UD’s Safronova and collaborators win prestigious ‘Synergy Grant’ for development of new technology and fundamental physics
The atomic clocks that give extraordinary precision to the Global Positioning System (GPS) are based on transitions between energy states of atoms. Many advances have been made since the launch of the GPS satellites and the best world clock is now accurate to within one second every 30 billion years. (more…)
On the wall of Aaron Dollar’s office is a poster for R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the 1920 Czech play that gave us the word “robot.” The story ends with the nominal robots seizing control of the factory of their origin and then wiping out nearly all of humanity. Dollar, fortunately, has something more cheerful in mind for the future of human-robot relations. (more…)
Quantum computers are in theory capable of simulating the interactions of molecules at a level of detail far beyond the capabilities of even the largest supercomputers today. Such simulations could revolutionize chemistry, biology and materials science, but the development of quantum computers has been limited by the ability to increase the number of quantum bits, or qubits, that encode, store and access large amounts of data. (more…)
A U physicist will help determine if neutrinos can outrace light
Back in 2007, a physics experiment clocked elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos going faster than light.
That wasn’t supposed to happen. If the speed of light in a vacuum—denoted “c” by physicists—isn’t the universal speed limit, it would mean that Einstein put the wrong number in his famous E=mc2 equation.
University of Minnesota physicist Marvin Marshak was part of the experiment, called MINOS. It clocked beams of neutrinos shot from Fermilab, a national physics lab near Chicago, to a detector 457 miles away in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in northern Minnesota. (more…)
