, so “one would need a clear physical criterion for both when a measurement occurs and what is measured. And that is precisely what the theory never provides.” GRW explains this “measurement problem” by suggesting that the collapse isn't unique to the act of measuring itself—rather, a microscopic particle has a given probability to collapse at any time, and that collapse is much more likely to happen (essentially guaranteed) when examined in a macroscopic experimental device.

GRW is one kind of collapse model, and if physicists are able to measure this collapse in action, “then it would suggest that the collapse model is correct,” says Peter Barker, a physicist at University College London. “We can say, this is where quantum mechanics ends and classical mechanics begins. It would be amazing.”

Barker is a member of a group of the TEQ collaboration, which will put these ideas about GRW and quantum collapse to the test. The small piece of quartz, one-thousandth of the width of a human hair, will be suspended by an electric field and trapped in a cold, confined space, where its atomic vibrations will slow to near absolute zero.

The scientists will then fire a laser at the quartz and see whether the scattering of the light shows signs of the object moving. The motion of the silicon dioxide could indicate a collapse, which would make the experiment a compelling confirmation of GRW predictions. (The theory predicts that objects of different masses have different amounts of motion related to a collapse.) If the scientists do not see the signals predicted from a collapse, the experiment would still provide valuable information about the quantum world of particles as it blurs with the classical world of everyday objects. Either way, the findings could be a quantum leap for quantum physics.

The idea that particles could exist in multiple states as once unsettled Einstein and a few others. But many physicists ignore these fundamental questions of what actually happens and characterize their own attitude as a “shut-up-and-calculate” one, Maudlin says. “Very few physicists want to understand foundational issues in quantum mechanics. And they don’t want to admit that it’s a pretty scandalous situation.”

Those who do investigate the foundational realities of atomic matter, however, seem to agree there’s likely more going on than existing theories cover, even if it’s not clear yet exactly what happens on such miniscule scales. In addition to GRW, rival theories include the speculative “ many-worlds interpretation ,” an idea that every experimental outcome can and does happen as particles endlessly collapse into all possible states, spawning an infinite number of parallel universes. Another alternative known as Bohmian mechanics , named after its originator David Bohm in the 1950s, argues that the probabilities involved in quantum experiments merely describe our limited knowledge of a system—in reality, an equation with variables currently hidden to physicists guides the system regardless of whether someone makes a measurement.

But the data from previous quantum experiments still don’t point toward a single interpretation, making it hard to pick one as a more accurate picture of reality. Thanks to TEQ though, physicists could finally provide evidence for or against collapse theories like GRW, breaking the impasse with the measurement problem. “Collapse models are actually experimentally falsifiable,” says Matteo Carlesso, a physicist at University of Trieste, who studies quantum theories. Even though no experiment has been sensitive enough to successfully verify or falsify a collapse model, such an experiment should be possible with the sensitivity of something like TEQ.

The experiment won’t be easy. The precise apparatus, frozen to near absolute zero, can’t eliminate all uncertainty, and the scientists involved have to rule out other, mundane physics explanations of the levitated particle’s motion before they can presume to attribute what they see to quantum motions. Physicists refer to the kind of energy signals they measure as “noise,” and it will be incredibly difficult to isolate “collapse noise” from sources of background noise that might work their way into the sensitive experiment. And it doesn’t help that the measurement itself heats the particle, making it harder to distinguish the very quantum motions the researchers are looking for.

Despite these uncertainties, TEQ physicists are now building and testing the device, and it will all come together at the University of Southampton in the U.K. where they’ll run the most sensitive versions of the experiment within a year. They have the chance to finally see quantum behavior firsthand, and if not, perhaps push the limits of quantum mechanics and shed light on what kinds of quantum behavior don’t happen.

The experiment is similar to the decades-old search for dark matter particles : physicists haven’t detected them directly yet, but they now know more than before about how massive the particles can’t be. One difference, though, is that physicists know dark matter’s out there, even if they don’t know exactly what it is, says Andrew Geraci, a physicist at Northwestern University. The quantum collapse models that Carlesso and others study aren’t guaranteed to be an accurate representation of what happens to matter on the atomic scale.

“I think testing these collapse models and seeing if we can figure something out about how the measurement problem works is certainly a tantalizing possibility that this type of technology opens up,” Geraci says. “Regardless of whether we see something, it’s worth checking.”

Get the latest Science stories in your inbox.

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

• Backchannel
• Newsletters
• WIRED Insider
• WIRED Consulting

Katie McCormick

A New Experiment Casts Doubt on the Leading Theory of the Nucleus

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine .

A new measurement of the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together, confirms previous hints of an uncomfortable truth: We still don’t have a solid theoretical grasp of even the simplest nuclear systems.

To test the strong nuclear force, physicists turned to the helium-4 nucleus, which has two protons and two neutrons. When helium nuclei are excited, they grow like an inflating balloon until one of the protons pops off. Surprisingly, in a recent experiment, helium nuclei didn’t swell according to plan: They ballooned more than expected before they burst. A measurement describing that expansion, called the form factor, is twice as large as theoretical predictions.

“The theory should work,” said Sonia Bacca , a theoretical physicist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and an author of the paper describing the discrepancy, which was published in Physical Review Letters . “We’re puzzled.”

The swelling helium nucleus, researchers say, is a sort of mini-laboratory for testing nuclear theory because it’s like a microscope—it can magnify deficiencies in theoretical calculations. Physicists think certain peculiarities in that swelling make it supremely sensitive to even the faintest components of the nuclear force—factors so small that they’re usually ignored. How much the nucleus swells also corresponds to the squishiness of nuclear matter , a property that offers insights into the mysterious hearts of neutron stars. But before explaining the crush of matter in neutron stars, physicists must first figure out why their predictions are so far off.

Bira van Kolck , a nuclear theorist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, said Bacca and her colleagues have exposed a significant problem in nuclear physics. They’ve found, he said, an instance where our best understanding of nuclear interactions—a framework known as chiral effective field theory—has fallen short.

“This transition amplifies the problems [with the theory] that in other situations are not so relevant,” van Kolck said.

Atomic nucleons—protons and neutrons—are held together by the strong force. But the theory of the strong force was not developed to explain how nucleons stick together. Instead, it was first used to explain how protons and neutrons are made of elementary particles called quarks and gluons.

For many years, physicists didn’t understand how to use the strong force to understand the stickiness of protons and neutrons. One problem was the bizarre nature of the strong force—it grows stronger with increasing distance, rather than slowly dying off. This feature prevented them from using their usual calculation tricks. When particle physicists want to understand a particular system, they typically parcel out a force into more manageable approximate contributions, order those contributions from most important to least important, then simply ignore the less important contributions . With the strong force, they couldn’t do that.

Then in 1990, Steven Weinberg found a way to connect the world of quarks and gluons to sticky nuclei. The trick was to use an effective field theory—a theory that is only as detailed as it needs to be to describe nature at a particular size (or energy) scale. To describe the behavior of a nucleus, you don’t need to know about quarks and gluons. Instead, at these scales, a new effective force emerges—the strong nuclear force, transmitted between nucleons by the exchange of pions.

By Jeffrey Van Camp

By Julian Chokkattu

By Simon Hill

By Medea Giordano

Weinberg’s work helped physicists understand how the strong nuclear force emerges from the strong force. It also made it possible for them to perform theoretical calculations based on the usual method of approximate contributions. The theory—chiral effective theory—is now widely considered the “best theory we have,” Bacca said, for calculating the forces that govern the behavior of nuclei.

In 2013, Bacca used this effective field theory to predict how much an excited helium nucleus would swell. But when she compared her calculation to experiments performed in the 1970s and 1980s, she found a substantial discrepancy. She’d predicted less swelling than the amounts measured, but the experimental error bars were too big for her to be sure.

After that first hint of a problem, Bacca encouraged her colleagues at Mainz to repeat the decades-old experiments—they had sharper tools at their disposal and could make more precise measurements. Those discussions led to a new collaboration: Simon Kegel and his colleagues would update the experimental work, and Bacca and her colleagues would try to understand the same intriguing mismatch, if it emerged.

In their experiment, Kegel and his colleagues excited the nuclei by shooting a beam of electrons at a tank of cold helium gas. If an electron zipped within range of one of the helium nuclei, it donated some of its excess energy to the protons and neutrons, causing the nucleus to inflate. This inflated state was fleeting—the nucleus quickly lost grasp of one of its protons, decaying into a hydrogen nucleus with two neutrons, plus a free proton.

As with other nuclear transitions, only a specific amount of donated energy will allow the nucleus to swell. By varying the electrons’ momentum and observing how the helium responded, scientists could measure the expansion. The team then compared this change in a nucleus’s spread—the form factor—with a variety of theoretical calculations. None of the theories matched the data. But, strangely, the calculation that came closest used an oversimplified model of the nuclear force—not the chiral effective field theory.

“This was totally unexpected,” said Bacca.

Other researchers are equally mystified. “It’s a clean, well-done experiment. So I trust the data,” said Laura Elisa Marcucci , a physicist at the University of Pisa in Italy. But, she said, the experiment and theory contradict one another, so one of them must be wrong.

In hindsight, physicists had several reasons to suspect that this simple measurement would probe the limits of our understanding of nuclear forces.

