#cloud vms

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As a general rule of thumb, it isn’t a good thing to be sleeping on the job; especially if you are Russian rocket security. To let a blogger and several friends explore and take plenty of photos of the facility you’re supposed to be watching, is even worse. On Thursday, Russia’s deputy prime minist Vending Telemetry  er vowed to punish the security officials who were caught sleeping.

Blogger Lana Sator an industrial LTE router  d her friends must be great at sneaking about. Or maybe they didn’t have to be, as security is so lax. They were not caught as they roamed around the Energomash facility on not one, not two, but five separate occasions. In almost 100 pictures, they exposed run-down decrepit-looking hardware from inside an engine-fuel testing tower, the plant’s control room, and more.

It&rsqu remote monitoring  o;s hard to say which is scarier; the state of the facility or the fact that anyone can easily enter and do whatever they like, never being noticed. A senior space agency official called the breach a shock. “It showed a complete inability to protect anything whatsoever.”

It’s just another embarrassment to a Space agency that has had several recently.

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A bird's-eye view of NDCX-II. The injector is at top right, inside its grounded cage. Groups of induction cells alternate with diagnostic cells to form the accelerator. The end station is at lower left.

A team of engineers and scientists just completed work on NDCX-II, a special-purpose particle accelerator designed to produce a high-quality, dense beam that can rapidly deliver a powerful punch to a solid target.

The just-completed NDCX-II, the second generation Neutralized Drift Compression Experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), is an unusual special-purpose particle accelerator built by DOE’s Heavy Ion Fusion Science Virtual National Laboratory (HIFS VNL), whose member institutions are Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

NDCX-II is a compact machine designed to produce a high-quality, dense beam that can rapidly deliver a powerful punch to a solid target. Research with NDCX-II will make advances in the acceleration, compression, and focusing of intense ion beams that can inform and guide the design of major components for heavy-ion fusion energy production.

“We’ve reached the official conclusion of the NDCX-II project, which was funded in 2009 with $11 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” says Joe Kwan of Berkeley Lab’s Accelerator and Fusion Research Division (AFRD), NDCX-II project director. “Installation of all accelerating and diagnostic modules was completed in April, and we are in the process of integrating the full 27-cell configuration. We’ll be commissioning the project in stages as we go forward.”

The beam quality of NDCX-II is monitored by measurements of the injected beam after transit through multiple cells. It has the potential to deliver enough power, quickly and evenly, to boost a thin-foil target into the regime of so-called “warm dense matter” before it expands and disintegrates.

“NDCX-II is a textbook example of team science done well,” says Suzanne Suskind, Federal Project Director in DOE’s Berkeley Site Office. “Scientists and engineers from Berkeley, Livermore, and Princeton worked together seamlessly to achieve this important milestone and fulfill the charge of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to help spur further technological advances in science.”

A close view of the upstream modules in the NDCX-II induction linac. Small coupling boxes at the top of the induction cells are for connecting power lines to the fo industrial 4G/3G router  cusing solenoids, and large coupling boxes at the side wil Smart Vending  l connect coaxial cables to carry the accelerating pulsed power, either from the pulse-forming network or the Blumleins.

The eventual goal of heavy-ion fusion is to produce electrical power with particle accelerators through a process called inertial confinement fusion. Heavy-ion fusion is a particularly promising method of accessing this inherently clean and virtually limitless source of energy, fueled by naturally occurring hydrogen isotopes. There’s plenty of practical science to be done along the way to that goal, both in accelerator design and in the physics of the fusion-fuel targets.

The poorly understood realm of warm dense matter is of special interest – called warm because its temperature is measured in thousands of degrees Kelvin instead of the millions of degrees typical of nuclear fusion. Denser than a plasma – a hot gas of electrons and atomic nuclei – but not quite solid, warm dense matter exists in the cores of giant planets and as a way-station on the road to fusion. The rapid heating required to create warm dense matter – and eventually achieve the fusion of a solid-fuel target – requires a very short, very high-current pulse accelerated to the right energy.

The insert at bottom shows the computer simulation of the ion beam exiting the accelerator section and entering the neutralized drift compression section, where neutralization allows the tail of the pulse to catch up with the head and compress to a length of a mere nanosecond, a billionth of a second. Above is an artist's conception of the nanosecond pulse entering the foil.

