{"id":1061,"date":"2007-01-25T10:40:29","date_gmt":"2007-01-25T10:40:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/01\/25\/physics-news-roundup\/"},"modified":"2007-01-25T10:40:29","modified_gmt":"2007-01-25T10:40:29","slug":"physics-news-roundup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/01\/25\/physics-news-roundup\/","title":{"rendered":"Physics News Round-Up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been collecting a bunch of little news squibs from the IoP and the APS over the last week or so, and I keep saying that I&#8217;m going to do a nice long post explaining each of the experiments. And my actual job keeps eating my life, what with candidate interviews, committee meetings, class prep, and lab set-up. And, of course, those news items are becoming less current with every passing day&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>In lieu of a lengthy and detailed explanation of each, then, here&#8217;s a short list of physics stories that have caught my eye. If there&#8217;s a great clamor for a more detailed explanation of any of these, I&#8217;ll try to put one together over the weekend. For the moment, I have to go do a lab about the boring old photo-electric effect, while you can click through to read about single photon data storage, new advances in quantum computing, and signals travelling backwards in time (maybe)&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We&#8217;ll start with a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eurekalert.org\/pub_releases\/2007-01\/uor-uos011907.php\">slightly garbled press release<\/a> and a <a href=\"http:\/\/physicsweb.org\/articles\/news\/11\/1\/19\/1?rss=2.0\">much clearer news story<\/a> regarding an experiment at Rochester using &#8220;slow light&#8221; to store image information with single photons. The description is a little confusing, because the images shown are actually the sum of many single-photon detections&#8211; a single photon does not make the &#8220;U&#8221; pattern shown in the picture. At least, I don&#8217;t think it does&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Coherence* has links to <a href=\"http:\/\/superconducting.blogspot.com\/2007\/01\/high-speed-linear-optics-quantum.html\">two interesting experiments<\/a>, the first of which is a new development in linear optics quantum computation. The idea here is that they&#8217;ve run some quantum algorithms in a system using nothing but beamsplitters, polarizers, and waveplates, and they&#8217;ve implemented a &#8220;feed-forward&#8221; system to speed up the results. It sounds cool, but I&#8217;ll need to take a look at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/nature\/journal\/v445\/n7123\/abs\/nature05346.html\">actual paper<\/a> (in <cite>Nature<\/cite>, who are bastards about online access) for this one, because the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hpcwire.com\/hpc\/1199598.html\">press summary<\/a> is hopeless. <\/li>\n<li>Also via that Coherence* post, a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfgate.com\/cgi-bin\/article.cgi?f=\/c\/a\/2007\/01\/21\/ING5LNJSBF1.DTL\">proposed experiment<\/a> to look for &#8220;retrocausailty&#8221; by sending correlated photons through two double-slit set-ups at different times. The idea is to have one photon of an entangled pair hit a detector that will either show a particle pattern or a wave pattern, depending on its position, and show that the other particle of the pair produces the same result. The twist is that the second particle hits first&#8211; the plan is to delay the measurement that makes the particle\/ wave determination until after the measurement of the correlated photon, and see what happens. According to the &#8220;Transactional Interpretation&#8221; favored by John Cramer, there should be a signal travelling backwards in time to determine the result of the earlier measurement, and this might be a way to test that.<\/li>\n<li>Just for completeness, let me note a <a href=\"http:\/\/physicsweb.org\/articles\/news\/11\/1\/21\/1?rss=2.0\">Physics Web news story<\/a> about an experiment I mentioned here a while back, looking at the quantum statistics of atoms. This is great stuff.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been collecting a bunch of little news squibs from the IoP and the APS over the last week or so, and I keep saying that I&#8217;m going to do a nice long post explaining each of the experiments. And my actual job keeps eating my life, what with candidate interviews, committee meetings, class prep,&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/01\/25\/physics-news-roundup\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Physics News Round-Up<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}