First, this system is particularly persnickety. The energy needed to produce the transiently inflated helium nucleus—the state researchers want to study—lies just above the energy needed to expel a proton and just below that same threshold for a neutron. That makes everything hard to calculate.

The second reason has to do with Weinberg’s effective field theory. It worked because it allowed physicists to ignore the less important parts of the equations. Van Kolck contends that some of the parts deemed less important and routinely ignored are in fact very important. The microscope provided by this particular helium measurement, he said, is illuminating that basic error.

“I cannot be too critical because these calculations are very difficult,” he added. “They’re doing the best they can.”

Several groups, including van Kolck’s, plan to repeat Bacca’s calculations and find out what went wrong. It’s possible that simply including more terms in the approximation of the nuclear force might be the answer. On the other hand, it’s also possible that these ballooning helium nuclei have exposed a fatal flaw in our understanding of the nuclear force.

“We exposed the puzzle, but unfortunately we have not solved the puzzle,” Bacca said. “Not yet.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine , an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

You Might Also Like …

In your inbox: Get Plaintext —Steven Levy's long view on tech

Welcome to the hellhole of programmatic advertising

How many EV charging stations does the US need to replace gas stations?

A nonprofit tried to fix tech culture —but lost control of its own

It's always sunny: Here are the best sunglasses for every adventure

Charlie Wood

Lyndie Chiou

Amos Zeeberg

Steve Nadis

David Robson

Paul Sutter, Ars Technica

Christopher Niezrecki

Laura Hautala

• June 20, 2024 | Rising Popularity of “Magic” Amanita Mushrooms Raises Alarms – Scientists Warn of Serious Dangers
• June 20, 2024 | Odysseus Lander Achieves “Dawn of Radio Astronomy From the Moon”
• June 20, 2024 | * Hard Yet Stretchable: Scientists Create “Unbreakable” New Material
• June 20, 2024 | Major Fusion Milestone: Princeton Scientists Discover Game-Changer in Reactor Design
• June 20, 2024 | Far-Reaching Implications – Scientists Discover Previously Hidden Binding Sites for Medications

Beyond the Void: New Experiment Challenges Quantum Electrodynamics

By Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf December 20, 2023

The X-ray beam from the world’s largest X-ray laser, the European XFEL, only becomes as clearly visible as in the photo in complete darkness and with an exposure time of 90 seconds. In 2024, the first experiments to detect quantum fluctuations in vacuum will take place here. Credit: European XFEL / Jan Hosan

The team at HZDR suggests improvements for an experiment aimed at investigating the boundaries of physics.

Absolutely empty – that is how most of us envision the vacuum. Yet, in reality, it is filled with an energetic flickering: the quantum fluctuations. Scientists are currently scientists are gearing up for a laser experiment intended to verify these vacuum fluctuations in a novel way, which could potentially provide clues to new laws in physics.

A research team from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has developed a series of proposals designed to help conduct the experiment more effectively – thus increasing the chances of success. The team presents its findings in the scientific journal  Physical Review D .

The physics world has long been aware that the vacuum is not entirely void but is filled with vacuum fluctuations – an ominous quantum flickering in time and space. Although it cannot be captured directly, its influence can be indirectly observed, for example, through changes in the electromagnetic fields of tiny particles.

However, it has not yet been possible to verify vacuum fluctuations without the presence of any particles. If this could be accomplished, one of the fundamental theories of physics, namely quantum electrodynamics (QED), would be proven in a hitherto untested area. Should such an experiment reveal deviations from the theory, however, it would suggest the existence of new, previously undiscovered particles.

Dr. Ulf Zastrau heads the HED (High Energy Density Science) experimental station at the European XFEL. In the HED beam chamber the flashes from the world’s largest X-ray laser must meet the light pulses from the ReLaX high-power laser operated by the HZDR in order to detect vacuum fluctuations. Credit: European XFEL / Jan Hosan

The experiment intended to accomplish this is planned as part of the Helmholtz International Beamline for Extreme Fields (HIBEF), a research consortium led by the HZDR at the HED experimental station of the European XFEL in Hamburg, the largest X-ray laser in the world. The underlying principle is that an ultra-powerful laser fires short, intense flashes of light into an evacuated stainless steel chamber. The aim is to manipulate the vacuum fluctuations so that they, seemingly magically, change the polarization of an X-ray flash from the European XFEL, i.e., rotate its direction of oscillation.

“It would be like sliding a transparent plastic ruler between two polarizing filters and bending it back and forth,” explains HZDR theorist Prof. Ralf Schützhold. “The filters are originally set up so that no light passes through them. Bending the ruler would now change the direction of the light’s oscillation in such a way that something could be seen as a result.” In this analogy, the ruler corresponds to the vacuum fluctuations while the ultra-powerful laser flash bends them.

Two flashes instead of just one

The original concept involved shooting just one optical laser flash into the chamber and using specialized measurement techniques to register whether it changes the X-ray flash’s polarization. But there is a problem: “The signal is likely to be extremely weak,” explains Schützhold. “It is possible that only one in a trillion X-ray photons will change its polarization.”

But this might be below the current measurement limit – the event could simply fall through the cracks undetected. Therefore, Schützhold and his team are relying on a variant: instead of just one, they intend to shoot two optical laser pulses simultaneously into the evacuated chamber.

Both flashes will strike there and literally collide. The X-ray pulse of the European XFEL is set to fire precisely into their collision point. The decisive factor: The colliding laser flashes affect the X-ray pulse like a type of crystal. Just as X-rays are diffracted, i.e., deflected, when passing through a natural crystal, the XFEL X-ray pulse should also be deflected by the briefly existing “light crystal” of the two colliding laser flashes.

“That would not only change the polarization of the X-ray pulse but also slightly deflect it at the same time,” explains Ralf Schützhold. This combination could increase the chances of actually being able to measure the effect – so the researchers hope. The team has calculated various options for the striking angle of the two laser flashes colliding in the chamber. Experiments will show which variant proves to be most suitable.

Targeting ultra-light ghost particles?

The prospects could even be improved further if the two laser flashes shot into the chamber were not of the same color but of two different wavelengths. This would also allow the energy of the X-ray flash to change slightly, which would, likewise, help to measure the effect. “But this is technically quite challenging and may only be implemented at a later date,” says Schützhold.

The project is currently in the planning stages in Hamburg together with the European XFEL team at the HED experimental station, and the first trials are scheduled to launch in 2024. If successful, they could confirm QED once more.

But perhaps the experiments will reveal deviations from the established theory. This could be due to previously undiscovered particles – for example, ultra-light ghost particles known as axions. “And that,” says Schützhold, “would be a clear indication of additional, previously unknown laws of nature.”

Reference: “Detection schemes for quantum vacuum diffraction and birefringence” by N. Ahmadiniaz, T. E. Cowan, J. Grenzer, S. Franchino-Viñas, A. Laso Garcia, M. Šmíd, T. Toncian, M. A. Trejo and R. Schützhold, 10 October 2023,  Physical Review D . DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.108.076005

More on SciTechDaily

Feasting on the Cosmos: The Surprising Eating Habits of Black Holes

Magnetic Resonance Explained by Simple Experiment

Science Made Simple: What Is Artificial Intelligence?

State-of-the-Art Technology Used to Further Refine How Quickly the Universe Is Expanding

Robotic Grasp of Language: Unlocking an Open-Ended World for Automation

In a Split Second, Clothes Make the Man in the Eyes of Others

Breathing Uneasy: Sleep Apnea Linked With Increased Long COVID Risks

Watch NASA SpaceX Dragon Endeavour Splashdown in Stunning 4K HD Video

4 comments on "beyond the void: new experiment challenges quantum electrodynamics".

Scientific experiments are omnipotent, which is a typical pseudo scientific idea. Scientific research guided by correct theories can enable humanity to stand higher and see further. Every science enthusiast hopes that true science is not fooled by so-called academic journals (such as Physics Review Letters, Science, Nature, etc).

Wishing you all success.

Physics Review Letters (PRL) hardly know what shame is. The two-dimensional images in mathematics are meaningless for them. They would rather believe in baseless imagination than believe in mathematics. They firmly believe that two objects (such as two sets of cobalt 60) rotating in opposite directions can form a mirror image of each other. They are unwilling to believe that scientific experiments are limited by nature, so they go further and further on the path of pseudoscience, even lazy to turn back. The spirit of science has long been lost to them. The collective silence in today’s academic community is a true reflection of the prevalence of these pseudo academic journals. This is precisely the greatest tragedy of the academic community in the 21st century. Your article has been published in such a journal. Is it worth showing off?

If anyone is really interested in science, you can browse https://www.zhihu.com/column/c_1278787135349633024 .

Leave a comment Cancel reply

Email address is optional. If provided, your email will not be published or shared.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

March 1, 2023

11 min read

Tiny Bubbles of Primordial Soup Re-create Early Universe

New experiments can re-create the young cosmos, when it was a mash of fundamental particles, more precisely than ever before

By Clara Moskowitz

A technician installs cables on the new sPHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Long Island's Brookhaven National Laboratory. Inside sPHENIX's cylindrical interior, atomic nuclei will collide to make droplets of a plasma that existed at the beginning of the cosmos.