NDCX‑II is an induction accelerator that can handle compact pulses of some 200 billion positively charged lithium ions, shaping each pulse as it is accelerated, and making sure that almost all the ions are delivered to the target within a nanosecond, a mere billionth of a second. But when they start from the injector, the ions are spread out in a 500-nanosecond pulse whose tail is moving slightly faster than its head. During initial acceleration, the overall pulse length shortens to less than 70 nanoseconds.

After further acceleration, the pulse enters a drift tube filled with plasma, which neutralizes the mutually repulsive charge of the positive ions and allows the pulse to compress, as its faster-moving tail closes the final distance to the head while focusing on the target. This process of neutralized drift compression gives the machine its name.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory provided the accelerating cells, which were previously used for its Advanced Test Accelerator. They were then modified and rebuilt for NDCX-II at Berkeley Lab. Berkeley Lab also fabricated new diagnostic “intercells” to monitor beam quality in the accelerator. The accelerator is readily reconfigurable by rearranging the cells.

The first several induction cells are powered by long-pulse voltage generators, but when the pulses become short enough, the accelerating power is supplied by 250,000-volt, pulsed-power sources called Blumleins, also supplied by Livermore. The drift chamber that finally compresses and focuses the beam is equipped with a plasma source provided by the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

NDCX-II’s robust design and ultimate machine performance were established through simulations at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) using the Warp-3D ion-beam optics code developed by David Grote of Livermore and Berkeley Lab’s AFRD, in collaboration with Alex Friedman of Livermore and AFRD, Jean-Luc Vay of AFRD, and others. Grote and Vay used up to 6,000 processors and over a million hours of machine time on NERSC’s Franklin and Hopper supercomputers and other NERSC platforms.

“What makes NDCX-II unique is the ion beam’s charged-particle density,” says Kwan, “The beam is optimized to deposit most of its energy in the thin target itself, heating it instantly to warm dense matter conditions.”

The study begins with thin foil targets, not giant planets, and key aspect gprs  s of heavy-ion fusion-target physics can be addressed with NDCX-II. Warm dense matter is new territory for understanding a variety of astrophysical phenomena, an important research field in itself. Much closer to home is the preparation for a new generation of power plants on Earth, mimicking the engines of the stars.

Work on NDCX-II was supported by the DOE Office of Science.

Images: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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Administration of the RIBI oral polio vaccine. Credit: Flickr/RIBI

In Pakistan, nine health workers were killed last year. They were administering the polio vaccine, which has been cast by the Taliban as a plot against Islam. This is because the CIA used vaccination programs to get close to Osama bin Laden.

Pakistan is one of three countries where the transmission of the virus has never been interrupted. At the beginning of this year, seven additional health  data terminal unit  workers were killed and the vaccination program was just relaunched on this past Tuesday. There are signs that this campaign, which depends on the efforts of volunteers and low-paid health workers who work in solo or small teams, is faltering as the health workers are staying home.

The Lancet states that this might have an effect on neighboring Afghanistan, which, together with Pakistan itself and Nigeria, is one of the remaining polio-endemic countries. In 2003 to 2004, th DIN-Rail router  ere was an immunization boycott in northern Nigeria, which was led by religious and political leaders, claiming that the oral polio vaccine could cause sterility. This led to the poliovirus rebounding in Nigeria and spreading to 15 African countries and Indonesia.

The CIA, under the pretense of administering an injectable hepatitis B va managed switch  ccine, was attempting to harvest DNA from children who were believed to be related to Osama bin Laden. They didn’t succeed.

[via Wired]

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Here, graphene is represented by a maroon-colored top layer; boron nitride is represented by yellow-green lattices below the graphene; and the atom is represented by a grey circle. A low concent wastewater treatment  ration of DC voltage (in blue) allows the light to propagate inside the boron nitride, forming a tightly confined waveguide for optical signals.

By applying a DC voltage to layers of graphene and boron nitride, researchers have demonstrated the ability to control light emission from a nearby atom.

Researchers have found a way to couple the properties of different two-dimensional materials to provide an exceptional degree of control over light waves. They say this has the potential to lead to new kinds of light detection, thermal-management systems, and high-resolution imaging devices.

The new findings — using a layer of one-atom-thick graphene deposited on top of a similar 2-D layer of a material called hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) — are published in the journal Nano Letters. The work is co-authored by MIT associate professor of mechanical engineering Nicholas Fang and graduate student Anshuman Kumar, and their co-authors at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Ce Android Industrial Computer  nter, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and the University of Minnesota.

