Monthly Archives: June 2017

June 27, 2017 UQ's Mr Nicolas Mauranyapin, Professsor Warwick Bowen and Dr Lars Madsen. Credit: University of Queensland

A diagnostic technique that can detect tiny molecules signalling the presence of cancer could be on the horizon.

The possibility of an entirely new capability for detecting cancer at its earliest stages arises from University of Queensland physicists applying quantum physics to single molecule sensing for the first time.

Australian Research Council Future Fellow Professor Warwick Bowen said the research reported in Nature Photonics this week demonstrated how quantum technologies could revolutionise the study of life's "nanoscale machinery, or biological motor molecules".

"Motor molecules encode our genetic material, create the energy our cells use to function, and distribute nutrients at a sub-cellular level," Professor Bowen said.

"Unlike methods currently available, the technique helps us observe the behaviour of single biomolecules without large-label particles or damaging light intensities."

PhD student Nicolas Mauranyapin said motor molecules drove all of life's primary functions, but scientists did not yet completely understand their workings.

"Our research opens a new door to study motor molecules in their native state, at the nanoscale," Mr Mauranyapin said.

Project researcher Dr Lars Madsen said the project applied techniques used to detect gravitational waves from black holes in outer space to the nanoscale super small world of molecular biology.

"The techniques required to detect extremely faint signals produced by distant black holes were developed over decades," Dr Madsen said.

"Our research translates this technological development over to the biosciences and offers the possibility of a new biomedical diagnostics technique capable of detecting the presence of even a single cancer marker molecule."

Researchers from five countries - Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, France and Pakistan were involved in the project.

It is funded by the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research, which aims to use the technique to help understand stress on pilot behaviour at the sub-cellular level.

The project is part of the University of Queensland Precision Sensing Initiative, a joint initiative of the schools of Mathematics and Physics and of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering.

It was supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems, which aims to develop next-generation quantum technologies for future Australian industries.

Explore further: UQ, partners taking computing out of this world

More information: N. P. Mauranyapin et al. Evanescent single-molecule biosensing with quantum-limited precision, Nature Photonics (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2017.99

University of Queensland researchers have partnered with global technology leader Lockheed Martin to develop next generation computers for aerospace applications.

A new nanoscale sensor has been developed that can help detect cytokinesmolecules that play a critical role in cellular response to infection, inflammation, trauma and disease.

(Phys.org)A team of Australian scientists has developed a powerful microscope using the laws of quantum mechanics to probe the inner workings of living cells.

Next-generation sensors to be used in fields as diverse as mineral exploration and climate change will be turbo boosted thanks to University of Queensland and University of Sussex research.

A team of theoretical physicists has proposed a way to simulate black holes on an electronic chip. Additionally, the technology used to create these lab-made black holes may be useful for quantum technologies. The researchers ...

Quantum mechanics rules. It dictates how particles and forces interact, and thus how atoms and molecules workfor example, what happens when a molecule goes from a higher-energy state to a lower-energy one. But beyond the ...

A diagnostic technique that can detect tiny molecules signalling the presence of cancer could be on the horizon.

A new strategy for sending acoustic waves through water could potentially open up the world of high-speed communications activities underwater, including scuba diving, remote ocean monitoring, and deep-sea exploration.

At the moment they come together, the individual grains in materials like sand and snow appear to have exactly the same probability of combining into any one of their many billions of possible arrangements, researchers have ...

An international team of researchers, working at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley, fabricated an atomically thin material and measured its exotic and durable ...

Using an off-the-shelf camera flash, researchers turned an ordinary sheet of graphene oxide into a material that bends when exposed to moisture. They then used this material to make a spider-like crawler and claw robot that ...

(Phys.org)A team of researchers from institutions in Australia, the U.S. and China has developed a functional prototype nonvolatile ferroelectric domain wall memory. In their paper published on the open access site Science ...

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Physicists make quantum leap in understanding life's nanoscale machinery - Phys.Org

June 23, 2017 by Carla Reiter Here 3 symbolizes an Efimov molecule comprised of three atoms. While all 3s look about the same, research from the Chin group observed a tiny 3 that is clearly different. Credit: Cheng Chin

New research by physicists at the University of Chicago settles a longstanding disagreement over the formation of exotic quantum particles known as Efimov molecules.

The findings, published last month in Nature Physics, address differences between how theorists say Efimov molecules should form and the way researchers say they did form in experiments. The study found that the simple picture scientists formulated based on almost 10 years of experimentation had it wronga result that has implications for understanding how the first complex molecules formed in the early universe and how complex materials came into being.

Efimov molecules are quantum objects formed by three particles that bind together when two particles are unable to do so. The same three particles can make molecules in an infinite range of sizes, depending on the strength of the interactions between them.

Experiments had shown the size of an Efimov molecule was roughly proportional to the size of the atoms that comprise ita property physicists call universality.

