(PhysOrg.com) -- For the first time, scientists have successfully operated a quantum gate between two remote particles of matter, marking an important step toward the development of a quantum computer. In previous experiments, researchers have used photons, which are difficult to store. Using matter qubits enables the researchers to store the obtained quantum information, opening up new possibilities for the generation of remote networks of entangled qubits.

While the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) continues to get the majority of buzz in particle physics news stories (anticipated to start back up in October or so), new research being done in the BELLA (BErkeley Lab LAser) program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory may show such large-scale particle accelerators to be obsolete ... or at least cost prohibitive. (Austria announced plans to drop out of CERN involvement, but then changed their mind, bringing up concerns that other nations might start looking to CERN and LHC funding as an optional expense that could be trimmed or re-allocated in their budget debates.)

The new particle accelerators are being designed and tested as part of the BELLA program, which use a series of lasers to accelerate particles over a span of inches, rather than the miles needed in traditional particle accelerators. Though the "big boy" particle accelerators are still much more powerful, using the BELLA-style accelerators in serial (one after the other) could get particles going nearly as fast in a much shorter period of time, allowing for some similar tests to be run in a much smaller facility.

Other proposals have been made in the past, such as desktop plasma-based accelerators. It remains to be seen which of these proposals will prove most viable.

Researchers from across Europe have united to build the largest quantum key distribution network ever built. The efforts of 41 research and industrial organisations were realised as secure, quantum encrypted information was sent over an eight node, mesh network.

World's smallest optical transistor brings optical computers a step closer

Robert P Crease talks to a former string theorist who found what he wanted in science when he applied the tools of physics to fundamental questions in biology

The idea that quantum mechanics can explain many fundamental aspects of life is resurging, as Paul Davies reveals

Startling new discoveries show that there is more to the cell than just genetics and biochemistry, explains Jochen Guck

Sam Wang describes some of the physics of our most complex organ

Born 200 years ago, Charles Darwin is rightly celebrated for his work explaining the origin of species. But in setting a new standard for what an explanation of nature should be like, he also had a huge impact on physics and cosmology, as Leonard Susskind explains

Andrew Steane reviews Stuart Kauffman's Reinventing the Sacred

How protein folding can be fun

Some instruments in teaching laboratories may look old-fashioned, but those wooden boxes can hold surprisingly advanced equipment. George Herold describes his career designing experiments for undergraduate labs

Darwin was no physicist, but his approach to science will be familiar to us

Alexei Kornyshev thinks that physicists and biologists are now working more closely together than ever before, but that barriers to closer collaboration still exist

Life at the top of a semiconductor company

Inflationary universe pioneer to be honoured in London

Workshop: 2 Nov 2009 - 5 Nov 2009, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Organized by National Research Council of Canada/Carleton University.

School: 4 Sep 2009 - 7 Sep 2009, Bad Herrenalb, Germany. Organized by DFG-Center for Functional Nanostructures.

Conference: 8 Sep 2009 - 13 Sep 2009, Acquafredda di Maratea, Italy. Organized by European Science Foundation (ESF).

Conference: 27 May 2010 - 28 May 2010, The Institute of Physics, 76 Portland Place, London, W1B 1NT, United Kingdom. Organized by Miss Anna Fricker.

Conference: 11 May 2010 - 15 May 2010, Chancellors Hotel & Conference Centre, Manchester, United Kingdom. Organized by Dr Vladimir Vishnyakov.

Conference: 17 Jan 2010 - 22 Jan 2010, Castle Green Hotel, Kendal,, Cumbria, United Kingdom. Organized by Andrew Temple.

Conference: 2 Nov 2009, The Institute of Physics, 76 Portland Place, London, United Kingdom. Organized by Dr Andrew Ckarke.

Conference/Exhibition: 21 Feb 2009 - 26 Feb 2009, San Jose, CA, United States. Organized by SPIE.

Conference: 7 Dec 2009 - 9 Dec 2009, Sydney, Australia. Organized by http://www.ainse.edu.au/ainse.html .

Conference/Exhibition: 5 Apr 2009 - 9 Apr 2009, Orlando, FL, United States. Organized by SPIE.

Diffraction enhanced X-ray imaging promises better brain scans

Tiny detectors could warn of hazardous conditions

Science and Technology Facilities Council outlines reduced programme for 2009-10

Sun’s passage through spiral arms not correlated with climate change, says new research

SNOLAB and Perimeter Institute benefit from infrastructure grants

High speed photography sheds light on ‘clustering’ in sand streams

A while back, Stephen Hawking and his daughter, Lucy, released a children's book that teaches scientific concepts to young readers: George's Secret Key to the Universe. The book covers concepts mostly from astrophysics, especially focusing on black holes, Hawking's area of expertise. There's an entire "mini-book" in one chapter that is nothing short of a textbook for children on the basic information about black holes and, throughout the entire book, there are interesting call-outs and sidebars with scientific information, as well as several colorful pages of photographs from outer space. Read our full review of the book now. (Review of the sequel should be coming in the next few weeks.)