Although the two materials are structurally similar — both composed of hexagonal arrays of atoms that form two-dimensional sheets — they each interact with light quite differently. But the researchers found that these interactions can be complementary, and can couple in ways that afford a great deal of control over the behavior of light.

The hybrid material blocks light when a particular voltage is applied to the graphene, while allowing a special kind of emission and propagation, called “hyperbolicity,” when a different voltage is applied — a phenomenon not seen before in optical systems, Fang says. One of the consequences of this unusual behavior is that an extremely thin sheet of material can interact strongly with light, allowing beams to be guided, funneled, and controlled by voltages applied to the sheet.

“This poses a new opportunity to send and receive light over a very confined space,” Fang says, and could lead to “unique optical material that has great potential for optical interconnects.” Many researchers see improved interconnection of optical and electronic components as a path to more efficient computation and imaging systems.

Light’s interaction with graphene produces particles called plasmons, while light interacting with hBN produces phonons. Fang and his colleagues found that when the materials are combined in a certain way, the plasmons and phonons can couple, producing a strong resonance.

The properties of the graphene allow precise control over light, while hBN provides very strong confinement and guidance of the light. Combining the two makes it possible to create new “metamaterials” that marry the advantages of both, the researchers say.

Phaedon Avouris, a researcher at IBM and co-author of the paper, says, “The combination of these two materials provides a unique system that allows the manipulation of optical processes.”

The combined materials create a tuned system that can be adjusted to allow light only of certain specific wavelengths or directions to propagate, they say. “We can start to selectively pick some frequencies [to let through], and reject some,” Kumar says.

These properties should make it possible, Fang says, to create tiny optical waveguides, about 20 nanometers in size — the same size range as the smallest features that can now be produced in microchips. This could lead to chips that combine optical and electronic components in a single device, with far lower losses than when such devices are made separately and then interconnected, they say.

Co-author Tony Low, a researcher at IBM and the University of Minnesota, says, “Our work paves the way for using 2-D material heterostruc M2M IoT router tures for engineering new optical properties on demand.”

Another potential application, Fang says, comes from the ability to switch a light beam on and off at the material’s surface; because the material naturally works at near-infrared wavelengths, this could enable new avenues for infrared spectroscopy, he says. “It could even enable single-molecule resolution,” Fang says, of biomolecules placed on the hybrid material’s surface.

Sheng Shen, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who was not involved in this research, says, “This work represents significant progress on understanding tunable interactions of light in graphene-hBN.” The work is “pretty critical” for providing the understanding needed to develop optoelectronic or photonic devices based on graphene and hBN, he says, and “could provide direct theoretical guidance on designing such types of devices. … I am personally very excited about this novel theoretical work.”

The research team also included Kin Hung Fung of Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Publication: Anshuman Kumar, et al., “Tunable Light–Matter Interaction and the Role of Hyperbolicity in Graphene–hBN System,” Nano Letters, 2015, 15 (5), pp 3172–3180; DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.5b01191

Image: Anshuman Kumar Srivastava and Jose Luis Olivares/MIT

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A scanning electron micrograph of carrot, top, and potato, bottom, showing relatively thin-walled cells. The oval objects within the potato tissue are starch granules. Images: Don Galler

MIT researchers believe engineers may be able design new bio-inspired materials by compiling and analyzing data on the microstructures of a number of different plants.

From an engineer’s perspective, plants such as palm trees, bamboo, maples and even potatoes are examples of precise engineering on a microscopic scale. Like wooden beams reinforcing a house, cell walls make up the structural supports of all plants. Depending on how the cell walls are arranged, and what they are made of, a plant can be as flimsy as a reed, or as sturdy as an oak.

An MIT researcher has compiled data on the microstructures of a number of different plants, fr low-cost cellular router om apples and potatoes to willow and spruce trees, and has found that plants exhibit an enormous range of mechanical properties, depending on the arrangement of a cell wall’s four main building blocks: cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin and pectin.

Lorna Gibson, the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, says understanding plants’ microscopic organization may help engineers design new, bio-inspired materials.

“If you look at engineering materials, we have lots of different types, thousands of materials that have more or less the same range of properties as plants,” Gibson says. “But here the plants are, doing it arranging just four basic constituents. So maybe there’s something you can learn about the design of engineered materials.”