Christopher Payne

Imagine you have a microscope that would let you see a single atom up close. Let's say it's a hydrogen atom, the smallest kind. Zoom in past the single electron orbiting at the outskirts, and you'll find the nucleus—in this case a lone proton. High school physics would have you believe that inside this proton you'll find a simple triad of three fundamental particles called quarks—two up quarks and one down quark. But the reality inside a proton is so much more complex that physicists are still trying to figure out its inner structure and how its constituents combine to produce its mass, spin and other properties.

The three quarks in the basic picture of the interior of a proton are merely the “valence quarks”—buoys bobbing on top of a roiling sea of quarks and antiquarks (their antimatter counterparts), as well as the sticky “gluon” particles that hold them together. The total number of quarks and gluons inside a proton is always changing. Quark-antiquark pairs are constantly popping in and out of existence, and gluons tend to split and multiply, especially when a proton gains speed. It's basically pure chaos. The strong force—the most powerful of the four fundamental forces of nature—keeps this mess confined to the insides of protons and neutrons. Except when it doesn't.

In the first tiny fractions of a second after the big bang, the universe was too hot and dense for the strong force to bind quarks and gluons together. Instead they became an ocean—a perfect liquid of particles flowing with almost no resistance, called a quark-gluon plasma. This stage of the universe's history ended quickly. Within 10 -6  second, quarks and gluons were caged inside protons and neutrons. But then, 13.7 billion years later, physicists learned how to re-create the quark-gluon plasma inside particle accelerators. When two large atomic nuclei (such as gold) smash together at nearly the speed of light, the collision produces the temperatures and pressures needed for droplets of quark-gluon plasma to form, briefly, before disintegrating.

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

The machines that capture these collisions are towering constructions, stacks of detectors and instruments arranged in concentric rings, all of it connected with thousands of wires. When I visited two of them last year at the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Long Island campus, I marveled at the painstaking work of large teams of technicians climbing multiple levels of scaffolding to access the devices. Standing underneath such a colossus feels like witnessing the pinnacle of what humans can achieve—these are some of the largest and most intricate machines ever built, all to study a drop of primordial ooze even smaller than an atom. Investigating droplets of quark-gluon plasma gives scientists a chance to learn how matter got its start. “This is what filled the entire universe about 10 microseconds after the big bang,” says Bjoern Schenke, a Brookhaven theoretical physicist. “Studying it allows us to go back in time as much as we possibly can.”

The research is also a window into the strong force, the least understood of all nature's forces. This force is described by a theory called quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which is so complicated that scientists can almost never use it to calculate anything directly. The best they can do is to use supercomputers running simulations to get approximate answers. “As human beings, we want to understand nature, and part of understanding nature is to understand quantum chromodynamics and the strong force,” says physicist Haiyan Gao, associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics at Brookhaven. “We need to do experiments on quark-gluon plasma to understand how this theory works.”

In April 2023 Brookhaven scientists will turn on the latest experiment designed to study quark-gluon plasma. The device, called sPHENIX, is one of two detectors at the lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), one of the largest particle accelerators in the world. The other detector there, the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR), is also reopening after major upgrades. Across the Atlantic at the European CERN physics lab near Geneva, the globe's biggest accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), recently began a new run with upgraded detectors and an ability to smash many more atoms at once. Together these tools should reveal the most detailed picture yet of this primordial fluid, bringing us closer to unraveling the secrets of the tiniest constituents of matter.

Particles circulate along RHIC's 2.4-mile ring at close to the speed of light before colliding inside detectors such as sPHENIX. Credit: Christopher Payne

A Surprising Discovery

Scientists predicted quark-gluon plasma long before they discovered it—although they expected it to take a very different form. The predictions came about in the 1970s and 1980s, following the discovery of quarks in the late 1960s and of gluons in 1979. Physicists expected that quarks and gluons, when freed from nuclei, would take the form of a uniformly expanding gaseous substance. “Usually fluids turn to gas as they get hotter,” says Berndt Mueller, a physicist at Duke University, who started working on theoretical models for quark-gluon plasma in the 1980s. It was a reasonable assumption: quarks and gluons aren't released from nuclei until they reach temperatures of trillions of degrees.

Mueller was attracted to the field because the theoretical possibilities were wide open, and experimental data were set to start arriving soon. “At that time I was about 30 years old, and you look around for new things you could work on where you have lots of interesting stuff to discover.” During this era physicists were developing technologies to smash together heavy ions—nuclei with dozens of protons and neutrons inside them—and they expected these collisions to generate temperatures and densities that would break subatomic particles apart. The earliest heavy ion collisions, which took place in the 1970s at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, weren't powerful enough to create quark-gluon plasma, but in 1986 the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator at CERN began its own heavy ion collisions, and those produced the first evidence for the new state of matter.

It took a while. The CERN team eventually announced their findings in 2000, but even then researchers were divided over whether the data were strong enough to claim a discovery. That same year Brookhaven's RHIC opened and started crashing heavy ions at higher energies than at the SPS. Within five years this accelerator had amassed enough data that physicists declared quark-gluon plasma officially found.

It wasn't what they had imagined. Instead of an expanding gas, the quark-gluon plasma looked like a liquid—a nearly perfect one, with almost no viscosity. In a gas, particles act individually; in a liquid, particles move cohesively. The stronger the interactions among particles—the more they can pull one another along—the “better” the liquid is at being a liquid. The RHIC observations showed that quark-gluon plasma exhibited less resistance to flow than any substance ever known. This, Mueller says, “was very much unexpected.”

Credit: Jason Drakeford

In 2010 RHIC researchers announced the first measurement of the quark-gluon plasma's temperature. It was a scorching four trillion degrees Celsius, far hotter than any other matter ever created by humans, and about 250,000 times hotter than the middle of the sun. “Usually the hotter something becomes, the less of a perfect fluid it becomes,” Mueller says. “But in this case, it's the opposite—when you reach the critical temperature, it turns into a liquid.” Scientists suspect the strong force is behind this odd behavior. When the particles become hot enough to escape from protons and neutrons, the strong force acts over the entire plasma, causing the collective mass of particles to interact strongly with one another.

The Mystery of the Strong Force

One of the biggest open questions about quark-gluon plasma is when, exactly, the quarks and gluons break out of their confinement. “Where is the boundary between usual matter and quark-gluon plasma?” Gao asks. “Where is the so-called critical point where the nuclear matter and the quark-gluon plasma coexist?” Understanding where that transition happens, and how many particles it takes to initiate the collective behavior, will be among the main goals of the new and upgraded experiments.

Another question is whether quark-gluon plasma is a fractal—that is, whether its structure has a complex, repeating pattern that appears the same at every scale, whether you zoom out or in. Some researchers have been arguing that quark-gluon plasma has these two properties and that fractal theory could offer insights into how the plasma behaves. “There is evidence that we have fractal structure in quark-gluon plasma,” says Airton Deppman, a physicist at the University of São Paulo's Institute of Physics. “We are also investigating if the fractal structure survives the phase transition” from plasma to proton.

Answering these questions could help with a larger goal: understanding the strong force, the most confusing of nature's fundamental forces. Quantum chromodynamics describes the interactions between quarks and gluons by ascribing them a property called color charge. This color charge is akin to electrical charge in the theory of electromagnetism, and it also explains why quantum chromodynamics so quickly gets out of hand. Whereas electromagnetism has only two charges—positive or negative—QCD has three—red, green or blue. And antimatter particles can carry antired, antigreen or antiblue charge.

In electromagnetism, the particle that carries the electromagnetic force, the photon, is itself electrically neutral, which keeps things somewhat simple. In QCD, though, the force carrier, the gluon, also carries a color charge and can interact through the strong force with itself and with quarks. These self-interactions and extra charges have made QCD prohibitively complicated. “You can write down the theory essentially in two lines, but actually solving it has not been really achieved,” Schenke says. “The process of confinement—how gluons and quarks are being trapped in the proton, for example—has not been solved.”

Inside RHIC's tunnels “stochastic cooling kickers” push the particles within the rings closer together to correct for their tendency to spread out as they travel. This ensures that as many particles as possible will collide inside the detectors. Credit: Christopher Payne

Scientists hope that studying quark-gluon plasma—the only situation in which scientists have ever been able to probe unbound quarks—could reveal more about how confinement works. “One way to get at that is to free them and see how they then recombine again to protons, neutrons and other particles that we can observe from the detector,” Schenke adds. Thus, experimental data from heavy-ion collisions can be used to better understand the mechanisms within QCD that lead to confinement.

New and Improved

With the RHIC's new experiment, sPHENIX, and the upgraded STAR detector, scientists should be able to take the most precise measurements of the plasma yet. For instance, sPHENIX has a superconducting magnet that is roughly three times stronger than STAR's. “That's important for many of the things we want to measure,” says David Morrison, a Brookhaven physicist working on the new machine. “If you have a collision, particles come out every which way, and then the magnetic fields bend their paths. We can look at that to start unraveling what kind of particle was it and how much energy and momentum did it have?” The team is hoping to spot composite particles called upsilons, for example. Upsilons, which contain a bottom quark and an anti-bottom quark, can form in collisions and then fly through the quark-gluon plasma, acting as test probes to reveal how the plasma changes them. “We can really unravel the physics that underlies a lot of the weird properties of the quark-gluon plasma,” he adds.

