EP 25 · 44:13

Rundown — Matter from “nothing” (RHIC, lambda hyperons, spin correlations)

From Plants, Quantum Sensors, and Predicting Cancer Evolution

Episode
14/23
A plant missing enzyme solves a 50-year biosynthesis mystery, entangled atomic clouds push quantum sensing beyond the SQL, and ALFA-K predicts how aneuploid cancers evolve under treatment.
Transcript

1,336 words · auto-generated from the episode video

44:14a quark gluon plasma. >> Quarks are the particles. Gluons are the force carriers of the strong nuclear force. That's the thing that binds a nucleus together. Because if you think about it, the nucleus is a bunch of positive charge, right? Protons on top of protons on top of protons. All that positive charge wants to get away from the other positive charges because electromagnetism wants wants it to leave. But what keeps them together is the strong nuclear force which overpowers the the electromagnetic force. >> The strong nuclear force is very very weird. Because if you think about gravity and electromagnetism, um the farther you get, the weaker the

44:55force. >> The strong nuclear force up to a certain length scale, the farther you get, the stronger the force. It's very weird. It leads to something called quark confinement, which is the this idea that if I have two quirks that are right next to each other >> and I start spreading them apart, the force between them is going to get bigger. What does that really mean? That means the energy density in between them is going to get really big. At some point, the energy density is going to be enough where two quirks pop out of existence >> out of the out of just the gluon energy that's there, right? And so, you're never going to see quirks on their own. So, it's been really hard to study how protons form because you never see the individual constituents on their own.

45:38Does that make sense? >> Okay. This new paper is about a technique that lets us study that formation process >> without really relying on trying to see a single quark on its own. >> Okay. >> Okay. This is from the star collaboration at the Brook Haven National Lab. They have something called the relativistic heavy ion collider. This is the largest particle collider that we have at in um the US. Although, you know, people at Firmeny Lab might disagree with that. Depends on what you're trying trying to talk If you're from Fmy Lab and you want to complain about that factoid, please put it in the comments. >> Yeah, go ahead. And so what what happens is in this relativistic heavy ion collider, there's a ton of energy,

46:18right? And sometimes what you get is a strange and an anti-range quark that pops out of the vacuum just from vacuum fluctuations. Now vacuum fluctuations meaning the quantum vacuum is the lowest energy state. But because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that lowest energy state is still going to have a tiny bit of jiggle, right? And that jiggle means there's really particles popping in and out of existence. Sometimes you get a strange and an anti- strange particle that pop in and out of existence that could borrow energy from this high collision that we're getting inside this collider. And when it borrows energy, it turns into a cousin of the proton called the

47:00lambda hyperon. So, it's still three quarks. The proton is up, up, down, and the neutron is up, down, down. Those are the three quirks that make up the proton and the neutron. Here, you've got a strange up down or a strange up. That's this lambda hyperon. So, it's like a cousin of the proton. You're going to get the lambda particle and the anti- lambda particle because you always have to conserve charge and all this other stuff. But the spins of these guys are going to be correlated because the strange >> the strange quirks that came out of the vacuum have correlated spins, >> right? >> And what they could do is measure the spin correlations of these particles.

47:41>> Okay? >> When you do that, that's something I can actually measure, right? I can I can wait for these lambda particles to decay into different products, measure the angular momentum of all these different products, figure out what the original spin was, and then I could see if these two are correlated because they, you know, formed at the same time, things like that. >> Mhm. >> What's cool is this gives a way to think about how hadrons form without having to worry about trying to observe individual quirks. Now, we can actually peer into this process of how does that three constituent particle form from a thing out of the vacuum. How does that spin correlate? If they're closer together, there's higher correlation. If they're

48:22farther apart, there's less correlation. And you know, it's kind of cool because the relativistic heavy ion collider is retiring now and it's going to become part of something much bigger called the electron ion collider. Um, it's part of the DOE. what they're doing is building with the existing infrastructure at Brook Haven this larger collider now. So this is one of the last things that it did but it's and it's very fundamental. It was it was in um nature out of the star collaboration. It's kind of a you know um the swansong of that collider and it's it's quite fundamental. It's people are very excited. >> Just a quick point of order for those who don't know the DOE is the department of energy. Mhm.

49:03>> Uh they are the federal agency which is in charge of all of our nuclear weapons for example and anything that has a nexus to atomic or nuclear energy weapons and fundamental research in those categories. >> And what's interesting about this it sort of sounds like we basically have found it's this whole tracing mechanism similarly to our past story. It's like we found a way to look at the derivative products or outcomes >> and then reverse engineer >> with math what the where they came from which allows us to not have to worry about the ability to observe >> because we have enough data to get to the original state derivative

49:44observations. >> Yeah. Yeah. And this is a common technique in particle physics like when we when we found the Higs Bzon for example at CERN right again it's always these decay products that you want to catch and then from that reconstitute what the Higs was what is the mass of the Higs so on and so forth so this is doing it but now it's actually looking at spin looking at the angular momentum of these tiny little objects and trying to make it happen right they're trying to trace back what's happening with the quantum vacuum >> you know why I love the story. >> Of course, >> cuz if we're talking about the quantum vacuum or vacuum energy, obviously we have to talk about zero point energy.

50:25>> Yeah. >> And that's how the aliens are getting here guys. >> Exactly. >> It's obviously they figured out how to manifest and utilize vacuum energy in a very similar way to maybe how we're describing. >> Yeah, dude. Not proven. I'm sort of just putting it out there, getting it into your minds, letting it ruminate a little bit. Maybe we'll have a future research story that actually points to it, but we're not quite there yet. >> But speaking of the quantum, we're going to end the rundown here and we are going to go into our story number two, which is a quantum sensing story. Uh the question here or the idea here is

51:06we have this new multiparameter estimation with an array of entangled atomic sensors. This was published in science in January from the University of Basil >> as well as uh Sorbon in France the laboratory Castal Brousel. >> Um and the some one of us can kind of pronounce French stuff. Um and the idea here is how can quantum entanglement revolutionize uh measurement precision. Yeah. >> And that appears to be what we have going on here. >> Yes. Um measurement precision is very

From the episode
  1. EP 25

    Plants, Quantum Sensors, and Predicting Cancer Evolution

    A plant enzyme breakthrough, entangled quantum sensors, and cancer evolution forecasting.

    A plant missing enzyme solves a 50-year biosynthesis mystery, entangled atomic clouds push quantum sensing beyond the SQL, and ALFA-K predicts how aneuploid cancers evolve under treatment.