A paper detailing Gibson’s findings has been published this month in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

To Gibson, a cell wall’s components bear a close resemblance to certain manmade materials. For example, cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin can be as stiff and strong as manufactured polymers. A plant’s cellular arrangement can also have engineering parallels: cells in woods, for instance, are aligned, similar to engineering honeycombs, while polyhedral cell configurations, such as those found in apples, resemble some industrial foams.

To explore plants’ natural mechanics, Gibson focused on three main plant materials: woods, such as cedar and oak; parenchyma cells, which are found in fruits and root vegetables; and arborescent palm stems, such as coconut trees. She compiled data from her own and other groups’ experiments and analyzed two main mechanical properties in each plant: stiffness and strength.

Among all plants, Gibson observed wide variety in both properties. Fruits and vegetables such as apples and potatoes were the least stiff, while the densest palms were 100,000 times stiffer. Likewise, apples and potatoes fell on the lower end of the strength scale, while palms were 1,000 times stronger.

“There are plants with properties over that whole range,” Gibson says. “So it’s not like potatoes are down here, and wood is over there, and there’s nothing in between. There are plants with properties spanning that whole huge range. And it’s interesting how the plants do that.”

It turns out the large range in stiffness and strength stems from an intricate combination of plant microstructures: the composition of the cell wall, the number of layers in the cell wall, the arrangement of cellulose fibers in those layers, and how much space the cell wall takes up.

In trees such as maples and oaks, cells grow and multiply in the cambium layer, just below the bark, increasing the diameter of the trees. The cell walls in wood are composed of a primary layer with cellulose fibers randomly spread throughout it. Three secondary layers lie underneath, each with varying compositions of lignin and cellulose that wind helically through each layer.

Taken t remote communication  ogether, the cell walls occupy a large portion of a cell, providing structural support. The cells in woods are organized in a honeycomb pattern — a geometric arrangement that gives wood its stiffness and strength.

Parenchyma cells, found in fruits and root vegetables, are much less stiff and strong than wood. The cell walls of apples, potatoes and carrots are much thinner than in wood cells, and made up of only one layer. Cellulose fibers run randomly throughout this layer, reinforcing a matrix of hemicellulose and pectin. Parenchyma cells have no lignin; combined with their thin walls and the random arrangement of their cellulose fibers, Gibson says, this may explain their cell walls’ low stiffness. The cells in each plant are densely packed together, similar to industrial foams used in mattresses and packaging.

Unlike woody trees that grow in diameter over time, the stems of arborescent palms such as coconut trees maintain similar diameters throughout their lifetimes. Instead, as the stem grows taller, palms support this extra weight by increasing the thickness of their cell walls. A cell wall’s thickness depends on where it is along a given palm stem: Cell walls are thicker at the base and periphery of stems, where bending stresses are greatest.

Gibson sees plant mechanics as a valuable resource for engineers designing new materials. For instance, she says, researchers have developed a wide array of materials, from soft elastomers to stiff, strong alloys. Carbon nanotubes have been used to reinforce composite materials, and engineers have made honeycomb-patterned materials with cells as small as a few millimeters wide. But researchers have been unable to fabricate cellular composite materials with the level of control that plants have perfected.

“Plants are multifunctional,” Gibson says. “They have to satisfy a number of requirements: mechanical ones, but also growth, surface area for sunlight and transport of fluids. The microstructures plants have developed satisfy all these requirements. With the development of nanotechnology, I think there is potential to develop multifunctional engineering materials inspired by plant microstructures.”

Karl Niklas, a professor of plant biology at Cornell University, says Gibson’s engineering parallels are fitting. Plants, in a way, he says, are “largely structural things … chemical factories that are architecturally arranged.”

“Plants on Earth have evolved over three-averizon industrial routernd-a-half billion years, and that is a giant evolutionary experiment of trial and error, because the things that don’t work are extinct, and the things that do work are more abundant,” Niklas says. “We can learn things from nature and apply it to construct better panel boards, styrofoams and photovoltaics that will help society.”

Image: Don Galler

Reprinted with permission of MIT News

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Workers on a Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation b retrofit  oat release iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean. Image by HSRC.

Last July, a chartered fishing boat strewed 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the ocean, off the western coast of Canada. The goal was to supercharge the marine ecosystem. The iron was supposed to fertilize plankton, boost salmon population and sequester carbon. Currently, it’s still unclear whether the ocean responded as hoped, but this project has angered scientists, embarrassed a village of indigenous people and enraged opponents of geoengineering.