The experiment will also benefit from being able to record much more data—meaning many more collisions and the particles they result in—than was possible before. STAR captures around 10 petabytes of data a year; sPHENIX will take around 150 petabytes annually. That increase will bring previously unanswerable questions within reach.

STAR also has novel capabilities, such as new calorimeters for measuring the energies of particles and tracking detectors for identifying particles with different electrical charges. Among the most significant additions, says Brookhaven's Lijuan Ruan, one of STAR's spokespeople, are “forward” detectors that can record particles flying out of collisions at wider angles than before, including particles moving in the same direction as the beams that fed into the crash. “Now that's basically it—we're not going to upgrade anymore,” says Ruan, who has been working on STAR for many years and helped to build some of its early components around 20 years ago as a graduate student. “It's a different feeling when you just use a detector, compared to when you actually build it and the entire collaboration can use it,” she says. “I feel proud.” STAR, which was among the original RHIC experiments that helped to discover quark-gluon plasma, will operate for another three years before shutting down.

In Europe, the LHC recently began its third run, which started in July 2022 and will continue until 2025. After the latest upgrades, LHC scientists can analyze about 100 times more lead-lead collisions than they could during the first two runs. The extra collisions will also increase the precision of measurements. “One of the important goals for run three is to precisely quantify the properties of the quark-gluon plasma and connect them to the dynamics of its constituents,” says Luciano Musa, a member of the ALICE experiment at the LHC.

Compared with the RHIC experiments, the LHC collisions occur at higher energies and produce a hotter, denser and longer-lived quark-gluon plasma. These energetic smashups also create a larger variety of particles that scientists can use to probe the plasma's properties. “The studies at RHIC and LHC really go hand in hand,” Musa says. “Studying the properties of relativistic nuclear collisions at different energy scales and with different collision systems at CERN and RHIC allows us to gain a more profound and comprehensive understanding of nuclear matter.”

The different energy ranges reveal different aspects of the plasma. Raghav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli, a physicist at Vanderbilt University, did their Ph.D. work at the LHC, but recently became a member of the STAR and sPHENIX collaborations to focus on the particles coming out of lower-energy collisions. “They are closer to the scale of the plasma; they talk to it a lot more,” Kunnawalkam Elayavalli says. “Think of it like a party: there's a lot of people, and you're making a beeline to the exit. But if you're kind of slow and you don't want to leave that fast, you get a chance to talk to people on your way out.” Because particles flying through the quark-gluon plasma at RHIC take longer to move through it, they can extract more information from it. “The things we're trying to measure are the transport properties—the average distance you can go without interacting with another particle,” they add. “It tells us about the fundamental scale of the plasma.”

Back to the Beginning

The new era of quark-gluon plasma experiments should move the field beyond the basics and toward concrete answers to long-standing questions. “There was a period of physics at RHIC that was basically, ‘Wow, this happening—this is new physics,’” Kunnawalkam Elayavalli says. “And now we are in the precision era. We can ask, ‘Why is this happening?’”

Physicist Lijuan Ruan peers inside the heart of the STAR detector at RHIC. At STAR's core, heavy ions collide inside a cylindrical solenoid electromagnet. The energy created in the crashes can generate thousands of new particles. Credit: Christopher Payne

RHIC and the LHC are leading the effort to understand this special state of matter, but upcoming experiments elsewhere will also add insights. At CERN, alongside the LHC, the SPS accelerator is still running. A planned experiment there called NA61/SHINE will collide moving ions into a stationary target to measure the critical point when protons and neutrons turn into quark-gluon plasma. A second fixed-target experiment, the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) at GSI Darmstadt in Germany, is due to open in 2028. And at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna near Moscow, a collider called the Nuclotron-based Ion Collider fAcility (NICA) will also probe the critical point.

“It's an exciting time,” Mueller says. “We know the quark-gluon plasma existed in the early universe, but we have no way of probing that. This is our way of probing a physics situation that otherwise we don't have any hope to reach.”

Clara Moskowitz is a senior editor at Scientific American , where she covers astronomy, space, physics and mathematics. She has been at Scientific American for a decade; previously she worked at Space.com. Moskowitz has reported live from rocket launches, space shuttle liftoffs and landings, suborbital spaceflight training, mountaintop observatories, and more. She has a bachelor's degree in astronomy and physics from Wesleyan University and a graduate degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

A New Experiment Tries To Clear Up Einstein’s Biggest Physics Headache

Dark matter haunts our universe — and physicists' dreams.

A ghost is haunting our universe. This has been known in astronomy and cosmology for decades. Observations suggest that about 85 percent of all the matter in the universe is mysterious and invisible. These two qualities are reflected in its name: dark matter .

Several experiments have aimed to unveil what it’s made of, but despite decades of searching, scientists have come up short. Now, our new experiment , under construction at Yale University, is offering a new tactic.

Dark matter has been around the universe since the beginning of time, pulling stars and galaxies together . Invisible and subtle, it doesn’t seem to interact with light or any other kind of matter. In fact, it has to be something completely new.

The standard model of particle physics is incomplete , and this is a problem. We have to look for new fundamental particles . Surprisingly, the same flaws of the standard model give precious hints on where they may hide.

The trouble with the neutron

Let’s take the neutron, for instance. It makes up the atomic nucleus along with the proton. Despite being neutral overall, the theory states that it is made up of three charged constituent particles called quarks . Because of this, we would expect some parts of the neutron to be charged positively and others negatively — this would mean it was having what physicists call an electric dipole moment .

Yet, many attempts to measure it have come with the same outcome: It is too small to be detected. Another ghost. And we are not talking about instrumental inadequacies, but a parameter that has to be smaller than one part in ten billion. It is so tiny that people wonder if it could be zero altogether.

In physics, however, the mathematical zero is always a strong statement. In the late 70s, particle physicists Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn (and later, Frank Wilczek and Steven Weinberg) tried to accommodate theory and evidence .

They suggested that maybe the parameter is not zero. Rather it is a dynamical quantity that slowly lost its charge, evolving to zero, after the Big Bang. Theoretical calculations show that, if such an event happened, it must have left behind a multitude of light, sneaky particles.

These were dubbed “axions” after a detergent brand because they could “clear up” the neutron problem. And even more. If axions were created in the early universe, they have been hanging around since then. Most importantly, their properties check all the boxes expected for dark matter. For these reasons, axions have become one of the favorite candidate particles for dark matter.

Axions would only interact with other particles weakly. However, this means they would still interact a bit. The invisible axons could even transform into ordinary particles, including – ironically – photons, the very essence of light. This may happen in particular circumstances, like in the presence of a magnetic field. This is a godsend for experimental physicists.

Experimental design

Many experiments are trying to evoke the axion-ghost in the controlled environment of a lab. Some aim to convert light into axions, for instance, and then axions back into light on the other side of a wall.

At present, the most sensitive approach targets the halo of dark matter permeating the galaxy (and consequently, Earth) with a device called a haloscope. It is a conductive cavity immersed in a strong magnetic field; the former captures the dark matter surrounding us (assuming it is axons), while the latter induces the conversion into light. The result is an electromagnetic signal appearing inside the cavity, oscillating with a characteristic frequency depending on the axion mass.

The system works like a receiving radio. It needs to be properly adjusted to intercept the frequency we are interested in. Practically, the dimensions of the cavity are changed to accommodate different characteristic frequencies. If the frequencies of the axion and the cavity do not match, it is just like tuning a radio on the wrong channel.

The powerful magnet is moved to the lab at Yale.

Unfortunately, the channel we are looking for cannot be predicted in advance. We have no choice but to scan all the potential frequencies. It is like picking a radio station in a sea of white noise – a needle in a haystack – with an old radio that needs to be bigger or smaller every time we turn the frequency knob.

Yet, those are not the only challenges. Cosmology points to tens of gigahertz as the latest, promising frontier for axion search. As higher frequencies require smaller cavities, exploring that region would require cavities too small to capture a meaningful amount of signal.

New experiments are trying to find alternative paths. Our Axion Longitudinal Plasma Haloscope (Alpha) experiment uses a new concept of cavity based on metamaterials.

Metamaterials are composite materials with global properties that differ from their constituents – they are more than the sum of their parts. A cavity filled with conductive rods gets a characteristic frequency as if it were one million times smaller while barely changing its volume. That is exactly what we need. Plus, the rods provide a built-in, easy-adjustable tuning system.

We are currently building the setup, which will be ready to take data in a few years. The technology is promising. Its development is the result of the collaboration among solid-state physicists, electrical engineers, particle physicists, and even mathematicians.

Despite being so elusive, axions are fueling progress that no ghost will ever take away.

This article was originally published on The Conversation by Andrea Gallo Rosso at Stockholm University. Read the original article here .

• Space Science

CERN Accelerating science

Experiments

A range of experiments at CERN investigate physics from cosmic rays to supersymmetry

Diverse experiments at CERN

CERN is home to a wide range of experiments. Scientists from institutes all over the world form experimental collaborations to carry out a diverse research programme , ensuring that CERN covers a wealth of topics in physics, from the Standard Model to supersymmetry and from exotic isotopes to cosmic rays .