Data stored using micro-holograms

Device sorts good cells from bad

Physicists have just created a variation of a black hole which, instead of trapping photons (particles of light), traps phonons (particles of sound). Yes, waves of sound vibrations in matter (like waves of light in space) can be expressed as either waves or particles in quantum physics, a principle known as wave particle duality.

This strange black hole phenomenon is achieved within the curious form of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this rare state of matter, the flow of sound through the material is expressed the same way that the movement of light in a gravitational field is expressed, which has led the scientists to realize that they could create this analog of a black hole for sound. Multiple groups were working to achieve this, but the success seems to have come from Oren Lahav, Jeff Steinhauer, and colleagues at the Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa.

Sound waves created within the "black hole" (which, I think, would more appropriately be called a "black noise hole" or maybe a "quiet hole," but neither have a catchy ring to them) are unable to escape, because when they attempt to reach the event horizon, they can't pass that barrier because they are pulled in at supersonic speeds. In other words, they are pulled into the black hole faster than they can travel out, like someone trying to swim against rapids or a waterfall.

But things get stranger ... because it's possible that these black holes for sound will also exhibit Hawking radiation. Quantum physics indicates that pairs of "virtual phonons" are constantly being created and destroyed. If one of these pairs forms near the event horizon of the sound black hole, one of the phonons may end up getting pulled into the black hole while the other escapes. This means that the sound black hole could emit phonons, which is exactly what one expects for light instead of sound in regular black holes.

With the successful creation of a black hole for sound, it appears that the race is on to detect Hawking radiation for sound.

Related Articles:

• New Scientist - Physicists create 'black hole for sounds'
• Technology Review - Acoustic Black Hole Created in Bose-Einstein Condensate
• Physicsworld.com - Black-hole analogue traps sound
• ArXiv.org - A sonic black hole in a density-inverted Bose-Einstein condensate
• What Is a Black Hole?
• What Is Hawking Radiation?
• Useful definitions: Event Horizon, Phonon, and Bose-Einstein Condensate

Earlier this month, there was a great blog post over at Physicsworld.com, "The power of robotics," in which Robert P. Crease (philosophy professor at Stony Brook University) discusses his son's participation in the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a major robotics competition charity founded by inventor Dean Kamen. The article discusses not only his son's personal experiences, but also the fact that the hands-on element of the robotics design is a crucial component of science education which is being largely ignored by our national science curriculum.

I previously discussed the benefits of FIRST back in April, around the time of their national competition in Atlanta, Georgia.

For more about actually creating robots, check out the "Robotics and Robots" section of About.com Inventors...

In physics, time travel is technically allowed by the theory of relativity. The results that demonstrate time travel are called closed timelike curves (or CTC), which are paths that begin and end at the same coordinates in spacetime.

Though technically allowed, the closed timelike curves in relativity do create all sorts of problems for physics, because the initial conditions are no longer static. All predictivity seems to be lost. David Deutsch was able to describe a way to avoid this in 1991, by explaining how the particles begin traveling in a loop that causes them to interact in the initial conditions in exactly the same way they "originally" did, creating sort of a "Groundhog Day" effect.

According to a new paper in Physics Review Letters, it looks like there's a new addition to the problems caused by closed timelike curves: they can be used to break potential quantum encryption techniques. These systems involve using a quantum-mechanical system to encrypt information in a computer system. Here's how the Physics Review Focus newsletter describes the new findings:

Todd Brun of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and his colleagues have now found a way to use states defined by the Deutsch formulation to decode quantum-encrypted messages. Such a message could be sent as a series of particles, each in quantum state "zero," quantum state "one," or a combination state called a superposition. The intended recipient measures each particle but needs additional information after-the-fact from the sender to distinguish the superpositions from the non-superpositions. But a spy who could distinguish "on the fly" between, say, a zero and a superposition state could intercept the message and also send particles to the recipient that mimic the originals, thereby avoiding detection.

For the spy to accomplish this, the researchers imagine a particle entering a CTC so that it travels around and back in time, allowing it to interact with its future self, so to speak, before going on its way again. They describe an interaction that, in the simplest example, leaves a particle in the zero state unchanged but transforms a superposition of zero and one into a pure one state. A standard measurement by the spy that distinguishes one from zero can then reveal with complete certainty whether the initial state was zero or a superposition.

Ordinarily such a transformation wouldn't be possible without advanced knowledge of the incoming state. The trick, Brun explains, is that the particle interacts with the transformed version of itself that comes back from the future. Brun says the scheme doesn’t violate any laws of physics, but he admits that the logic is hard to grasp. Compared with regular chronological reasoning, he says, "it's definitely cheating."

