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RESEARCHERS HAVE DISCOVERED SOMETHING PECULIAR about the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt—the shape is ideal for focusing certain electromagnetic waves. And while this discovery is unlikely to provide any insights into ancient Egyptian burial practices, it might lead to the creation of better nanotech.
The study, published in the Journal of Applied Physics, looked at how the shape of the pyramid would interact with resonant radio waves. Resonance is an important physical phenomenon, where small wave oscillations are able to pile up on top of one another to create large oscillations. Given the pyramid’s size and shape, the resonant radio waves are expected to have wavelengths between 650 and 1,970 feet (200–600 meters).
The team found that external waves of the resonant wavelength striking the pyramid were concentrated by its shape, focused either into the pyramid’s central chambers or into the region below its base, depending on the specific model for its structure that they used.
Just to be clear, this study is about theoretical calculations and shouldn’t be taken as an explanation for some profound mystery surrounding Egypt’s tombs. The pyramid most definitely can’t receive or send alien messages because our atmosphere is not transparent to signals at the resonant wavelengths.
“Egyptian pyramids have always attracted great attention. We as scientists were interested in them as well, so we decided to look at the Great Pyramid as a particle dissipating radio waves resonantly,” senior author Dr. Andrey Evlyukhin said in a statement.
“Due to the lack of information about the physical properties of the pyramid, we had to use some assumptions. For example, we assumed that there are no unknown cavities inside, and the building material with the properties of an ordinary limestone is evenly distributed in and out of the pyramid. With these assumptions made, we obtained interesting results that can find important practical applications.”
The team plans to exploit these properties of pyramid-shaped objects in nanostructures. They hope to use the focusing ability in sensors and solar cells—hopefully using materials better suited for these functions than the limestone used to build the Great Pyramid of Giza.
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A NEW PAPER, PUBLISHED IN THE JOURNAL OF GEOPHYS-ical Research: Atmospheres, has quite the title. Obviously you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but we’d argue this one warrants close attention: “A terrestrial gamma-ray flash inside the eyewall of Hurricane Patricia.”
In other words, this means that one of the windiest hurricanes on record produced a fair bit of lightning, and at least one of those flashes was energetic enough to produce a beam of antimatter, which shot down to Earth. If you don’t think that’s cool, then that’s fine, but you’d be wrong.
Back in 2015, when Hurricane Patricia was wreaking havoc on Mexico’s west coast, records were being set. The intensity of this cyclonic behemoth was unparalleled, and scientists wanted to get a closer look. Thankfully, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has some specially designed aircraft that can fly into the hearts of hurricanes unharmed.
As one of NOAA’s Hurricane Hunter planes flew directly into Patricia’s peak paroxysmal rage, it headed for the eyewall, a circumference of colossal thunderstorms, high winds, and extreme weather. An instrument aboard the craft named ADELE—the Airborne Detector for Energetic Lightning Emissions—designed by engineers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, picked up 184 counts of ionizing “gamma” radiation in the blink of an eye, following a lightning flash. Based on the associated radio signal, and comparing the gamma-ray energy spectrum to simulations, the team concluded that ADELE had happened upon a beam of positrons.
Positrons are the antimatter equivalents of electrons; they have the same mass, but an equal yet opposite charge. So what’s the science behind this spectacular occurrence of lightning-generated antimatter?
The average lightning bolt involves the transfer of a billion or so joules of energy, equivalent to detonating around a quarter of a ton of TNT. This enormous energy release can accelerate charged particles to terrific speeds, and these high-energy particles then emit gamma rays as they smash into atoms in the atmosphere. The collisions rip further electrons from the atoms, which themselves collide, generating more gamma rays in a cascade effect—producing a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF). The gamma rays soon decay, in a process called “pair production,” back into electrons and their antimatter partners, positrons. This creates a beam of electrons that shoots upward into space, just as the oppositely charged positrons move downward, their negative charge sending them in the opposite direction in the thunderstorm’s electrical field.
Fortunately, the event detected by NOAA in 2015 has been found to match the models perfectly: ADELE picked up a downward-blasted beam of positrons. Detecting this TGF-linked antimatter beam wasn’t a surprise; it is, however, the first time it’s actually been observed, which is clearly marvelous. In case you’re wondering: No, you’d have to be right near the source of this beam for it to be of any danger.
This certainly won’t be the last time an antimatter beam like this will be detected. You might not even need to brave flying into hurricanes; the team’s study explained that “this reverse gamma-ray beam penetrates to low enough altitudes to allow ground-based detection of typical upward TGFs from mountain observatories.” Not quite as cool as flying into a hurricane, though.
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by Alfredo Carpineti
The “uncertainty principle” of quantum mechanics says it’s impossible to pin down the position and momentum of a subatomic particle of matter—it can be thought of as in several places at once. A study in 2018 in Nature Communications extended this concept to temperature, so particles in effect have several temperatures at once.
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CERN’S LARGE HADRON COLLIDER (LHC) HAS EXPANDED our understanding of fundamental physics significantly, thanks to the discovery of the Higgs boson. But while the LHC still has much to give, physicists have already started thinking about the next big thing, and it’s called the Future Circular Collider (FCC).
The conceptual design report for the ambitious project has been released and it combines the work of 1,300 collaborators from 150 universities, research institutes, and industrial partners to deliver a series of concepts for what the FCC might look like. The accelerator is envisioned to be 62 miles (100 km) long, almost four times the size of the present LHC.
The team estimates a 10-fold increase in the energy of particle collisions. This would allow us to study the interaction between the Higgs boson and other particles, helping us to understand the behavior of matter in the early universe and even look for new massive particles at higher energies. The FCC will put the standard model of particle physics to the most exacting tests yet.
“The FCC conceptual design report is a remarkable accomplishment. It shows the tremendous potential of the FCC to improve our knowledge of fundamental physics and to advance many technologies with a broad impact on society,” CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti said in a statement. “While presenting new, daunting challenges, the FCC would greatly benefit from CERN’s expertise, accelerator complex, and infrastructures, which have been developed over more than half a century.”
The current plan will be discussed in the context of the European Strategy for Particle Physics, alongside other proposals such as the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC). The proposal calls for the construction of the tunnel and a positron-electron collider, potentially beginning by 2040–2050. This collider will serve the particle community for 15 to 20 years, after which a proton collider will be installed in the tunnel.
“Proton colliders have been the tool of choice for generations to venture new physics at the smallest scale,” said Eckhard Elsen, CERN director for research and computing. “A large proton collider would present a leap forward in this exploration and decisively extend the physics program beyond results provided by the LHC and a possible electron-positron collider.”
The full proposal is contained in four volumes and took five years to complete. It has received the strong support of the European Commission.
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No reason really. We just liked the number. Although it may interest you to know that in November 2016, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) assigned element 117 of the periodic table—that is, a chemical element with 117 protons in its nucleus—the name tennessine (pronounced “ten-ess-een”). That’s after the state of Tennessee—home of Elvis, Jack Daniels, and now the lab where this little element was discovered.