Several collaborations run experiments using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful accelerator in the world. In addition, fixed-target experiments, antimatter experiments and experimental facilities make use of the LHC injector chain.

LHC experiments

Nine experiments at the Large Hadron Collider  (LHC) use detectors to analyse the myriad of particles produced by collisions in the accelerator . These experiments are run by collaborations of scientists from institutes all over the world. Each experiment is distinct and characterised by its detectors.

The biggest of these experiments, ATLAS and CMS , use general-purpose detectors to investigate the largest range of physics possible. Having two independently designed detectors is vital for cross-confirmation of any new discoveries made.  ALICE and LHCb  have detectors specialised for focussing on specific phenomena. These four detectors sit underground in huge caverns on the LHC ring.

The smallest experiments on the LHC are  TOTEM  and  LHCf , which focus on "forward particles" – protons or heavy ions that brush past each other rather than meeting head on when the beams collide. TOTEM uses detectors positioned on either side of the CMS interaction point, while LHCf is made up of two detectors which sit along the LHC beamline, at 140 metres either side of the ATLAS collision point.  MoEDAL-MAPP uses detectors deployed near LHCb to search for a hypothetical particle called the magnetic monopole. FASER and SND@LHC , the two newest LHC experiments, are situated close to the ATLAS collision point in order to search for light new particles and to study neutrinos.

MoEDAL-MAPP

Fixed-target experiments.

In “fixed-target” experiments, a beam of accelerated particles is directed at a solid, liquid or gas target, which itself can be part of the detection system. 

COMPASS , which looks at the structure of hadrons – particles made of quarks – uses beams from the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS).

The SPS also feeds the North Area (NA), which houses a number of experiments. NA61/SHINE studies a phase transition between hadrons and quark-gluon plasma, and conducts measurements for experiments involving cosmic rays and long-baseline neutrino oscillations. NA62 uses protons from the SPS to study rare decays of kaons. NA63 directs beams of electrons and positrons onto a variety of targets to study radiation processes in strong electromagnetic fields. NA64 is looking for new particles that would mediate an unknown interaction between visible matter and dark matter. NA65 studies the production of tau neutrinos. UA9 is investigating how crystals could help to steer particle beams in high-energy colliders.

The CLOUD experiment uses beams from the  Proton Synchrotron (PS) to investigate a possible link between cosmic rays and cloud formation. DIRAC , which is now analysing data, is investigating the strong force between quarks.

Antimatter experiments

Currently the Antiproton Decelerator and ELENA serve several experiments that are studying antimatter and its properties:  AEGIS, ALPHA ,  ASACUSA ,  BASE and  GBAR . PUMA is designed to carry antiprotons to ISOLDE . Earlier experiments ( ATHENA , ATRAP  and ACE ) are now completed.

Experimental facilities

Experimental facilities at CERN include ISOLDE , MEDICIS , the neutron time-of-flight facility (n_TOF) and the CERN Neutrino Platform .

CERN Neutrino Platform

Non-accelerator experiments.

Not all experiments rely on CERN’s accelerator complex. AMS , for example, is a CERN-recognised experiment located on the International Space Station, which has its control centre at CERN. The CAST and OSQAR experiments are both looking for hypothetical dark matter particles called axions.

Past experiments

CERN’s experimental programme has consisted of hundreds of experiments spanning decades.

Among these were pioneering experiments for electroweak physics, a branch of physics that unifies the electromagnetic and weak fundamental forces . In 1958, an experiment at the Synchrocyclotron discovered a rare pion decay that spread CERN’s name around the world. Then in 1973, the Gargamelle bubble chamber presented first direct evidence of the weak neutral current. Ten years later, CERN physicists working on the UA1 and UA2 detectors announced the discovery of the W boson in January and Z boson in June – the two carriers of the electroweak force. Two key scientists behind the discoveries – Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer – received the Nobel prize in physics in 1984.

From 1989, the Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP) enabled the ALEPH , DELPHI , L3 and OPAL experiments to put the Standard Model of particle physics on a strong experimental basis. In 2000, LEP made way for the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the same tunnel.

CERN’s huge contributions to electroweak physics are just some of the highlights of the experiments over the years.

MIT Technology Review

• Newsletters

How underwater drones could shape a potential Taiwan-China conflict

A new war-gaming experiment set out how cutting-edge technologies could prove critical.

• James O'Donnell archive page

A potential future conflict between Taiwan and China would be shaped by novel methods of drone warfare involving advanced underwater drones and increased levels of autonomy, according to a new war-gaming experiment by the think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS). 

The report comes as concerns about Beijing’s aggression toward Taiwan have been rising: China sent dozens of surveillance balloons over the Taiwan Strait in January during Taiwan’s elections, and in May, two Chinese naval ships entered Taiwan’s restricted waters. The US Department of Defense has said that preparing for potential hostilities is an “absolute priority,” though no such conflict is immediately expected. 

The report’s authors detail a number of ways that use of drones in any South China Sea conflict would differ starkly from current practices, most notably in the war in Ukraine, often called the first full-scale drone war. 

Differences from the Ukrainian battlefield

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, drones have been aiding in what military experts describe as the first three steps of the “kill chain”—finding, targeting, and tracking a target—as well as in delivering explosives. The drones have a short life span, since they are often shot down or made useless by frequency jamming devices that prevent pilots from controlling them. Quadcopters—the commercially available drones often used in the war—last just three flights on average, according to the report. 

Drones like these would be far less useful in a possible invasion of Taiwan. “Ukraine-Russia has been a heavily land conflict, whereas conflict between the US and China would be heavily air and sea,” says Zak Kallenborn, a drone analyst and adjunct fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who was not involved in the report but agrees broadly with its projections. The small, off-the-shelf drones popularized in Ukraine have flight times too short for them to be used effectively in the South China Sea. 

An underwater war

Instead, a conflict with Taiwan would likely make use of undersea and maritime drones. With Taiwan just 100 miles away from China’s mainland, the report’s authors say, the Taiwan Strait is where the first days of such a conflict would likely play out. The Zhu Hai Yun , China’s high-tech autonomous carrier, might send its autonomous underwater drones to scout for US submarines. The drones could launch attacks that, even if they did not sink the submarines, might divert the attention and resources of the US and Taiwan. 

It’s also possible China would flood the South China Sea with decoy drone boats to “make it difficult for American missiles and submarines to distinguish between high-value ships and worthless uncrewed commercial vessels,” the authors write.

Though most drone innovation is not focused on maritime applications, these uses are not without precedent: Ukrainian forces drew attention for modifying jet skis to operate via remote control and using them to intimidate and even sink Russian vessels in the Black Sea. 

More autonomy

Drones currently have very little autonomy. They’re typically human-piloted, and though some are capable of autopiloting to a fixed GPS point, that’s generally not very useful in a war scenario, where targets are on the move. But, the report’s authors say, autonomous technology is developing rapidly, and whichever nation possesses a more sophisticated fleet of autonomous drones will hold a significant edge.

What would that look like? Millions of defense research dollars are being spent in the US and China alike on swarming , a strategy where drones navigate autonomously in groups and accomplish tasks. The technology isn’t deployed yet, but if successful, it could be a game-changer in any potential conflict.  

A sea-based conflict might also offer an easier starting ground for AI-driven navigation, because object recognition is easier on the “relatively uncluttered surface of the ocean” than on the ground, the authors write.

China’s advantages

A chief advantage for China in a potential conflict is its proximity to Taiwan; it has more than three dozen air bases within 500 miles, while the closest US base is 478 miles away in Okinawa. But an even bigger advantage is that it produces more drones than any other nation.

“China dominates the commercial drone market, absolutely,” says Stacie Pettyjohn, coauthor of the report and director of the defense program at CNAS. That includes drones of the type used in Ukraine.

For Taiwan to use these Chinese drones for their own defenses, they’d first have to make the purchase, which could be difficult because the Chinese government might move to block it. Then they’d need to hack them and disconnect them from the companies that made them, or else those Chinese manufacturers could turn them off remotely or launch cyberattacks. That sort of hacking is unfeasible at scale, so Taiwan is effectively cut off from the world’s foremost commercial drone supplier and must either make their own drones or find alternative manufacturers, likely in the US. On Wednesday, June 19, the US approved a $360 million sale of 1,000 military-grade drones to Taiwan.

Artificial intelligence

How to opt out of meta’s ai training.

Your posts are a gold mine, especially as companies start to run out of AI training data.

• Melissa Heikkilä archive page

Apple is promising personalized AI in a private cloud. Here’s how that will work.

Apple’s first big salvo in the AI wars makes a bet that people will care about data privacy when automating tasks.

Why does AI hallucinate?

The tendency to make things up is holding chatbots back. But that’s just what they do.

• Will Douglas Heaven archive page

This AI-powered “black box” could make surgery safer

A new smart monitoring system could help doctors avoid mistakes—but it’s also alarming some surgeons and leading to sabotage.

• Simar Bajaj archive page

Stay connected

Get the latest updates from mit technology review.

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at [email protected] with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.

LABS.GOOGLE

Experiment with the future of ai, visual artists x imagen, ai overviews in search, gemini for google workspace.