"This hypothesis has been checked and rechecked multiple times in the past 10 years, and almost all the experiments suggested that this is indeed the case," said Cheng Chin, a professor of physics at UChicago, who leads the lab where the new findings were made. "But some theorists say the real world is more complicated than this simple formula. There should be some other factors that will break this universality."

The new findings come down somewhere between the previous experimental findings and predictions of theorists. They contradict both and do away with the idea of universality.

"I have to say that I am surprised," Chin said. "This was an experiment where I did not anticipate the result before we got the data."

The data came from extremely sensitive experiments done with cesium and lithium atoms using techniques devised by Jacob Johansen, previously a graduate student in Chin's lab who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. Krutik Patel, a graduate student at UChicago, and Brian DeSalvo, a postdoctoral researcher at UChicago, also contributed to the work.

"We wanted to be able to say once and for all that if we didn't see any dependence on these other properties, then there's really something seriously wrong with the theory," Johansen said. "If we did see dependence, then we're seeing the breakdown of this universality. It always feels good, as a scientist, to resolve these sorts of questions."

Developing new techniques

Efimov molecules are held together by quantum forces rather than by the chemical bonds that bind together familiar molecules such as H2O. The atoms are so weakly connected that the molecules can't exist under normal conditions. Heat in a room providing enough energy to shatter their bonds.

The Efimov molecule experiments were done at extremely low temperatures50 billionths of a degree above absolute zeroand under the influence of a strong magnetic field, which is used to control the interaction of the atoms. When the field strength is in a particular, narrow range, the interaction between atoms intensifies and molecules form. By analyzing the precise conditions in which formation occurs, scientists can infer the size of the molecules.

But controlling the magnetic field precisely enough to make the measurements Johansen sought is extremely difficult. Even heat generated by the electric current used to create the field was enough to change that field, making it hard to reproduce in experiments. The field could fluctuate at a level of only one part in a milliona thousand times weaker than the Earth's magnetic fieldand Johansen had to stabilize it and monitor how it changed over time.

The key was a technique he developed to probe the field using microwave electronics and the atoms themselves.

"I consider what Jacob did a tour de force," Chin said. "He can control the field with such high accuracy and perform very precise measurements on the size of these Efimov molecules and for the first time the data really confirm that there is a significant deviation of the universality."

The new findings have important implications for understanding the development of complexity in materials. Normal materials have diverse properties, which could not have arisen if their behavior at the quantum level was identical. The three-body Efimov system puts scientists right at the point at which universal behavior disappears.

"Any quantum system made with three or more particles is a very, very difficult problem," Chin said. "Only recently do we really have the capability to test the theory and understand the nature of such molecules. We are making progress toward understanding these small quantum clusters. This will be a building block for understanding more complex material."

Explore further: Exotic, gigantic molecules fit inside each other like Russian nesting dolls

More information: Jacob Johansen et al. Testing universality of Efimov physics across broad and narrow Feshbach resonances, Nature Physics (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nphys4130

University of Chicago scientists have experimentally observed for the first time a phenomenon in ultracold, three-atom molecules predicted by Russian theoretical physicist Vitaly Efimov in 1970.

An exotic physical effect based on the attraction among three particles has a similar universality to that of common two-body interactions, Yusuke Horinouchi from the University of Tokyo and Masahito Ueda from the RIKEN Center ...

An international team of physicists has converted three normal atoms into a special new state of matter whose existence was proposed by Russian scientist Vitaly Efimov in 1970.

When a two-body relation becomes a three-body relation, the behaviour of the system changes and typically becomes more complex. While the basic physics of two interacting particles is well understood, the mathematical description ...

Some years ago, Rudolf Grimm's team of quantum physicists in Innsbruck provided experimental proof of Efimov states a phenomenon that until then had been known only in theory. Now they have also measured the second Efimov ...

(Phys.org) Chemical reactions drive the mechanisms of life as well as a million other natural processes on earth. These reactions occur at a wide spectrum of temperatures, from those prevailing at the chilly polar icecaps ...

A diagnostic technique that can detect tiny molecules signalling the presence of cancer could be on the horizon.

A new strategy for sending acoustic waves through water could potentially open up the world of high-speed communications activities underwater, including scuba diving, remote ocean monitoring, and deep-sea exploration.

At the moment they come together, the individual grains in materials like sand and snow appear to have exactly the same probability of combining into any one of their many billions of possible arrangements, researchers have ...

An international team of researchers, working at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley, fabricated an atomically thin material and measured its exotic and durable ...

Using an off-the-shelf camera flash, researchers turned an ordinary sheet of graphene oxide into a material that bends when exposed to moisture. They then used this material to make a spider-like crawler and claw robot that ...

(Phys.org)A team of researchers from institutions in Australia, the U.S. and China has developed a functional prototype nonvolatile ferroelectric domain wall memory. In their paper published on the open access site Science ...

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We cannot have nonsense particles without complete annihilation, also a little magic! But no science!

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Physicists settle debate over how exotic quantum particles form - Phys.Org