A New Laser Weapon Just Unveiled

US navy deploys the first laser weapon to protect ships in the Persian gulf.The LAWS, an acronym for Laser Weapons System,  It is deployed on board the USS Ponce amphibious transport ship.  

Since Laser travels with velocity of light its the fastest weapon and its 50000 times faster than an incoming ICBM .The $40 million system requires a team of three to operate it and a small generator to power its electricity supply, according to the Navy. The best part is it only costs American taxpayers about $1 per shot.

It operates in an invisible part of the electromagnetic spectrum so you don't see the beam, it doesn't make any sound, it's completely silent and it's incredibly effective at what it does according to Lt. Cale Hughes, laser weapons system officer.

Air-based laser weapon systems offer flexibility and precision for self defense against aircraft and missiles and weapons on the ground. 

Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking

We know that the Bosons are force carriers namely photon ,W and Z bosons (W+ W- an Z0) ,graviton and Gluon. Gluons mediate the interactions of the strong nuclear force, which binds together quarks to form protons and neutrons also holds the protons and neutrons together within an atom's nucleus.Photons are responsible for electromagnetic interactions,where as W and Z bosons are weak forces.

At enegies greater than 100 Gev these particles photons, W and Z bosons are essentially identical, the weak and electromagnetic interactions were manifestations of a single force but The Weinberg–Salam (spontaneous symmetry breaking) theory predicts that, at lower energies, this symmetry is broken so that the massless photon and the massive W and Z bosons emerge.

The question of how the W and Z got so much mass in the spontaneous symmetry breaking is still a perplexing one.The symmetry-breaking mechanism is called a Higgs field, and requires a new boson, the Higgs boson to mediate it.The graviton is a theoretical particle which has not yet been experimentally detected.

The name boson comes from the surname of Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, a brilliant physicist from the early twentieth century who worked with Albert Einstein to develop a method of analysis called Bose-Einstein statistics.

One of the most dramatic effect of Bose-Einstein statistics is the prediction that bosons can overlap and coexist with other bosons. Fermions, on the other hand, can not do this, because they follow the Pauli Exclusion Principle which states that no two particles can have all 4 quantum numbers or quantum state same they have to differ in at least in one of them.

Einstein tried to show that under the appropriate conditions that is at very high energies prevailed at the big bang, all the fundamental forces of nature could be described as a unified single force. 

New Particle XI-CC++ Discovered

Scientists at CERN discovered a new particle called or named Xi-cc++ pronounced as (Ka-sigh-see-see-plus-plus) which is a doubly charmed Baryon.It consisting of two charm quarks and an up quark weighs approximately 3621 MeV where as a proton with two up quarks and one down quark weighs 938Mev. Both neutron and proton are baryons.As we know baryons are 3 quark particle and mesons are two quark particles basically a quark and anti-quark.

There are totally 6 quarks, the up (u),d own(d),strange(S) are light where as charm(c) ,Bottom(b) and Top (t) are heavy. Scientists predict there are many different combinations that can make up baryons. Until now the only baryons observed contain two light quarks and one heavy quark. Standard model also predicted the existence of heavy baryons made up of heavy charm quarks.This new particle may lead more insight into the strong interactions.

In contrast to other baryons, in which the three quarks perform an elaborate dance around each other, a doubly heavy baryon is expected to act like a planetary system, where the two heavy quarks play the role of heavy stars orbiting one around the other, with the lighter quark orbiting around this binary system, added Guy Wilkinson, former Spokesperson of the collaboration. 

  

Quantum Computers

Quantum computing is based on the concept of quantum nature of particles. Instead of just binary digits 0 and 1,  quantum computation works on several possibilities a quantum state can have. The basic unit of information in quantum computers is quantum bits or qubits. Any two or more quantum states can be added together superposed and the result will be another valid quantum state, conversely every quantum state can be represented as a sum of two or more other distinct states.

Quantum computing primarily employs two important concepts of quantum physics, superposition and quantum entanglement. In superposition particles are thought of as existing across all the possible states at the same time.However, once a measurement of a particle is made, and for example its energy or position is known, the superposition is lost and now we have a particle in one known state.

Quantum entanglement means that multiple particles are linked together in a way such that the measurement of one particle's quantum state determines the possible quantum states of the other particles even if they separated by several light years. Changing one particle will induce a change in the other.

A 2-bit register in an ordinary computer can store only one of four binary configurations (00, 01, 10, or 11) at any given time, a 2-qubit register in a quantum computer can store all four numbers simultaneously or combination of any two or more configurations because each qubit represents two values,That is a qubit can store a zero, a one, both zero and one, or an infinite number of values in between and be in multiple states (store multiple values) at the same time! If more qubits are added, the increased capacity is expanded exponentially.

It is extremely difficult to get particles to behave in the proper way for a significant length of time. A major difficulty in quantum computing has been any disturbance in a quantum system say a stray photon or wave of EM radiation causes the quantum state to collapse, a process known as decoherence. A quantum computer must be totally isolated from all external interference during the computation phase. Some success has been achieved with the use of qubits in intense magnetic fields, with the use of ions.

Although a fully functioning quantum computer is a longer-term goal, many fundamental and practical discoveries have been made in the name of quantum computing.

A team of NASA and Google engineers announced the D-Wave computer, running an optimization problem, came up with an answer 100 million times faster than a conventional computer with a single core processor. What a D-Wave machine does in a second would take a conventional computer with a single core 10,000 years to perform a similar task.

IBM made a new superconducting chip demonstrates a technique crucial to the development of quantum computers. Google, NASA, Microsoft, IBM, and the U.S. government are all working on this new technology.

  

Russian Telescope detects an Alien Signal?

Russian Astronomers claimed to have detected a strong signal from space actually 95 light years away from a star named HD164595 in the Hercules constellation. The star Contains a planet within it which is the size of Neptune and appears to have the right conditions for supporting life.

Seti(Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute) a private organization, searches the skies for alien life. Seth Shostak, the director for the Center for SETI Research, cautions people to curb their enthusiasm. There are many different possible explanations for what caused the detection.

SETI's Allen Telescope Array, based in northern California is looking for another signal by pointing their radio telescopes in that direction to see if it can pick up a repeat transmission. 

Gravitational Lensing

Gravitational lensing is the warping of light around objects in space that have a strong gravitational pull like our sun.Einstein general theory of relativity describes how gravity can distort the path of light, altering its trajectory.

 

Lensing can produce multiple images of a distant source a phenomenon termed strong lensing. The foreground lens is a galaxy and when the background source is a quasar or resolved jet, the strong lensed images are usually point-like multiple images; When the background source is a galaxy or extended jet emission, the strong lensed images can be arcs or rings.

 

Microlensing ,the temporary brightening of a star due to the magnification induced by a foreground object that crosses the line of sight to the observer. Microlensing has also been effective in the detection of exoplanets as well.

 

Weak gravitational lensing holds enormous promise in observational cosmology, as the technique, properly employed, can reveal the distribution of dark matter independently of any assumptions about its nature. Dark matter does have mass so we can use gravitational lensing to map the dark matter in the universe.

 

We can use the effect to peer deeper into the Universe than would otherwise be possible with our conventional telescopes. In fact, the most distant galaxies ever observed, ones seen just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, were all discovered using gravitational lensing. Astronomers use gravitational microlensing to detect planets around other stars. The foreground star acts as a lens for a background star.

 

 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/for-first-time-einsteins-relativity-used-to-weigh-a-star/?WT.mc_id=SA_TW_SPC_NEWS&sf86652721=1