MUSICFX RADIO

VIDEOFX WITH VEO

LATEST DROP

GOING GLOBAL

IMAGEFX AND MUSICFX

LAB SESSIONS

VISUAL ARTISTS ✕ IMAGEN

Artists endlessly reimagine Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by fine-tuning Imagen 2 to generate infinite images in each of their unique styles.

TEACHER X LLMs

NYU professor and creator of popular YouTube channel The Coding Train, Daniel Shiffman, joins us to explore an AI tool that helps learners on their creative coding journey.

JOURNALIST ✕ LLMs

Video journalist Cleo Abram tries out NotebookLM and riffs with creator Steven Johnson on memory retrieval, fact checking, and second brain workflow.

RAPPER ✕ LLM

GRAMMY® Award-winning artist Lupe Fiasco helps build AI tools for writers, rappers, and wordsmiths.

COMPOSER ✕ GEN AI

Dan Deacon creates a live performance using generative AI tools like MusicFX, Gemini, and Phenaki.

STUDENTS ✕ SIGN LANGUAGE RECOGNITION

Students from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology experiment with AI to make learning sign language easier.

Experiments with Google

A note to our community

Experiments with Google was born out of a simple idea, but you all turned it into something beyond anything we could have ever imagined. You filled it with thousands of experiments that inspired people everywhere - from the classroom to the surface of Mars.

When it comes to the internet, 14 years is a long time. So in the spirit of experimentation we’re trying something new.

This site will continue as a rich archival gallery for all existing experiments. But the action will live on at labs.google, a new place filled with new tools and toys for you to play with. And together we can continue to experiment with the future of technology.

Since 2009, coders have created thousands of amazing experiments using Chrome, Android, AI, AR and more. We're showcasing projects here, along with helpful tools and resources, to inspire others to create new experiments. Here are collections of experiments to explore, with new ones added every week. Have fun.

Featured Collections

View all collections.

WebXR Experiments

AR and VR made for the web

AI Experiments

Celebrating Creativity and AI

Arts & Culture Experiments

See what happens at the crossroads of art and technology

Experiments for Learning

A collection of experiments that teachers, students, and families are using to learn from home.

Start With One

A collection of experiments that started by working with one person to make something impactful for them and their community

Chrome Experiments

Creative code for the web

Recent Experiments

View all experiments, passage of water, instrument playground, cultural icons, say what you see, don’t touch the art, what's happening.

Every print subscription comes with full digital access

Science News

Here’s what goldfish driving ‘cars’ tell us about navigation.

The animals’ sense of direction is not limited to their natural habitat

In a new experiment, several goldfish learned how to drive a motorized water tank.

Matan Samina

Share this:

By Maria Temming

January 10, 2022 at 7:00 am

It might seem like a fish needs a car like — well, like a fish needs a bicycle. But a new experiment suggests that fish actually make pretty good drivers.

In the experiment, several goldfish learned to drive what is essentially the opposite of a submarine — a tank of water on wheels — to destinations in a room. That these fish could maneuver on land suggests that fishes’ understanding of space and navigation is not limited to their natural environment — and perhaps has something in common with landlubber animals’ internal sense of direction, researchers report in the Feb. 15 Behavioural Brain Research .

Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel taught six goldfish to steer a motorized water tank. The fishmobile was equipped with a camera that continually tracked a fish driver’s position and orientation inside the tank. Whenever the fish swam near one of the tank’s walls, facing outward, the vehicle trundled off in that direction.

I am excited to share a new study led by Shachar Givon & @MatanSamina w/ Ohad Ben Shahar: Goldfish can learn to navigate a small robotic vehicle on land. We trained goldfish to drive a wheeled platform that reacts to the fish’s movement ( https://t.co/ZR59Hu9sib ). pic.twitter.com/J5BkuGlZ34 — Ronen Segev (@ronen_segev) January 3, 2022

Fish were schooled on how to drive during about a dozen 30-minute sessions. The researchers trained each fish to drive from the center of a small room toward a pink board on one wall by giving the fish a treat whenever it reached the wall. During their first sessions, the fish averaged about 2.5 successful trips to the target. During their final sessions, fish averaged about 17.5 successful trips. By the end of driver’s ed, the animals also took faster, more direct routes to their goal.

Some of the fish — all named after Pride and Prejudice characters — were speedier learners than others. “Mr. Darcy was the best,” says study coauthor and neuroscientist Ronen Segev.

In further experiments, the goldfish were still able to reach the pink board when starting from random positions around the room, rather than the center. This finding confirmed that the fish had not merely memorized a choreography of movements to reach their reward, but were planning routes toward their prize each time. When the researchers tried to trick the goldfish by placing decoy boards of different colors on the other walls or moving the pink board to the other side of the room, the fish were not fooled, and navigated to the pink board.

“That was pretty conclusive that the fish actually navigate,” says study coauthor Ohad Ben-Shahar, a computer scientist and neuroscience researcher. Recently, the team let a goldfish take a joyride throughout an entire building, Ben-Shahar says, “and it actually started to explore. It went down one of the corridors and started to sneak away.”

Behavioral neuroscientist Kelly Lambert is “not completely surprised, but still intrigued” by the driving abilities of Mr. Darcy and his fish friends. In her own research at the University of Richmond in Virginia, Lambert has taught rats to drive toy cars. But teaching goldfish to navigate such alien terrain takes animal driving experiments to the next level, Lambert says. “I love the fish-out-of-water idea.”

When it comes to testing the bounds of animal navigation, “it’s important to diversify and expand our tasks and our species,” Lambert says. “I think we need an international race between the rats and the goldfish.”

More Stories from Science News on Animals

Can leeches leap? New video may help answer that debate

‘Cull of the Wild’ questions sacrificing wildlife in the name of conservation

Fossil finds amplify Europe’s status as a hotbed of great ape evolution

Horses may have been domesticated twice. Only one attempt stuck

Bird flu can infect cats. What does that mean for their people?

A built-in pocket protector keeps sawfish from ‘sword fighting’ in the womb

Human body lice could harbor the plague and spread it through biting 

Sumatran orangutans start crafting their engineering skills as infants

Subscribers, enter your e-mail address for full access to the Science News archives and digital editions.

Not a subscriber? Become one now .

Science Fun

New Science Experiments For Kids

Enjoy brand new science experiments posted every week. 

Make A Mentos Launcher:

Mini Marshmallow Launcher:

Send Mini Marshmallows Flying

Super Sound Popper:

World’s Easiest Bird Feeder:

Glowing Lava Lamp:

Make Fun Snow That Glows

Bubbling Blizzard:

Friction Fun:

How To Cast An Animal Track:

Make A Homemade Handwarmer:

Awesome Exothermic Reaction Experiment

Panicked Pepper:

Cold Air Balloon:

Make A Homemade Cold Pack:

Scared Cinnamon:

Cinnamon And Soap Don’t Mix

Giant Fingerprints:

Crazy Cocoa Powder:

Easy Film Canister Rocket:

Easiest Way To Break Your Own Geode:

Build Your Own Balance Buddy:

Super Easy Pan Flute:

Jumbo Water Bead Balloon:

Bug On A Leash:

Crazy Kazoo:

Duck In A Cup:

DIY Hydrophobic Sand:

Collect And Study Real Animal Tracks

Real Glowing Rocks:

Little Birdie Snack Bar:

Burp In A Bag:

Fabulous Floating Rocks:

Can Rocks Really Float?

Looney Lodestone:

Cloud In A Bottle:

Outrageously Easy Oobleck:

Rip Roaring Balloon:

Easy Oobleck Excavation:

Rocket Blast Balloon:

Exploding Baggie:

Flameproof Balloon:

Make A Balloon Resistant To Flames

Magic Firefighter:

Ice Fishing Adventure:

Discover Your Own DNA:

Find Out What You’re Really Made Of

Eating Iron For Breakfast:

Feeling A Little Rusty This Morning?

Snot Slime:

Explore Amazing Mucus And Spectacular Snot

Sunscreen And Skin:

Catching Rays… And Blocking Them

Does Land Heat Up Faster Than Water?

Make A Wind Vane:

DIY Barometer:

Make A Rock In A Cup:

Super Sedimentary Science Experiment

How Are Fold Mountains Formed?:

Mimic The Making Of Mountains

Rock Acid Test:

Identify Minerals With Sizzling Science

Understanding The Rock Cycle:

The Rock Cycle Rocks!

Super Seed Jar:

Examine What Seeds Do Underground

Making Oxygen:

Watch Plants Make The Air You Breath

Plant Trap:

Sprouting Seeds:

Easy Constellation Projector:

Is Your House Moving?:

Watch Stars Travel Across The Night Sky

Revolution Versus Rotation:

Make A Sundial:

Water In The Air:

Make A Rain Gauge:

Create A Device To Measure Precipitation

Cutting String With The Sun:

The Greenhouse Effect:

Flatulence Fun:

Have Fun Learning About Farts

Measure Lung Capacity:

See How Much Air Your Lungs Hold

Sweet Tooth:

This Experiment Will Make You Want To Brush Your Teeth

Baffling Balance:

Can You Balance Blindfolded?

