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posted by martyb on Tuesday July 14 2020, @03:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the light-reading-on-a-heavy-subject dept.

Simulation Shows Potential for Glowing Gravitons:

Where there is energy, there is gravity. And photons—massless packets of light energy—can, in exceedingly rare cases, spontaneously transform into gravity particles, according to Douglas Singleton, a physicist at California State University, who was not involved with the new study. The reverse happens, too, he says: gravitons can become photons. The new analysis considers a mechanism by which gravitons could unleash many billions of times more photons than earlier research suggested—making it easier to confirm their existence.

“A primitive estimate based on intensities [of gravitons] in the vicinity of black hole mergers came close” to numbers that would produce detectable light, says Raymond Sawyer, the study's author and a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

[...] Events such as black hole mergers should create the necessary conditions to send out photons in the form of radio waves with wavelengths many kilometers long. This signal would be extremely faint but perhaps possible to pick up from Earth. Events somewhat more violent than previously observed mergers could do it, Sawyer says. Scientists would have to tease the glow of the resulting radio waves from that of interfering gases.

First, though, theorists must check if the model holds up. Sawyer hopes future simulations will prove that photon bursts also occur in more realistic models of intense gravitational events, where many gravitons swirl in intricate patterns. Singleton agrees that the problem needs more computational firepower: current analyses are “gross simplifications,” he says. “The idea is to get people interested enough to do the heavy calculations.”

Journal Reference:
Raymond Sawyer. Seeing Gravitons in Colliding Gravitational Waves, Physics (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.101301)


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  • (Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Tuesday July 14 2020, @05:21AM (2 children)

    by stormwyrm (717) on Tuesday July 14 2020, @05:21AM (#1021065) Journal
    Is there some sort of unified field theory they're looking to test that unifies electromagnetism and gravitation, Einstein's final quest? Photons can transform into the weak bosons and vice-versa thanks to electroweak unification, and presumably at even higher energies the gluon might join in that symmetry dance as well in what is called Grand Unification. And at even higher energies, normally associated with the period around a Planck time after the Big Bang, presumably gravity joins in on the fun as well and all four known fundamental forces are unified. That ultimate unification, usually called the "Theory of Everything", seems to be one mechanism by which gravitons could transform into photons and vice-versa. Or is there some other hypothesised mechanism they're thinking of?
    --
    Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday July 14 2020, @10:38AM (1 child)

      by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Tuesday July 14 2020, @10:38AM (#1021141) Journal

      Yes, as I well remember, in 70' to early 80' there was a Grand Unification Theory based on multilinear Grassmann algebra apparatus, which explained gravitation quite well with graviton-gravitino interaction. And, surprisingly, predicted the local inversion of time possible. I have read about it in detail report in polish scientific magazine Problemy, about the same time when the then current Neutron Bomb was a big media story in politics.

      However, none of this survived for history: the theory itself was dismissed and outright banned in physics, the magazine Problemy itself was completely deleted from science immediately after fall of communism, and even a neutron bomb is an absolute MIC taboo today, maybe because of the only state producing them at industrial scale.

      What remains is the math, but even the Grassmann algebra did not come out of this suppression unscathed, as I witness on current Wikipedia.
      I recommend to look into old math books (Saunders, McLane and possibly Grassmann himself). The most precious information is, how many and which grassmannian generators the specific GUT algebra needs.

      --
      Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
      • (Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Tuesday July 14 2020, @11:14AM

        by zeigerpuppy (1298) on Tuesday July 14 2020, @11:14AM (#1021149)

        That sounds really fascinating.
        I have been interested for a while in theories which allow temporal inversion.
        There are two-time theories (Itzhak Bars) but these generally rely on the second time being folded (as in M theory).

        A theory that allows temporal inversion in a relativistic frame is quite a feat, but could provide a bridge between informational theories and quantum field theory. There can then be sidewards flow of time, eddies allowing recursion and the evolution of states with some independence. This could help to explain entanglement, a sort of out-of-stepness in 2T.

        I'd be interested in reading more about the Polish work.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @07:04AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @07:04AM (#1021095)

    Simulation shows I could be filthy rich.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @01:20PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @01:20PM (#1021215)

    > Knowing from previous work that other massless particles can abruptly change state in large numbers (a phenomenon known as a quantum break

    But is ungoogleable because Quantum Break is also the name of a game

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Tuesday July 14 2020, @02:12PM

      by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 14 2020, @02:12PM (#1021236) Journal

      > Knowing from previous work that other massless particles can abruptly change state in large numbers (a phenomenon known as a quantum break
      But is ungoogleable because Quantum Break is also the name of a game

      Check out the DOI link provided in the Journal Reference above: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.101301 [doi.org].

      It provides the full text of the journal article as well as all of its references.

      --
      Wit is intellect, dancing.
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