Related Articles:

• Physical Review Focus - Time Travel Beats Quantum Mechanics
• Physics Review Letters - Localized Closed Timelike Curves Can Perfectly Distinguish Quantum States by Todd A. Brun, Jim Harrington, and Mark M. Wilde
• Physics Review D - Quantum mechanics near closed timelike lines by David Deutsch
• What are Quantum Computers?

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a new warp drive possibility based on string theory, a variant of the Alcubierre drive. A new set of calculations performed by a team of Italian scientists, however, have proposed that a warp drive engine would eventually fail. The massive energy required to manipulate spacetime in the correct way would, according to their calculations, result in a rupture in the fabric of the universe when the massive energy running the drive runs out. This rupture could result in either an explosion or a black hole that might swallow up nearby planets, but it's unclear from the paper which result is more likely ... that depends on certain fundamental properties of our universe which are still being explored by theoretical physicists.

Over at the Scienceray blog, they've posted The Top Five Laws of Physics That Have So Impacted Humanity:

• Principle of Mass-Energy Equivalence - E = mc² (see our article on special relativity)
• Wave Particle Duality of Matter
• Electromagnetic Induction: Faraday's Law
• Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation and Three Laws of Motion
• Maxwell's Equations (see our article on the electromagnetic spectrum)

I'm not necessarily agreeing with this list of the most influential laws of physics ... but I also can't really argue with the idea that they are profoundly significant to our modern science and technology. And, frankly, I can't come up with a much better list (if I'm limited to only 5). The only real beef I have is to point out that Maxwell's Equations include among them Faraday's law of induction, but this isn't a major point: even without Maxwell's work in (mostly) completing electromagnetic theory, Faraday's realization of induction would have been influential on its own.

What do you think of their list? Are these the physical laws that have had the greatest impact on humanity? Leave a comment with what physics concept you think has been most influential.

Related Articles:

• Major Laws of Physics
• 10 Interesting - and Weird - Physical Theories
• Grand Ideas of Science
• Five Great Problems in Theoretical Physics

This week New York City is home to the World Science Festival, a celebration of scientific achievement throughout the city. There are some spectacular events planned for this week, starting on Wednesday, June 10, and ending on Sunday, June 14, culminating in the World Science Festival Street Fair at Washington Square Park.

Are you attending the World Science Festival? What events are you especially looking forward to? What events do you wish you could attend?

In the early years of quantum physics, there was a heated debate over the role of consciousness. Many aspects of quantum physics appear, at least with certain forms of analysis, to depend to some degree upon when a conscious observer witnesses an event. The classic of these types of problem is the Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment, which points out the curious quantum nature of things and asks at which point the probabilistic, indeterminant nature of quantum physics collapses into a single coherent state. (This controversy is well analyzed in the book Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness by Bruce Rosenblum & Fred Kuttner.)

Even among those who bring up the role of consciousness, however, an even deeper early controversy is often glossed over - these questions were viewed, among many of the most prominent founders of quantum physics, as profoundly mystical questions. This viewpoint is tackled in a paper published in the European Journal of Physics by Harvard historian Juan Miguel Marin ('Mysticism' in quantum mechanics: the forgotten controversy - abstract only).

Lisa Zyga covers the topic quite well in her article, Quantum Mysticism: Gone but Not Forgotten over at PhysOrg.com. Basically, Marin doesn't weigh in on the role of consciousness itself (being a historian rather than a physicist), but instead points out that the very fact that this controversy once existed shows that there are many different ways that science and religion can interact, instead of the "all or nothing" tug of war which seems so prevalent today. Marin suggests that, in part, this is a transition from the early 20th century Germanic worldview (which dominated theoretical physics of the early quantum era) with the Anglo-American viewpoint that has dominated physics since the Manhattan Project.

Apparently, weighing in on the science side of the science/religion split is the recent book by Victor J. Stenger, Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness, written with the (seemingly) express purpose of debunking the mis-application of quantum physics to pseudo-religious hokum. I won't question the validity of Stenger's argument, having not yet read his book (it's sitting right here and I promise I'll get to it!), but I do think that Marin makes a valid point that physicists today are too quick to dismiss the entire debate over consciousness without really giving the complexities due intellectual credit.

What is without a doubt important, in an age where new age mysticism seeks to co-opt quantum physics as part of its support structure, is for scholars such as Marin and Stenger to clearly delineate the limits of this discussion. Even in the most extreme formulations, quantum physics interactions with consciousness do not grant anyone the ability to summon vast amounts of wealth just by thinking about it.

Discover magazine is putting together an Educator's Guide, planned to start this fall, which will provide a forum for science educators to discover science content, share lesson plans/experiments/quizzes, and communicate with other teachers through chat rooms and message boards. (As if our forums aren't good enough!) If you're interested in providing some feedback during the planning phase of this experiment, check out Discover magazine's call to educators.