Disappearing Reflection:

Leakproof Baggie:

Poke Pencils Through A Baggie Of Water

Magic Water Cup:

Egg In A Bottle:

Cup Of Lava:

Baby Elephant’s Toothpaste:

Create A Foamy Chemical Reaction

Easy Invisible Ink:

Awesome Eruption:

Glowing Constellations:

How Are Craters Formed:

Explore Craters On The Moon’s Surface

Erupting Moon Rocks:

Eat Like An Astronaut:

Strength Test:

Magic Ball:

Observe Centrifugal Force In Action

Can A Light Weight Lift A Heavy Weight?:

Coin In A Cup:

Observing Inertia:

Coin Flick:

Magically Remove The Bottom Coin

Hammer Head:

Seemingly Defy Gravity

Galileo’s Swinging Strings:

Smog In A Jar:

Explore And Observe Air Pollution 

Compost In A Bottle:

Turn Trash Into Fertile Soil

Investigate Pollution And Precipitation

Make A Paper Straw:

Alternatives To One Time Use Plastics

Do Earthworms Like Light:

How Do Animals Hide:

Learn How Animals Use Camouflage To Survive

Why Are Eggs Egg Shaped:

Make An Animal Track Station:

Crazy Chalk:

Dancing Rice:

These Grains Of Rice Have Some Moves

Bubbling Slime:

Rubber Egg:

Cotton Ball Catapult:

Rapid Rubber Band Launcher:

Send A Bunch Of Rubber Bands Flying

Water Balloon Physics:

Centrifugal Force: 

Rainbow Crystals:

Grow Rock Candy Crystals:

This Crystal Science Experiment Is Sweet

Salt Crystals:

Grow Your Own Crystal Garden:

Use Straws To Reduce Friction:

Find A Hard Boiled Egg:

Use Spinning Science In This Experiment

Unbreakable Thread:

Magic Napkin:

Make A Marshmallow Popper:

Mentos And Soda Eruption:

A Crazy Candy Reaction That Erupts

DIY Science Soda:

Candy Container Popper:

Dancing Corn:

Non-Newtonian Goo:

Easy Oobleck Experiment

Lemon Penny Polish:

Big Stick Balance:

Color Changing Slime:

Create Colorful Super Absorbent Crystals 

Which Is Hotter?:

Rainbow Celery:

Bending Straw Illusion:

Walk On Water:

Explore An Awesome Non-Newtonian Material

Magnetic Wand:

Diving Egg:

Stab A Potato:

Traveling Toothpicks:

Surface Tension And Toothpicks Do Mix

Balance A House On Your Finger:

Ruler Race:

Catch An Ice Cube:

Frozen Water Is A Lot Of Fun

Make A Rainbow:

Refract Water And Make A Mini Rainbow

Which Water Leaks Faster?:

See If Hot Or Cold Water Drips Faster

Make A Water Filter:

Can You Make Clean Water With Sand And Pebbles? 

Secret Message:

Turn A Penny Green:

Make A Blueish-Green Compound

Rocket Boat:

Shiny Stuff:

Upside Down Reflection:

What Things Rust:

Explore Rust And Things That Rust

Bag Full Of States Of Matter:

Cork Challenge:

Underwater Volcanos:

Explore Ocean Currents And Underwater Geography

Coastal Erosion:

Examine Shifting Shorelines

Seashells And Vinegar:

Making Waves With Chemical Reactions

Frozen Ocean:

Can The Ocean Freeze?

Stop A Strainer:

Make A Simple Sundial:

Use The Sun To Tell Time

Googly Eye Slime:

Snow On The Pond:

Jumping Pepper:

Use Static Electricity To Make Pepper Pop

Magic Bending Water:

Make An Electromagnetic Train:

Electrical Goo:

Use Static Electricity To Control Goo

Sugar Rush:

Red Cabbage Litmus Paper:

Make Litmus Paper In Your Kitchen

Lemon Electricity:

Create Curds And Whey:

Balloon In A Bottle:

Balloon Speakers:

Rock Out With This Balloon Sound System

Balloon Powered Lightbulb:

Tabletop Balloon Water Fountain:

Mystical Mustard Packet:

Walking On Eggs:

Don’t Scramble These Eggs

Quarter Catch:

Make An Anemometer:

Observing Air Pressure:

See The Power Of Air Pressure In This Experiment

Why Do We Have Seasons?:

Why Is Winter Colder Than Summer?:

Understanding Air Pressure:

Build A Barometer:

Make A Meteorological Instrument To Measure Air Pressure

Cold Front:

How Far Away Is Lightning?:

Bowl Of Life:

You May Not Expect What These Grow Into

Sprout A Lemon Seed:

Become A Budding Botanist

Grow A Colony Of Mold:

Check Your Pulse:

Walking Rainbow:

Pulling Colors Apart:

Use Science To Separate Colors

Colorful Crystals:

Rainbow Skittles:

Make A Bridge Collapse:

Create An Engineering Failure

Can Paper Hold Your Weight?:

Test Material Strength And Load Bearing

Homemade Kaleidoscope:

Build A Contraption To “See” Science In Action

Make A Marble Run:

Use Engineering To Explore Gravity And Friction

Exploding Stomach:

Is That Your Tummy Rumbling?

Bad Taste In Your Mouth:

Things That Make You Go “Yuck!”

How Does An Eye Work?

Use Science To See Upside Down

What Do Taste Buds Taste?:

Oh, That’s Yummy… Or Is It?

Squishy Slime Balloon:

States Of Matter Balloon:

The Gas In This Balloon “Matters”

Make A Mini Hovercraft:

Expanding Air Balloon:

Pet Tornado:

Crazy Quicksand:

Make Quicksand With Cornstarch

CD Hovercraft:

Bean In A Bag:

Clucking Chicken In A Cup:

Talking String:

Teach A String To Talk

Trombone Straw:

Noisy Paper:

Compass Challenge:

Explore Magnetism With This Cool Challenge

Mystical Magnetic Field:

See Invisible Magnetic Fields

Can You Trick A Vending Machine?:

Magnetic Slime:

Rain In A Jar:

Reverse Water Spout:

Explore This Bizarre Weather Phenomenon

Winter At The Beach:

Why Is Summer So Hot?:

Crystal Garden:

Baking Soda Balloon:

Inflate A Balloon With A Chemical Reaction

Train Horn:

Really Rusty:

Turn Milk Into Plastic:

Orange Splash:

Explore High Diving Fruit And Physics

Rotten Banana:

Dirty Pennies:

Baking Soda And Vinegar Volcano:

Apples And Lemons:

How Do You Like Them Apples?

Smashing Seashells:

Foam At The Mouth:

Lemon Science Soda:

Can An Egg Float?:

Use Science To Float An Egg

Fat Food Test:

Secret Code On An Egg:

Why Does A Boat Float?:

Sugar Water Density Test:

Use Density To Make A Water Rainbow

Floating Grapes:

Can An Egg Float In The Ocean?:

Lava Lamp #2:

Disco Dancing Raisins:

These Raisins Know How To Boogie

Crazy Ketchup:

Pop Rocket:

Make A Model Back Bone:

Explore The Human Spine

Invisible Images:

What You See Is Not Always What You Get

Lung Capacity:

How Much Air Can You Hold?

Reaction Time:

Are You Quick Enough For This Experiment?

Liquid Sandwich:

Oil And Water Flip:

This Experiment Will Flip Your Opinion Of Density

Do Oil And Water Mix?:

Floating Water:

Blow A Bubble Inside A Bubble:

Lost At Sea:

Learn How To Trick A Compass

Trap A Tornado:

Snow Slime:

Copper Plated Nails:

Explore Physics With This Experiment

Super Bubble Solution:

Bubbling Buttons:

Film Canister Popper:

Styrofoam Slime:

Make Science Slime Even Better

Blow Up A Balloon With A Lemon:

Easy Science Experiments For Kids:

Kitchen Chemistry:

Cook Up Some Crazy Chemistry In Your Kitchen

Cool And Crazy Concoctions:

Electricity And Magnetism:

Shockingly Easy Electricity And Magnetism Experiments

Magic Science Experiments :

Seemingly Magical Science Experiments

Force And Motion:

Fun Force And Motion Science Experiments

Balloon Science Experiments:

Color Science Experiments:

Chemical Reactions:

Create Awesome Chemical Reactions

Amazing Animal Activities:

Learn About Animals Aquariums And More

Weather And Air Experiments:

Easy Density Experiments:

Sink Or Swim With These Awesome Density Experiments

Light And Sound Science Experiments:

These Science Experiments Look And Sound Amazing

Dinosaur And Fossil Fun:

Enter A Wonderful World Of Dinosaur Experiments

Rocket Science And Space Experiments:

Blast Off With The Cool Space Science Experiments

Candy Science Experiments:

Sweet Science Experiments To Explore And Enjoy

Crazy Crystals:

Crystal Growing Science Experiments

Botany And Biology:

Explore Living Things With These Experiments

Geology Rocks:

Dig Into Fun And Exciting Geological Experiments

Human Body:

Learn About The Human Body And How It Works

Ocean And Marine Animals:

Dive Into The Deep With These Ocean Experiments

STEM And Engineering Activities:

Design And Build Amazing Creations

Ecology Science Experiments:

Learn About The World Around You

Wacky Water Experiments:

Weird And Wonderful Water Experiments

trending now in US News

Hiker's legs went totally numb on a mountain hike — and the...