Initially, it was thought that this rogue effort of geoengineering was started off by Russ George, a US-based entrepreneur, who had persuaded the Haida Nation Village of Old Massett on the Queen Charlotte Islands to fund the project with the promise that it would be possible to sell these carbon credits for the carbon dioxide taken up by phytoplankton. It turns out that there is much more to the story.

Infographic by Nature.

Old Massett is a fishing village with fewer than 1,000 people, which embraced the project in hopes of restoring the dwindling salmon runs by boosting phytoplankton, and in turn, the entire marine food web. In February 2011, the villagers voted to lend $2.5 million to the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation (HSRC) to fertilize the ocean. The company planned on repaying Industrial IoT   its loan by selling the carbon credits to companies seeking to offset their greenhouse-gas emissions.

The iron fed a bloom of phytoplankton of 10,000 square kilometers that attracted fish, birds and whales, states John Disney, head of the Old Massett-based corporation and economic-development officer for the village. The Old Massett scheme dumped five times more iron than previous fertilization experiments and no scientists outside the project have seen data that might show whether this worked as advertised. Marine biologists agree that this is sophisticated science, and it’s not the way to conduct an experiment.

The project is on uncertain legal ground, as ocean fertilization is restricted voluntarily by an international moratorium on geoengineering and by a treaty on ocean pollution. There are exemptions for research, but officials from Environment Canada say that the agency warned the project leaders in May that the ocean fertilization would require a permit.

“Environment Canada did not approve this non-scientific event,” s Smart Vending tates environment minister Peter Kent and enforcement officers are investigating. The Canadian National Research Council gave $70,000 in funding to HSRC and NOAA provided 20 buoys to help to monitor water conditions. However, officials from both agencies assay they were never informed of the ocean-fertilization experiment and thought that the work involved salmon ecology.

It is yet unclear whether the project will restore the salmon population. Scientists remain skeptical. It will take another two years to before they find out whether the Haida project worked.

[via Nature]

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Taken by astronaut Alexander Gerst, this photo shows an image of an aurora from the International Space Station.

European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst posted this photograph taken from the International Space Station to social media on August 29, 2014, writing, “words can’t describe how it feels flying through an #aurora. I wouldn’t even know where to begin….”

Crewmembers on the space station photograph the Earth from their unique point of view located 200 miles above the surface. Photographs record how the planet is changing over time, from human-caused changes like urban growth and reservoir construction, to natural dynamic events such as hurricanes, floods and volcanic eruptions. Crewmembers have been photographing Earth from space since the early Mercury missions beginning in 1961. T smart grid  he continuous images taken from the space station ensu Vending Telemeter  re this record remains unbroken.

Industrial 3G Router

On Tuesday, September 9 aboard the space station, cosmonaut Max Suraev of Roscosmos takes the helm when Expedition 40 Commander Steve Swanson hands over control during a Change of Command Ceremony at 5:15 p.m. EDT. Suraev will lead Expedition 41 and stay in orbit until November with Gerst and NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman. Soyuz Commander Alexander Skvortsov, Swanson and Flight Engineer Oleg Artemyev will complete their mission Wednesday, September 10 at 7:01 p.m. when they undock in their Soyuz TMA-12M spacecraft from the Poisk docking compartment for a parachute-assisted landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan a little less than 3.5 hours later.

Image: NASA/ESA/Alexander Gerst

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When the waves are confined to a circular corral, they reflect back on  Android Industrial Computer  themselves, producing complex patterns (grey ripples) that steer the droplet in an apparently random trajectory (white line). But in fact, the droplet’s motion follows statistical patterns determined by the wavelength of the waves. Image: Dan Harris

MIT scientists uncover quantum behavior in fluid dynamics, offering a new perspective on wave-particle duality.

In the early days of quantum physics, in an attempt to explain the wavelike behavior of quantum particles, the French physicist Louis de Broglie proposed what he called a “pilot wave” theory. According to de Broglie, moving particles — such as electrons, or the photons in a beam of light — are borne along on waves of some type, like driftwood on a tide.

Physicists’ inability to detect de Broglie’s posited waves led them, for the most part, to abandon pilot-wave theory. Recently, however, a real pilot-wave system has been discovered, in which a drop of fluid bounces across a vibrating fluid bath, propelled by waves produced by its own collisions.

In 2006, Yves Couder and Emmanuel Fort, physicists at Université Paris Diderot, used this system to reproduce one of the most famous experiments in quantum physics: the so-called “double-slit” expe data terminal unit  riment, in which particles are fired at a screen through a barrier with two holes in it.

In the latest issue of the journal Physical Review E (PRE), a team of MIT researchers, in collaboration with Couder and his colleagues, report that they have produced the fluidic analogue of another classic quantum experiment, in which electrons are confined to a circular “corral” by a ring of ions. In the new experiments, bouncing drops of fluid mimicked the electrons’ statistical behavior with remarkable accuracy.

“This hydrodynamic system is subtle, and extraordinarily rich in terms of mathematical modeling,” says John Bush, a professor of applied mathematics at MIT and corresponding author on the new paper. “It’s the first pilot-wave system discovered and gives insight into how rational quantum dynamics might work, were such a thing to exist.”

Joining Bush on the PRE paper are lead author Daniel Harris, a graduate student in mathematics at MIT; Couder and Fort; and Julien Moukhtar, also of Université Paris Diderot. In a separate pair of papers, appearing this month in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Bush and Jan Molacek, another MIT graduate student in mathematics, explain the fluid mechanics that underlie the system’s behavior.

Interference inference

The double-slit experiment is seminal because it offers the clearest demonstration of wave-particle duality: As the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once put it, “Any other situation in quantum mechanics, it turns out, can always be explained by saying, ‘You remember the case of the experiment with the two holes? It’s the same thing.’”

If a wave traveling on the surface of water strikes a barrier with two slits in it, two waves will emerge on the other side. Where the crests of those waves intersect, they form a larger wave; where a crest intersects with a trough, the fluid is still. A bank of pressure sensors struck by the waves would register an “interference pattern” — a series of alternating light and dark bands indicating where the waves reinforced or canceled each other.

Photons fired through a screen with two holes in it produce a similar interference pattern — even when they’re fired one at a time. That’s wave-particle duality: the mathematics of wave mechanics explains the statistical behavior of moving particles.

In the experiments reported in PRE, the researchers mounted a shallow tray with a circular depression in it on a vibrating stand. They filled the tray with a silicone oil and began vibrating it at a rate just below that required to produce surface waves.

They then dropped a single droplet of the same oil into the bath. The droplet bounced up and down, producing waves that pushed it along the surface.

The waves generated by the bouncing droplet reflected off the corral walls, confining the droplet within the circle and interfering with each other to create complicated patterns. As the droplet bounced off the waves, its motion appeared to be entirely random, but over time, it proved to favor certain regions of the bath over others. It was found most frequently near the center of the circle, then, with slowly diminishing frequency, in concentric rings whose distance from each other was determined by the wavelength of the pilot wave.

The statistical description of the droplet’s location is analogous to that of an electron confined to a circular quantum corral and has a similar, wavelike form.

“It’s a great result,” says Paul Milewski, a math professor at the University of Bath, in England, who specializes in fluid mechanics. “Given the number of quantum-mechanical analogues of this mechanical system already shown, it’s not an enormous surprise that the corral experiment also behaves like quantum mechanics. But they’ve done an amazingly careful job, because it takes very accurate measurements over a very long time of this droplet bouncing to get this probability distribution.”

“If you have a system that is deterministic and is what we call in the business ‘chaotic,’ or sensitive to initial conditions, sensitive to perturbations, then it can behave probabilistically,” Milewski continues. “Experiments like this weren’t available to the giants of quantum mechanics. They also didn’t know anything about chaos. Suppose these guys — who were puzzled by why the world behaves in this strange probabilistic way — actually had access to experiments like this and ha 3G 4G LTE  d the knowledge of chaos, would they have come up with an equivalent, deterministic theory of quantum mechanics, which is not the current one? That’s what I find exciting from the quantum perspective.”

Publication: Daniel M. Harris, et al., “Wavelike statistics from pilot-wave dynamics in a circular corral,” Phys. Rev. E 88, 011001(R) (2013); doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.88.011001

Related Publications:

Jan Molaceka1 and John W. M. Bush, “Drops bouncing on a vibrating bath,” Journal of Fluid Mechanics / Volume 727 / July 2013, pp 582-611; doi:10.1017/jfm.2013.279 Jan Molaceka1 and John W. M. Bush, “Drops walking on a vibrating bath: towards a hydrodynamic pilot-wave theory,” Journal of Fluid Mechanics / Volume 727 / July 2013, pp 612-647; doi:10.1017/jfm.2013.280

Image: Dan Harris

Reprinted with permission of MIT News