From bizarre antimatter to experiments that tie light up in
knots, physics has revealed some spooky sides of our world. Here are seven of
the most mind-blowing recent discoveries.
Another amazing feat of physics came out of Brookhaven's
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider this year. In February 2010 scientists
announced they'd created a "<a href="http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/big-bang-conditions-quark-soup-100215.html">quark-gluon
soup</a>" where protons and neutrons had broken up into their constituent
building blocks – quarks and gluons.
It took extremely powerful collisions of gold atoms in the
accelerator to achieve the temperatures necessary – about 7 trillion degrees
Fahrenheit (4 trillion degrees Celsius). These conditions are 250,000 times
hotter than the center of the sun and similar to temperatures seen just after
the birth of the universe. They were the hottest temperatures ever reached on
Amazing particle triplets
Using lithium atoms, scientists recreated an ancient
mathematical symbol that had been seen as far back as the second century in Afghan
Buddhist art. The symbol, called the <a href="http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/091216-reappearing-particle-trio.html">Borromean
rings</a>, depicts three rings linked together. If any ring were removed, they
would all come apart.
Physicists predicted that particles should be able to form
this same arrangement, but no one had been able to achieve it until now. The
final realization, announced in December 2009, came 40 years after the
Light bends matter
While it's easy to see matter bending light – just look
through a prism – it's rare to find <a href="http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/light-bends-matter-100324.html">light
bending matter</a>. But scientists saw just that in an experiment reported in March
2010. Researchers assembled flat ribbons of nanoparticles – tiny bits of matter
only billionths of a meter long – in a darkened laboratory.
Then when the ribbons were exposed to light, they
curled up into spirals. The results could help engineers design new types of
optics and electronics.
Nuclear fusion – the melding of atomic nuclei that happens
inside stars – is a long-sought goal on Earth. If scientists can achieve it, it
could offer a powerful source of energy with few negative environmental
Scientists took a step closer to this goal in January 2010
when they announced they'd built a <a href="http://www.livescience.com/environment/nuclear-fusion-magnet-experiment-100128.html">levitating
magnet</a> that created some of the conditions thought to be necessary for
fusion. By suspending a giant donut-shaped magnet in midair, researchers were
able to control the motion of an extremely hot gas of charged particles
contained within the magnet's outer chamber. The density of this gas was close
to what's needed for nuclear fusion, the researchers said.
New antimatter particle
By smashing particles together at close to light speed
inside an atom smasher, scientists created a never-before-seen type of matter:
an <a href="http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/new-particle-anti-matter-100305.html">anti-hypertriton</a>.
This particle is weird in many ways. First, it's not normal
matter, but its eerie opposite, called antimatter, which annihilates whenever
it comes into contact with regular mass. Second, the anti-hypertriton is what's
called a "strange" particle, meaning it contains a rare building
block called a strange quark, which isn't present in the protons and neutrons
that make up regular atoms.
The experiment was conducted at the Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. The results were announced
in March 2010.
Knots of light
Light may seem to travel a straight line, but sometimes it
gets twisted into knots. In January 2010 researchers reported using a computer-controlled
hologram to twist beams of laser <a href="http://www.livescience.com/technology/tying-light-knots-100117.html">light
into pretzel shapes</a>. The holograms, which direct the flow of light, were
specially created to send light in certain directions and shapes.
The researchers used a field of mathematics known as knot
theory to study the resulting loops. These swirls of light, called optical
vortices, could have implications for future laser devices, the physicists
One of the strangest predictions of the theory of quantum
mechanics is that particles can become "entangled" so that even after
they are separated in space, when an action is performed on one particle, the
other particle responds immediately.
In June 2009 scientists announced they had <a href="http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/090603-maco-entanglement.html">measured
entanglement</a> in a new kind of system – two separated pairs of vibrating
particles. Previous experiments had entangled the internal properties of
particles, such as spin states, but this was the first time scientists
had entangled the particles' pattern of motion, which is a system that resembles
the larger, everyday world.