theoretical – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Matter-antimatter asymmetry confirmed in baryons

The LHCb detector. (credit: Fermilab ) Everyone, at some point in their lives, wonders why they are here. Existential questions don’t stop at the personal level, though. Why is there a Universe, and why is it filled with matter? The last question is a puzzle that has gainfully occupied the minds of and employed physicists for many years. The time spent pondering such questions has not been wasted, as it turns out, as researchers from the LHCb detector report that one of the theoretical paths that allows matter to outnumber antimatter is open for business. An overly simple reading of the Standard Model of physics predicts that matter will be produced at the same rate as antimatter. The antimatter and matter should, through simple statistics, collide and wipe each other out, leaving only energy. But that didn’t happen. The substance we label matter was, somehow, produced in greater abundance than antimatter. In the beginnings of the Universe, antimatter was eliminated, leaving only matter. A closer look at the Standard Model reveals that some imbalance is expected. But it also predicts a Universe with much less matter than we observe. And, experimentally, we’ve only observed the relevant matter/antimatter asymmetry for a particular class of particles, called mesons. That notably leaves out the particles that make up the Universe, called baryons. Luckily, baryon asymmetry is exactly what one of the LHC detectors, called LHCb, is designed to investigate. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continue reading here:
Matter-antimatter asymmetry confirmed in baryons

WiGig will bring superfast WiFi to devices next year

The WiFi Alliance has finally certified ” WiGig , ” a high-speed, 60 GHz standard otherwise known as 802.11ad. Using beamforming, it can yield speeds of up to 8 Gbps, or nearly 1GB per second from a distance of up to 10 meters. As many as 180 million devices using the standard, like routers, laptops and smartphones will arrive by the end of next year, the group said. It also unveiled the first five certified WiGig products from Intel, Dell and Qualcomm, among others. The WiFi Alliance notes that the new standard operates in the “less congested” 60 GHz spectrum, which should aid speeds. It says that manufacturers can implement “handoff” technology so that your phone and router will automatically switch to 2.4 or 5 GHz WiFi if you leave the room, for instance. Samsung, among others, has already released uncertified WiGig devices. 8 Gbps is around three times faster than the best 802.11ac routers can do right now. However, in the real world, most current devices can only hit 600 Mbps or so, less than a fifth of the theoretical maximum in some cases. In theory, 802.11ad should be faster, thanks to the beamforming and distance limitation, but you’ve essentially got to be in the same room as the router to benefit from such speeds. Of course, your smartphone or laptop would have to support the standard too, not just the router. Qualcomm’s WiGig video from CES 2016 Nevertheless, if the new standard can do even 20 percent of the promised speeds, it’ll be useful in a lot of cases. If you usually work from the same room and transfer files around your network, for instance, you’ll no longer need a wired gigabit connection. And folks with Google Fiber or other high-speed internet services should get faster wireless speeds — my router and smartphone combination limits me to 200 Mbps, for instance, while my laptop gets 1 Gbps via wired ethernet. The first mobile device to carry the standard is the Dell Latitude E7450/70, and both Intel and Qualcomm have certified router solutions. Expect a flood of devices to carry the standard soon, including smartphones, tablets, and notebooks. By next year, many will probably factor the standard into their “buy” decisions. Source: WiFi Alliance

View original post here:
WiGig will bring superfast WiFi to devices next year

Terabit fiber optic speeds just came closer to reality

Sure, researchers have been showing off terabit data speeds in fiber optics for years , but they’ve seldom been practical. That exotic technology may work over long distances, but it can quickly fall apart when you throw typical network loads in the mix. However, it’s about to become much more practical. Nokia Bell Labs, Deutsche Telekom and the Technical University of Munich have shown off 1Tbps data speeds in a field trial that involved “real conditions, ” with varying channel conditions and traffic levels. The secret was a new modulation technique, Probabilistic Constellation Shaping. Instead of using all the networking’s constellation points (the “alphabet of the transmission”) equally, like typical fiber, it prefers those points with lower amplitudes — the ones that are less susceptible to noise. That helps transmissions reach up to 30 percent further, since you can adapt the transmission rate to fit the channel. It’s so effective that the team got close to the theoretical peak data speeds possible for the fiber connection. You’re likely not going to see these terabit fiber lines in regular use for a while, since there’s a large gap between a field test and making commercially available lines. The timing might be ideal, mind you — 5G cellular data is just gathering momentum, and telecoms will need gobs of bandwidth to cope with the increased demands. A realistic 1Tbps fiber option would make sure that the internet’s wired backbones don’t collapse under the load. Via: FossBytes , ZDNet Source: TUM