Migrant charged with murder of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray was...

Trans woman accused of killing parents made chilling admission to...

Map shows Chinese-owned farmland next to 19 US military bases in...

Posh NYC nightclub frequented by Eric Adams boots conservative...

Raunchy video of women twerking in thongs at NJ high school...

Kindergartner and mom killed after being hit by NY school bus

Donald Trump calls mom of Rachel Morin, jogger murdered by...

Breaking news, fauci says backlash over painful beagle experiments he signed off on was ‘lies’ in new book: ‘lunacy’.

• View Author Archive
• Get author RSS feed

Thanks for contacting us. We've received your submission.

Dr. Anthony Fauci writes in a new book that public backlash he faced over funding painful experiments on beagle puppies was “lies” and “lunacy” from the “far-right” — despite acknowledging in recent congressional testimony that he “signed off” on the “peer-reviewed” research.

In “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service,” the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director never admits to approving a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant for a lab in Tunisia and dismisses it as a right-wing fever dream that fueled attacks from Republicans against him in fall 2021 .

“You really cannot make this stuff up! Though, of course, they did,” Fauci writes of the $375,000 grant that forced the snouts of sedated pooches into mesh cages to be feasted on by sand flies that had been food-deprived for 24 hours.

“These off-the-wall accusations were particularly bothersome to me for two reasons,” he adds. “NIH-funded research that involves animals is conducted under strict guidelines for the use and care of laboratory animals, and I am a passionate animal lover, especially of dogs.”

The beagles were later euthanized, according to internal NIAID grant documents later obtained by the taxpayer watchdog group White Coat Waste Project.

Fauci goes on in the book to decry the media frenzy around the research — which came from both sides of the political divide — as “lunacy” but recalls taking consolation in an unexpected phone call from “a familiar and welcome” public figure: Barack Obama.

“The former president asked me how I was holding up under this onslaught of lies,” the doc writes.

In a public hearing before a House committee earlier this month, however, Fauci was asked directly about the research by Staten Island GOP Rep. Nicole Malliotakis — and acknowledged that he approved it.

“I signed off on them because they were approved by a peer review,” Fauci told members of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

The experiments were first reported by White Coat Waste Project, which was founded by former Republican strategist Anthony Bellotti in 2013 and advocates for the elimination of federally funded animal research.

“Beaglegate is Fauci’s Achilles’ heel, which is why in his new book he’s still frantically fibbing about it even though White Coat Waste Project has receipts for his bankrolling of beagle torture in Tunisia,” Bellotti told The Post, pointing to a trove of internal NIAID documents confirming the research.

The Washington Post fact-checked the matter after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) lambasted Fauci in the same hearing by holding up a picture of the beagles taken while they were under experimentation.

In its report, the outlet noted that NIAID removed the project from its grant database without explanation following press inquiries in late 2021 — and that an editor of a journal that published the research admitted in back-channel communications to a conflict of interest after trying to edit out information about the agency’s funding.

“Moreover, the NIH study in Tunisia that the agency said it funded was cast in a positive light that is undermined by the grant application that has since been made public,” wrote Washington Post “chief fact-checker” Glenn Kessler.

“The Washington Post admitted we were right and that Fauci funded it and NIH then fabricated and fed the paper disinformation about dog testing to defend ‘America’s Doctor’ and discredit us,” Bellotti said.

Nor were Republicans and GOP-linked groups the only ones to decry the beagle testing.

In October 2021, the left-wing group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) issued a statement saying, “NIH’s denial that Fauci’s agency funded the beagle atrocity is a little too convenient.”

“Is rewriting history the new defense against complicity in torture?” asked PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo, who pointed to a similar experiment on monkeys that the NIH had dismissed as a mistake.

Share this article:

Advertisement

site categories

Lil rel howery & knowledge beckom bringing whats funny comedy festival to chicago in september, breaking news.

• Dark Universe Revealed: New World At Universal Orlando’s Epic Universe Will Include Werewolf Coaster & Frankenstein’s Experiment Gone Awry

By Tom Tapp

Deputy Managing Editor

More Stories By Tom

• “Born To Kill” Phrase On ‘Full Metal Jacket’ Movie Art To Be Restored On Prime Video After Backlash
• Jonathan Axelrod Dies: ABC & Columbia TV Exec, Producer Of ‘Dave’s World’ Was 74

Today Universal revealed the scope and specifics of Dark Universe – one of the five immersive worlds to be featured at the all-new Universal Epic Universe opening in 2025. Those five worlds are Celestial Park, the first world visitors encounter, that serves as a portal the to the other four — The Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Ministry of Magic; Super Nintendo World;  How To Train Your Dragon – Isle of Berk ; and Dark Universe.

Related Stories

Universal Studios Orlando Reveals New Rides, Donkey Kong Country Planned For Super Nintendo World At Epic Universe – See Images & Video

Universal Offers First In-Depth Look At How To Train Your Dragon – Isle Of Berk World Coming To Epic Universe In Orlando

The journey into Dark Universe begins the moment guests enter its electrified portal, which is said to “harness the dark energy of Darkmoor.”

As guests venture through Darkmoor – the ravaged village within Dark Universe – they’ll encounter the characters and subjects of Frankenstein’s experiments within a theme park environment that offers family-friendly fun while also pushing the boundaries on intensity.

Individual experiences include a ride called Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment, the Curse of the Werewolf coaster, a Darkmoor Monster Makeup Experience and an up-close opportunity to Meet the Monsters.

Deep in the woods that sit on the edge of Darkmoor, guests will find Curse of the Werewolf , a spinning family coaster inspired by The Wolf Man . Entering The Guild of Mystics guests will be greeted by the Maleva, the guild’s all-knowing seer and leader, who warns them that they bear the mark of the werewolf. Guests then board a wagon and venture into the forest, racing to escape the werewolves before they become one themselves.

Guests of all ages can don elaborate face paint and temporary tattoos at Darkmoor Monster Makeup Experience . Here, monster makers have converted Dr. Pretorius’ infamous old lab into a parlor and skilled artisans use their talents to transform guests into a likeness of their favorite Universal Monsters.

Meet the Monsters : The Monsters of Darkmoor are greet everyone from kids to adults in this photo op. The rogues gallery includes Dr. Victoria Frankenstein’s Monster and the alluring Bride of Frankenstein. Guests will also encounter other unusual inhabitants roaming the village, including Victoria Frankenstein’s servant, Ygor, The Invisible Man, an eccentric monster hunter and a talented musician who regales guests with songs and tales related to classic monster stories.

Brian Roberts, CEO of NBCUniversal parent Comcast, was ecstatic about Universal’s fourth theme park and most ambitious theme park on an earnings call with Wall Streeters in January. He called it “completely original” and “the most exciting project I’ve seen since we bought” NBCUniversal. “We are so excited, we are taking the board of directors to see the construction, which is something we have never done before.”

With Epic likely to drive visitors and boost the park’s market share, Comcast-owned NBCU is adding thousands of hotel rooms. The Orlando airport is building a new terminal, which will add capacity. The Epic property will be about three miles from the existing parks on the “north campus,” or a 25-minute ride on a road the company’s rebuilt to include a median for a dedicated Universal fleet of electric buses.

Must Read Stories

More ‘st. elmo’s fire’ sony explores reuniting cast of brat pack movie.

‘Yellowstone’ Finally Gets Premiere Date For Second Half Of Its Final Season 5

Jonathan majors to star in indie thriller ‘merciless’ from martin villeneuve, big names sign letter urging amptp to bargain fair contract with iatse, crafts.

Subscribe to Deadline Breaking News Alerts and keep your inbox happy.

Read More About:

Deadline is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Deadline Hollywood, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Canada Letter

Shattered by montreal mind-control experiments, but undeterred in a suit.

Families of patients in a Cold War-era mind-control experiment in Montreal are pressing forward after a recent setback in their class-action lawsuit.

By Vjosa Isai

Every weekend was an adventure for Julie Tanny when she was a young girl.

Her father, Charles, made sure of it, surprising his three children with trips and visits to the amusement park. His warmth radiated physically, too, when he would rub his children’s ice-cold feet back to life after a skate at their backyard rink in Montreal.

Everything changed in the winter of 1957. A tooth filling gone awry spurred an excruciating neurological condition that stumped five of his doctors. They referred him to the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital at McGill University in Montreal, where he was admitted for three months of treatment.

When Ms. Tanny’s father was released, the man who came home was distant, irate, confused and physically abusive. He did not remember that he owned a snowblower business. He was barely able to recognize his family.

It was as though his brain had been reprogrammed.

As Ms. Tanny would later learn, it largely was. Her father had unknowingly become a patient of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist running a secret mind-control experiment claimed to be funded by the Central Intelligence Agency as part of a Cold War-era program known as MK-ULTRA.

“He was like a shell of what he was before,” Ms. Tanny, a retired wholesale jeweler, said. “He was just a completely different person.”

Ms. Tanny, 70, is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed in 2019 against the institutions linked to the experiment and the Canadian and United States governments. About 400 people, mostly families of former patients who were treated at the clinic between 1948 and 1964, have joined the effort, she said.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .