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Scientists make first detection of exotic “X” particles in quark-gluon plasma

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In the first millionths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a roiling, trillion-degree plasma of quarks and gluons — elementary particles that briefly glommed together in countless combinations before cooling and settling into more stable configurations to make the neutrons and protons of ordinary matter.

In the chaos before cooling, a fraction of these quarks and gluons collided randomly to form short-lived “X” particles, so named for their mysterious, unknown structures. Today, X particles are extremely rare, though physicists have theorized that they may be created in particle accelerators through quark coalescence, where high-energy collisions can generate similar flashes of quark-gluon plasma.

Now physicists at MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science and elsewhere have found evidence of X particles in the quark-gluon plasma produced in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, based near Geneva, Switzerland.

The team used machine-learning techniques to sift through more than 13 billion heavy ion collisions, each of which produced tens of thousands of charged particles. Amid this ultradense, high-energy particle soup, the researchers were able to tease out about 100 X particles, of a type known as X (3872), named for the particle’s estimated mass.

The results, published this week in Physical Review Letters , mark the first time researchers have detected X particles in quark-gluon plasma — an environment that they hope will illuminate the particles’ as-yet unknown structure.

“This is just the start of the story,” says lead author Yen-Jie Lee, the Class of 1958 Career Development Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. “We’ve shown we can find a signal. In the next few years we want to use the quark-gluon plasma to probe the X particle’s internal structure, which could change our view of what kind of material the universe should produce.”

The study’s co-authors are members of the CMS Collaboration, an international team of scientists that operates and collects data from the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of the LHC’s particle detectors.

Particles in the plasma

The basic building blocks of matter are the neutron and the proton, each of which are made from three tightly bound quarks.

“For years we had thought that for some reason, nature had chosen to produce particles made only from two or three quarks,” Lee says.

Only recently have physicists begun to see signs of exotic “tetraquarks” — particles made from a rare combination of four quarks. Scientists suspect that X (3872) is either a compact tetraquark or an entirely new kind of molecule made from not atoms but two loosely bound mesons — subatomic particles that themselves are made from two quarks.

X (3872) was first discovered in 2003 by the Belle experiment, a particle collider in Japan that smashes together high-energy electrons and positrons. Within this environment, however, the rare particles decayed too quickly for scientists to examine their structure in detail. It has been hypothesized that X (3872) and other exotic particles might be better illuminated in quark-gluon plasma.

“Theoretically speaking, there are so many quarks and gluons in the plasma that the production of X particles should be enhanced,” Lee says. “But people thought it would be too difficult to search for them because there are so many other particles produced in this quark soup.”

“Really a signal”

In their new study, Lee and his colleagues looked for signs of X particles within the quark-gluon plasma generated by heavy-ion collisions in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. They based their analysis on the LHC’s 2018 dataset, which included more than 13 billion lead-ion collisions, each of which released quarks and gluons that scattered and merged to form more than a quadrillion short-lived particles before cooling and decaying.

“After the quark-gluon plasma forms and cools down, there are so many particles produced, the background is overwhelming,” Lee says. “So we had to beat down this background so that we could eventually see the X particles in our data.”

To do this, the team used a machine-learning algorithm which they trained to pick out decay patterns characteristic of X particles. Immediately after particles form in quark-gluon plasma, they quickly break down into “daughter” particles that scatter away. For X particles, this decay pattern, or angular distribution, is distinct from all other particles.

The researchers, led by MIT postdoc Jing Wang, identified key variables that describe the shape of the X particle decay pattern. They trained a machine-learning algorithm to recognize these variables, then fed the algorithm actual data from the LHC’s collision experiments. The algorithm was able to sift through the extremely dense and noisy dataset to pick out the key variables that were likely a result of decaying X particles.

“We managed to lower the background by orders of magnitude to see the signal,” says Wang.

The researchers zoomed in on the signals and observed a peak at a specific mass, indicating the presence of X (3872) particles, about 100 in all.

“It’s almost unthinkable that we can tease out these 100 particles from this huge dataset,” says Lee, who along with Wang ran multiple checks to verify their observation.

“Every night I would ask myself, is this really a signal or not?” Wang recalls. “And in the end, the data said yes!”

In the next year or two, the researchers plan to gather much more data, which should help to elucidate the X particle’s structure. If the particle is a tightly bound tetraquark, it should decay more slowly than if it were a loosely bound molecule. Now that the team has shown X particles can be detected in quark-gluon plasma, they plan to probe this particle with quark-gluon plasma in more detail, to pin down the X particle’s structure.

“Currently our data is consistent with both because we don’t have a enough statistics yet. In next few years we’ll take much more data so we can separate these two scenarios,” Lee says. “That will broaden our view of the kinds of particles that were produced abundantly in the early universe.”

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy.

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Physics World reporter Tim Wogan writes that MIT researchers used machine learning techniques to identify a mysterious “X” particle in the quark–gluon plasma produced by the Large Hadron Collider. “Further studies of the particle could help explain how familiar hadrons such as protons and neutrons formed from the quark–gluon plasma believed to have been present in the early universe,” writes Wogan.

Popular Science

Using machine learning techniques, MIT researchers have detected “X particles” produced by the Large Hadron Collider, reports Rahul Rao for Popular Science . “The results tell us more about an artifact from the very earliest ticks of history, writes Rao. “Quark-gluon plasma filled the universe in the first millionths of a second of its life, before what we recognize as matter—molecules, atoms, or even protons or neutrons—had formed.”

Scientists have discovered “X-particles” in the aftermath of collisions produced in the Large Hadron Collider, which could shed light on the structure of these elusive particles, reports Becky Ferreira for Vice . “X particles can yield broader insights about the type of environment that existed in those searing and turbulent moments after the Big Bang,” writes Ferreira.

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Further evidence for quark-matter cores in massive neutron stars

New theoretical analysis places the likelihood of massive neutron stars hiding cores of deconfined quark matter between 80 and 90 percent. The result was reached through massive supercomputer runs utilizing Bayesian statistical inference.

Neutron-star cores contain matter at the highest densities reached in our present-day Universe, with as much as two solar masses of matter compressed inside a sphere of 25 km in diameter. These astrophysical objects can indeed be thought of as giant atomic nuclei, with gravity compressing their cores to densities exceeding those of individual protons and neutrons manyfold.

These densities make neutron stars interesting astrophysical objects from the point of view of particle and nuclear physics. A longstanding open problem concerns whether the immense central pressure of neutron stars can compress protons and neutrons into a new phase of matter, known as cold quark matter. In this exotic state of matter, individual protons and neutrons no longer exist.

"Their constituent quarks and gluons are instead liberated from their typical color confinement and are allowed to move almost freely," explains Aleksi Vuorinen, professor of theoretical particle physics at the University of Helsinki.

A Strong Phase Transition May Still Ruin the Day

In a new article just published in Nature Communications, a team centred at the University of Helsinki provided a first-ever quantitative estimate for the likelihood of quark-matter cores inside massive neutron stars. They showed that, based on current astrophysical observations, quark matter is almost inevitable in the most massive neutron stars: a quantitative estimate that the team extracted placed the likelihood in the range of 80-90 percent.

The remaining small likelihood for all neutron stars to be composed of only nuclear matter requires the change from nuclear to quark matter to be a strong first-order phase transition, somewhat resembling that of liquid water turning to ice. This kind of rapid change in the properties of neutron-star matter has the potential to destabilize the star in such a way that the formation of even a minuscule quark-matter core would result in the star collapsing into a black hole.

The international collaboration between scientists from Finland, Norway, Germany, and the US was able to further show how the existence of quark-matter cores may one day be either fully confirmed or ruled out. The key is being able to constrain the strength of the phase transition between nuclear and quark matter, expected to be possible once a gravitational-wave signal from the last part of a binary neutron-star merger is one day recorded.

Massive Supercomputer Runs Using Observational Data

A key ingredient in deriving the new results was a set of massive supercomputer calculations utilizing Bayesian inference -- a branch of statistical deduction where one infers the likelihoods of different model parameters via direct comparison with observational data. The Bayesian component of the study enabled the researchers to derive new bounds for the properties of neutron-star matter, demonstrating them to approach so-called conformal behavior near the cores of the most massive stable neutron stars.

Dr. Joonas Nättilä, one of the lead authors of the paper, describes the work as an interdisciplinary effort that required expertise from astrophysics, particle and nuclear physics, as well as computer science. He is about to start as an Associate Professor at the University of Helsinki in May 2024.

"It is fascinating to concretely see how each new neutron-star observation enables us to deduce the properties of neutron-star matter with increasing precision."

Joonas Hirvonen, a PhD student working under the guidance of Nättilä and Vuorinen, on the other hand emphasizes the importance of high-performance computing:

"We had to use millions of CPU hours of supercomputer time to be able to compare our theoretical predictions to observations and to constrain the likelihood of quark-matter cores. We are extremely grateful to the Finnish supercomputer center CSC for providing us with all the resources we needed!"

• Dark Matter
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Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Helsinki . Original written by Johanna Pellinen. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Eemeli Annala, Tyler Gorda, Joonas Hirvonen, Oleg Komoltsev, Aleksi Kurkela, Joonas Nättilä, Aleksi Vuorinen. Strongly interacting matter exhibits deconfined behavior in massive neutron stars . Nature Communications , 2023; 14 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-44051-y

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February 27, 2019

Physicists Solve a 35-Year-Old Mystery Hidden inside Atomic Cores

New research reveals that pairs of protons and neutrons within atomic nuclei influence the speed of quarks passing through

By Rafi Letzter & LiveScience

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Here’s a mysterious truth that scientists have known since 1983: Protons and neutrons act differently when they’re inside an atom, versus floating freely through space. Specifically, the subatomic particles that make up those protons and neutrons, called quarks, slow down massively once they’re confined to a  nucleus in an atom .

Physicists really didn’t like this, because neutrons are neutrons whether they’re inside an atom or not. And protons are protons. Both  protons and neutrons  (which together make up the class of particles called “nucleons”) are made up of three smaller particles, called  quarks , bound together by  the strong force .

“When you put quarks into a nucleus, they start to move slower, and that is very weird,” said study co-author Or Hen, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That’s strange because the powerful interactions  between quarks  mainly determine their speed, whereas forces that bind the nucleus (and also act on quarks inside the nucleus) are supposed to be very weak, Hen added.

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And there’s no other known force that should be modifying the behavior of quarks in a nucleus so intensely. Yet, the effect remains: Particle physicists call it the EMC effect, named for the European Muon Collaboration, the group that discovered it. And until recently, scientists weren’t sure what caused it. [ The Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics ]

Two particles in a nucleus are typically pulled together by a force of around 8 million electron volts (8 MeV), a measure of energy in particles. Quarks in a proton or neutron are bound together by about 1,000 MeV. So it doesn’t make sense that the comparatively  mild interactions of the nucleus  are dramatically impacting the powerful interactions inside quarks, Hen told Live Science.

“What is eight next to 1,000?” he said.

But the EMC effect doesn’t look like a mild nudge from an outside force. Though it varies from one sort of nucleus to the next, “It’s not like half a percent. The effect pops out of the data once you are creative enough to design an experiment to look for it,” Hen said.

Depending on the nucleus involved, the apparent size of the nucleons (which is a function of their speed) can change by 10 to 20 percent. In a gold nucleus, for example, protons and neutrons are 20 percent smaller than they are when they float freely.

Theoreticians came up with lots of different models to explain what was going on here, Hen said.

“A friend of mine joked that EMC stood for ‘Everybody’s Model is Cool’ because every model seemed like it could explain it,” he said.

But over time, physicists did more experiments, testing those different models, and one after another fell away.

“No one could explain all of the data, and we were left with a big puzzle. We have a lot of data now, measurements of how the quarks move inside all kinds of different nuclei, and we couldn’t explain what was going on,” he said.

Instead of trying to explain all of the puzzle at once, Hen and his colleagues decided to look at a just one special case of neutron and proton interaction.

Under most circumstances, protons and neutrons in a nucleus don’t overlap with each other, instead respecting one another’s boundaries—even though they’re really just systems of bound quarks. But sometimes, nucleons get linked together within existing nucleus, and start to briefly, physically overlap with one another, becoming what scientists call “correlated pairs.” At any moment, about 20 percent of nucleons in a nucleus overlap in this way.

When that happens, enormous amounts of energy flows among the quarks, fundamentally changing their bound structure and behavior—a phenomenon caused by the  strong force . In a paper published Feb. 20 in the  journal Nature , the researchers argued that this energy flow precisely accounts for the EMC effect. [ The Standard Model of Particle Physics ]

The team bombarded lots of different types of nuclei with electrons , and found a direct relationship between these nucleon pairs and the EMC effect.

Their data strongly suggest, Hen said, that the quarks in most nucleons don’t change at all when they enter a nucleus. But those few involved in nucleon pairs change their behavior so dramatically that they skew the average results in any experiment. That many quarks packed into such a small space causes some dramatic strong force effects. The EMC effect is the result of just a minority of anomalies, rather than a change to the behavior of all protons and neutrons.

From the data, the team derived a mathematical function that accurately describes how the EMC effect behaves from one nucleus to the next.

“They [the authors of the paper] made a prediction, and their prediction was more or less confirmed,” said Gerald Feldman, a physicist at George Washington University who wrote an accompanying News & Views  article in the same issue of Nature but was not involved in the research.

That’s strong evidence that this pairing effect is the real answer to the EMC mystery, Feldman told Live Science.

After 35 years, particle physicists seem to have solved this problem with too many no-good solutions. Hen said he and his colleagues already have follow-up experiments planned to probe the issue even more deeply, and reveal new unknown truths about the behavior of paired-up nucleons inside atoms.

Copyright 2019  LiveScience.com , a Future company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed

CERN Accelerating science

The Standard Model

The Standard Model explains how the basic building blocks of matter interact, governed by four fundamental forces.

The theories and discoveries of thousands of physicists since the 1930s have resulted in a remarkable insight into the fundamental structure of matter: everything in the universe is found to be made from a few basic building blocks called fundamental particles, governed by four fundamental forces. Our best understanding of how these particles and three of the forces are related to each other is encapsulated in the Standard Model of particle physics. Developed in the early 1970s, it has successfully explained almost all experimental results and precisely predicted a wide variety of phenomena. Over time and through many experiments, the Standard Model has become established as a well-tested physics theory.

Particles of the Standard Model of particle physics (Image: Daniel Dominguez/CERN)

Matter particles

All matter around us is made of elementary particles, the building blocks of matter. These particles occur in two basic types called quarks and leptons. Each group consists of six particles, which are related in pairs, or “generations”. The lightest and most stable particles make up the first generation, whereas the heavier and less-stable particles belong to the second and third generations. All stable matter in the universe is made from particles that belong to the first generation; any heavier particles quickly decay to more stable ones. The six quarks are paired in three generations – the “up quark” and the “down quark” form the first generation, followed by the “charm quark” and “strange quark”, then the “top quark” and “bottom (or beauty) quark”. Quarks also come in three different “colours” and only mix in such ways as to form colourless objects. The six leptons are similarly arranged in three generations – the “electron” and the “electron neutrino”, the “muon” and the “muon neutrino”, and the “tau” and the “tau neutrino”. The electron, the muon and the tau all have an electric charge and a sizeable mass, whereas the neutrinos are electrically neutral and have very little mass.

Forces and carrier particles

There are four fundamental forces at work in the universe: the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. They work over different ranges and have different strengths. Gravity is the weakest but it has an infinite range. The electromagnetic force also has infinite range but it is many times stronger than gravity. The weak and strong forces are effective only over a very short range and dominate only at the level of subatomic particles. The weak force is weaker than the strong force and the electromagnetic force, but it is still much stronger than gravity. The strong force, as the name suggests, is the strongest of all four fundamental interactions.

Three of the fundamental forces result from the exchange of force-carrier particles, which belong to a broader group called “bosons”. Particles of matter transfer discrete amounts of energy by exchanging bosons with each other. Each fundamental force has its own corresponding boson – the strong force is carried by the “gluon”, the electromagnetic force is carried by the “photon”, and the “ W and Z bosons” are responsible for the weak force. Although not yet found, the “graviton” should be the corresponding force-carrying particle of gravity. The Standard Model includes the electromagnetic, strong and weak forces and all their carrier particles, and explains well how these forces act on all of the matter particles. However, the most familiar force in our everyday lives, gravity, is not part of the Standard Model, as fitting gravity comfortably into this framework has proved to be a difficult challenge. The quantum theory used to describe the micro world, and the general theory of relativity used to describe the macro world, are difficult to fit into a single framework. No one has managed to make the two mathematically compatible in the context of the Standard Model. But luckily for particle physics, when it comes to the minuscule scale of particles, the effect of gravity is so weak as to be negligible. Only when matter is in bulk, at the scale of the human body or of the planets for example, does the effect of gravity dominate. So the Standard Model still works well despite its reluctant exclusion of one of the fundamental forces.

So far so good, but...

...it is not time for physicists to call it a day just yet. Even though the Standard Model is currently the best description there is of the subatomic world, it does not explain the complete picture. The theory incorporates only three out of the four fundamental forces, omitting gravity. There are also important questions that it does not answer, such as “ What is dark matter? ”, or “ What happened to the antimatter after the big bang? ”, “Why are there three generations of quarks and leptons with such a different mass scale?” and more. Last but not least is a particle called the Higgs boson , an essential component of the Standard Model.

On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced they had each observed a new particle in the mass region around 126 GeV. This particle was consistent with the Higgs boson but it took further work to determine whether or not it was the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model. The Higgs boson, as proposed within the Standard Model, is the simplest manifestation of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism. Other types of Higgs bosons are predicted by other theories that go beyond the Standard Model.

On 8 October 2013 the Nobel prize in physics was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider”.

So although the Standard Model accurately describes the phenomena within its domain, it is still incomplete. Perhaps it is only a part of a bigger picture that includes new physics hidden deep in the subatomic world or in the dark recesses of the universe. New information from experiments at the LHC will help us to find more of these missing pieces.

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Beyond the Visible Universe: New Research Reveals How Gravity Influences the Quantum Realm

By Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility February 8, 2024

Nuclear physicists have discovered gravity’s profound influence on the quantum scale, revealing the strong force’s distribution within protons for the first time. This groundbreaking research, combining historical theoretical insights with modern experimental data, offers unprecedented understanding of the proton’s internal dynamics and sets the stage for future discoveries in nuclear science.

Nuclear physicists at Jefferson Lab have mapped the distribution of the strong force within the proton, employing a framework that links to gravity, opening a new pathway for exploration.

Gravity’s influence is unmistakably evident throughout the observable universe. Its effects are observed in the synchronized orbits of moons around planets, in comets that deviate from their paths due to the gravitational pull of large stars, and in the majestic spirals of enormous galaxies. These magnificent phenomena highlight the role of gravity on the grandest scales of matter. Meanwhile, nuclear physicists are uncovering the significant contributions of gravity at the very smallest scales of matter.

New research conducted by nuclear physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility is using a method that connects theories of gravitation to interactions among the smallest particles of matter to reveal new details at this smaller scale. The research has now revealed, for the first time, a snapshot of the distribution of the strong force inside the proton. This snapshot details the shear stress the force may exert on the quark particles that make up the proton. The result was recently published in Reviews of Modern Physics .

Insights into Proton Structure

According to the lead author on the study, Jefferson Lab Principal Staff Scientist Volker Burkert, the measurement reveals insight into the environment experienced by the proton’s building blocks. Protons are built of three quarks that are bound together by the strong force.

“At its peak, this is more than a four-ton force that one would have to apply to a quark to pull it out of the proton,” Burkert explained. “Nature, of course, does not allow us to separate just one quark from the proton because of a property of quarks called ‘color.’ There are three colors that mix quarks in the proton to make it appear colorless from the outside, a requirement for its existence in space. Trying to pull a colored quark out of the proton will produce a colorless quark/anti-quark pair, a meson, using the energy you put in to attempt to separate the quark, leaving a colorless proton (or neutron) behind. So, the 4-tons is an illustration of the strength of the force that is intrinsic in the proton.”

The result is only the second of the proton’s mechanical properties to be measured. The proton’s mechanical properties include its internal pressure (measured in 2018), its mass distribution (physical size), its angular momentum, and its shear stress (shown here). The result was made possible by a half-century-old prediction and two-decade-old data.

In the mid-1960s, it was theorized that if nuclear physicists could see how gravity interacts with subatomic particles, such as the proton, such experiments could reveal the proton’s mechanical properties directly.

“But at that time, there was no way. If you compare gravity with the electromagnetic force, for instance, there is 39 orders of magnitude of difference – So it’s completely hopeless, right?” explained Latifa Elouadhriri, a Jefferson Lab staff scientist and co-author on the study.

Theoretical Foundations and Experimental Breakthroughs

The decades-old data came from experiments conducted with Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF), a DOE Office of Science user facility. A typical CEBAF experiment would entail an energetic electron interacting with another particle by exchanging a packet of energy and a unit of angular momentum called a virtual photon with the particle. The energy of the electron dictates which particles it interacts with in this way and how they respond.

In the experiment, a force even much greater than the four tons needed to pull out a quark/antiquark pair was applied to the proton by the highly energetic electron beam interacting with the proton in a target of liquified hydrogen gas.

“We developed the program to study deeply virtual Compton scattering. This is where you have an electron exchanging a virtual photon with the proton. And at the final state, the proton remained the same but recoiled, and you have one real very highly energetic photon produced, plus the scattered electron,” said Elouadhriri. “At the time we took the data, we were not aware that beyond the 3-dimensional imaging we intended with this data, we were also collecting the data needed for accessing the mechanical properties of the proton.”

It turns out that this specific process – deeply virtual Compton scattering (DVCS) – could be connected to how gravity interacts with matter. The general version of this connection was stated in the 1973 textbook on Einstein’s general theory of relativity titled ‘Gravitation’ by Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne, and John Archibald Wheeler.

In it, they wrote, “Any mass-less spin-2 field would give rise to a force indistinguishable from gravitation, because a mass-less spin-2 field would couple to the stress–energy tensor in the same way that gravitational interactions do.”

Three decades later, theorist Maxim Polyakov followed up on this idea by establishing the theoretical foundation that connects the DVCS process and gravitational interaction.

“This breakthrough in theory established the relationship between the measurement of deeply virtual Compton scattering to the gravitational form factor. And we were able to use that for the first time and extract the pressure that we did in the Nature paper in 2018, and now the normal force and the shear force,” Burkert explained.

A more detailed description of the connections between the DVCS process and the gravitational interaction can be found in this article describing the first result obtained from this research.

Future Directions and Theoretical Advancements

The researchers say their next step is to work on extracting the information they need from the existing DVCS data to enable the first determination of the proton’s mechanical size. They also hope to take advantage of newer, higher-statistics, and higher-energy experiments that are continuing the DVCS research in the proton.

In the meantime, the study co-authors have been amazed at the plethora of new theoretical efforts, detailed in hundreds of theoretical publications, that have begun to exploit this newly discovered avenue for exploring the mechanical properties of the proton.

“And also, now that we are in this new era of discovery with the 2023 Long Range Plan of Nuclear Science released recently. This will be a major pillar of the direction of science with new facilities and new detector developments. We’re looking forward to seeing more of what can be done,” Burkert said.

Elouadhriri agrees.

“And in my view, this is just the beginning of something much bigger to come. It has already changed the way we think about the structure of the proton,” she said.

“Now, we can express the structure of subnuclear particles in terms of forces, pressure, and physical sizes that also non-physicists can relate to,” added Burkert.

Reference: “ Colloquium : Gravitational form factors of the proton” by V. D. Burkert, L. Elouadrhiri, F. X. Girod, C. Lorcé, P. Schweitzer and P. E. Shanahan, 22 December 2023, Reviews of Modern Physics . DOI: 10.1103/RevModPhys.95.041002

The study was funded by the US Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, Carl G. and Shirley Sontheimer Research Fund.

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4 comments on "beyond the visible universe: new research reveals how gravity influences the quantum realm".

Please answer: 1. Why is mathematics the language of science? 2. What is the difference between low dimensional spacetime matter and high-dimensional spacetime matter in mathematics? 3. What exactly is quantum? 4. Is quantum necessarily high-dimensional spacetime matter? 5. Is the so-called academic journal you believe in scientific? Are they honest? and so on.

Science must follow mathematical rules. For example, the Standard Model (SM) is considered to be one of the most significant achievements of physics in the 20th century. However, the magnetic moment of μ particle is larger than expected, revealed by a g-2 experiment at Fermilab, suggests that the established theory (such as SM) of fundamental particles is incomplete. Furthermore, the SM omitting gravity, it not involved the time problem and when the particle movement starts. Mathematics is the foundation of science. Physics must respect the scientific nature of mathematics and mathematical models. The SM must be based on mathematical models in order to be scientific, convincing, and in line with natural laws. I hope researchers are not fooled by the pseudoscientific theories of the Physical Review Letters (PRL), and hope more people dare to stand up and fight against rampant pseudoscience. The so-called academic journals (such as Physical Review Letters, Nature, Science, etc.) firmly believe that two high-dimensional spacetime objects (such as two sets of cobalt-60) rotating in opposite directions can be transformed into two objects that mirror each other, is a typical case of pseudoscience rampant. If researchers are really interested in Science and Physics, you can browse https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/643404671 and https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/595280873 .

The researchers are in an exact path to trace mechanical path for graviþy of quarks;Einstein’s GR is in good position applied to obtain result.Every aspect of the experiment is right;but,universe has a natural orientation to give perfect quantum gravity,not simpĺy the magntitude to establish in the laboratory otherwise achived from the other methods.

I just saw an article recently about the way a quasar that was billions of light years away, emitted photons and other cosmic particles, in these 2 huge jets that ejected from opposite sides. As the view gets farther and farther away, these 2 streams that look like a simple up and down motion, turns into a huge sweeping motion that almost resembles the first picture in this article. Spooky

Gravitational force field around the Earth varies significantly yet it is not recorded or felt because of the rotation planets and stars this can be calculated easily I shall publish my new hypotheses shortly

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China Pursues Major Role in Particle Physics

China is described as major force in particle physics research; Dr Hershen Chen, Institute of High Energy Physics, Beijing, director, suggests that International Linear Collider, proposed global project designed to go beyond any other facility in world, might be built in China; China is currently upgrading ability of Beijing collider to allow for wider recognition of rare events like multiple quarks or provide better understanding of quantum property charm; background of China's particle physics program described; drawings; photos (L)

By Dennis Overbye

In Lab's High-Speed Collisions, Things Just Vanish

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory research suggests that scientists there have successfully created strong force mini-black hole through collision of gold nuclei; Dr Horatiu Nasatase, Brown University physics professor who is conducting Brookhaven research, defines vortex as mini-black hole because it eats up part of gold and gives off radiation; physicists conducting experiment were expecting to produce quark-gluon plasma, not witness mini-hole; photos (M)

By Kenneth Chang

Time Running Short At Big Bang Device

Scientists working on Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory say proposal to cut $8 million from its budget in 2006 would mean that machine, seeking to be first to create and identify substance called quark-gluon plasma would only be able to operate for 12 weeks, rather than its typical 31, next year; say reduction in running time would reduce chance that lab will prove creation of elusive plasma before new, more powerful collider in Switzerland begins operation in 2007 (M )

By Valerie Cotsalas

Like Particles, 2 Houses of Physics Collide

Quark Matter 2004 conference becomes forum for Brookhaven National Laboratory scientists to present and critique own data on quest to create quark-gluon plasma; elusive state of matter is believed to have existed last immediately after big bang; CERN, Europe's leading particle physics laboratory, recently announced creation of deconfined quarks, state directly before quark-gluon plasma, and Brookhaven has been critical of that announcement, holding data is inconclusive; possible reasons for conflict between research groups and for Brookhaven's reluctance to announce discovery discussed; photo; drawing (L)

By James Glanz

Tests Suggest Scientists Have Found Big Bang Goo

At least three advanced diagnostic tests suggest that experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory has cracked open protons and neutrons like subatomic eggs to create promordial form of matter that last existed when universe was roughly one-millionth of second old; hot, dense substance is called quark-gluon plasma, and has managed to generate intense disputes in 15 years or so in which scientists have pursued it (M)

Demolition Derby of Physics Jars Loose Clues on Subatomic Glue

Dr Frank Close, Oxford University (Eng) theoretical physics professor, describes observations of particle glue called strong force, which binds together quarks in weird configurations; one of these exotic particles was identified at High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba (Japan) and is described in paper published in Physical Review Letters as quark molecule; mutant particles may give fresh insight into unclear portion of Standar Model, which is used by physicists to explain matter's structure; drawing; photo (M)

A Subatomic Discovery Emerges From Experiments in Japan

Experiments at Spring-8 lab in Osaka, Japan, find that slamming high-energy particles of light into carbon atoms produces new type of subatomic particle containing five quarks, which could have been common in very early universe; experiments three years ago were intended to examine two-quark particles known as mesons; Dr Takashi Nakano explains (M)

It's a Ball. No, It's a Pretzel. Must Be a Proton.

Definitive shape of proton is unknown; physicists continue to test proton reaction and experiments appear to be providing more information, but subatomic shape measuring estimated size of millionth of billionth of meter remains elusive; scientists hope tests planned for Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News (Virginia), in which higher-energy electrons will bombard protons, may give off photons able to be assembled to create picture of shape; how internal proton organization and quarks fluctuation influence theory of shape discussed; drawings (M)

Stars Suggest a Quark Twist And a New Kind of Matter

Astronomers say observations of two stars, one unusually small and other unusually cold, offer possible evidence of new form of matter and new kind of star, one possibly made of elementary particles known as quarks and denser than any cosmic object other than black hole, news conference at National Aeronautics and Space Administration; research is based mainly on data gathered by Earth-orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory; startling findings may open window on nature of matter on tiniest scales; seem to challenge standard model of neutron stars; Dr Jeremy Drake is lead author of report; diagrams (M)

By John Noble Wilford

Trying to Cook a Soup of Free-Range Quarks

Researchers hope to use Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, ring 2.4 miles in circumference, to free quarks from trios in which they occur in nature; Dr Thomas Ludlam, program director, says results should shed light on basic particle theories, origin of mass and weight in universe and nature of empty space; photos (M)

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Research reveals quantum entanglement among quarks

by US Department of Energy

Collisions of high energy particles produce "jets" of quarks, anti-quarks, or gluons. Due to the phenomenon called confinement, scientists cannot directly detect quarks. Instead, the quarks from these collisions fragment into many secondary particles that can be detected.

Scientists recently addressed jet production using quantum simulations. They found that the propagating jets strongly modify the quantum vacuum—the quantum state with the lowest possible energy. In addition, the produced quarks retain quantum entanglement, the linkage between particles across distances. This finding, published in Physical Review Letters , means that scientists can now study this entanglement in experiments.

This research performed quantum simulations that have detected the modification of the vacuum by the propagating jets. The simulations have also revealed quantum entanglement among the jets. This entanglement can be detected in nuclear experiments. The work is also a step forward in quantum-inspired classical computing. It may result in the creation of new application-specific integrated circuits.

Collisions of high energy particles produce "jets"—quarks, antiquarks, or gluons moving through the quantum vacuum. Due to the confinement property of strong interactions, quarks are never directly detected but instead fragment into many secondary particles.

Scientists have long expected that as jets propagate through the confining quantum vacuum, they will modify that vacuum. Scientists have also proposed that the initial quark-antiquark pair may retain quantum entanglement , at least for some time. However, these problems could not be solved previously due to lack of appropriate theoretical and computational tools.

That situation has changed with the advent of quantum computing methods.

These long-standing problems in nuclear physics have been addressed by a team of scientists from Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory that is collaborating with computing company NVIDIA. Their results can stimulate experimental work on detecting entanglement at Brookhaven National Lab and elsewhere.

Journal information: Physical Review Letters

Provided by US Department of Energy

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Newly discovered subatomic particle may be the universe’s mythical ‘glueball’

BEIJING — In the fascinating realm of particle physics, scientists are constantly on the hunt for new subatomic particles that can shed light on the fundamental building blocks of our universe. Now, researchers at the BESIII experiment in China have made an exciting discovery – a new particle called the X(2370) that may be the long-sought-after “glueball.”

You might be asking: what exactly is a glueball? To understand that, we first need to take a step back and look at what matter is made of at its most basic level. Everything around us, from the chair you’re sitting on to the device you’re reading this on, is ultimately composed of atoms . Those atoms are made up of even smaller particles like protons, neutrons, and electrons.

Protons and neutrons are part of a family of particles called hadrons . Most hadrons, including protons and neutrons, are made up of even more fundamental particles called quarks , which are held together by other particles called gluons. Gluons are the “glue” that binds quarks together. They carry the strong nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature.

Here’s where things get even more interesting. The theory that describes the behavior of quarks and gluons is called quantum chromodynamics , or QCD for short. One of the key features of QCD is that, unlike the other fundamental forces , the strong force actually gets stronger with distance! Imagine if the further you pulled two magnets apart, the harder they tried to snap back together – that’s kind of how the strong force works.

This unique property of QCD leads to some fascinating consequences. One prediction is that, in addition to the usual hadrons made of quarks, there could exist particles made entirely of gluons – glueballs. Just like quarks can combine to form composite particles, the thinking goes, so too could gluons bind together with no quarks involved. These glueballs would be a completely new class of subatomic particles .

Physicists have been searching for evidence of glueballs for decades. However, spotting them is tricky. Glueballs are predicted to be very short-lived, quickly decaying into other particles. Also, their expected properties are similar to those of other, more ordinary hadrons, making them hard to distinguish.

Enter the X(2370). This new particle, described in Physical Review Letters , was discovered by carefully analyzing the debris from particle collisions at the BESIII experiment. The researchers were investigating a particular decay process where a J/psi particle (itself a type of hadron) decays into a photon and a group of lighter particles. By reconstructing the paths and energies of the decay products, they were able to identify a new, previously unseen particle – the X(2370).

What’s special about the X(2370) is that its measured properties align very closely with theoretical predictions for the lightest possible glueball. Its mass and quantum properties (like spin and parity) are right in the ballpark of what QCD models have suggested for a glueball candidate.

Of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and further study will be needed to confirm if the X(2370) is indeed the long-awaited glueball. Alternative explanations, like an exotic hadron made of both quarks and gluons, will need to be ruled out. However, the initial data is highly promising.

If confirmed, the discovery of the X(2370) glueball would be a major milestone for particle physics. It would provide direct evidence for this novel class of subatomic particles, validating key predictions of QCD theory. It would deepen our understanding of the strong force and the complex ways that quarks and gluons can combine to create the rich variety of matter in our universe .

StudyFinds Editor-in-Chief Steve Fink contributed to this report.

MIT Technology Review

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A wave of retractions is shaking physics

Grappling with problematic papers and poorly documented data, researchers and journal editors gathered in Pittsburgh to hash out the best way forward.

• Sophia Chen archive page

Recent highly publicized scandals have gotten the physics community worried about its reputation—and its future. Over the last five years, several claims of major breakthroughs in quantum computing and superconducting research, published in prestigious journals, have disintegrated as other researchers found they could not reproduce the blockbuster results. 

Last week, around 50 physicists, scientific journal editors, and emissaries from the National Science Foundation gathered at the University of Pittsburgh to discuss the best way forward.“To be honest, we’ve let it go a little too long,” says physicist Sergey Frolov of the University of Pittsburgh, one of the conference organizers. 

The attendees gathered in the wake of retractions from two prominent research teams. One team, led by physicist Ranga Dias of the University of Rochester, claimed that it had invented the world’s first room temperature superconductor in a 2023 paper in Nature . After independent researchers reviewed the work, a subsequent investigation from Dias’s university found that he had fabricated and falsified his data. Nature retracted the paper in November 2023. Last year, Physical Review Letters retracted a 2021 publication on unusual properties in manganese sulfide that Dias co-authored. 

The other high-profile research team consisted of researchers affiliated with Microsoft working to build a quantum computer. In 2021, Nature retracted the team’s 2018 paper that claimed the creation of a pattern of electrons known as a Majorana particle, a long-sought breakthrough in quantum computing. Independent investigations of that research found that the researchers had cherry-picked their data, thus invalidating their findings. Another less-publicized research team pursuing Majorana particles fell to a similar fate, with Science retracting a 2017 article claiming indirect evidence of the particles in 2022.

In today’s scientific enterprise, scientists perform research and submit the work to editors. The editors assign anonymous referees to review the work, and if the paper passes review, the work becomes part of the accepted scientific record. When researchers do publish bad results, it’s not clear who should be held accountable—the referees who approved the work for publication, the journal editors who published it, or the researchers themselves. “Right now everyone’s kind of throwing the hot potato around,” says materials scientist Rachel Kurchin of Carnegie Mellon University, who attended the Pittsburgh meeting.

Much of the three-day meeting, named the International Conference on Reproducibility in Condensed Matter Physics (a field that encompasses research into various states of matter and why they exhibit certain properties), focused on the basic scientific principle that an experiment and its analysis must yield the same results when repeated. “If you think of research as a product that is paid for by the taxpayer, then reproducibility is the quality assurance department,” Frolov told MIT Technology Review . Reproducibility offers scientists a check on their work, and without it, researchers might waste time and money on fruitless projects based on unreliable prior results, he says. 

In addition to presentations and panel discussions, there was a workshop during which participants split into groups and drafted ideas for guidelines that researchers, journals, and funding agencies could follow to prioritize reproducibility in science. The tone of the proceedings stayed civil and even lighthearted at times. Physicist Vincent Mourik of Forschungszentrum Jülich, a German research institution, showed a photo of a toddler eating spaghetti to illustrate his experience investigating another team’s now-retracted experiment. ​​Occasionally the discussion almost sounded like a couples counseling session, with NSF program director Tomasz Durakiewicz asking a panel of journal editors and a researcher to reflect on their “intimate bond based on trust.”

But researchers did not shy from directly criticizing Nature , Science , and the Physical Review family of journals, all of which sent editors to attend the conference. During a panel, physicist Henry Legg of the University of Basel in Switzerland called out the journal Physical Review B for publishing a paper on a quantum computing device by Microsoft researchers that, for intellectual-property reasons, omitted information required for reproducibility. “It does seem like a step backwards,” Legg said. (Sitting in the audience, Physical Review B editor Victor Vakaryuk said that the paper’s authors had agreed to release “the remaining device parameters” by the end of the year.) 

Journals also tend to “focus on story,” said Legg, which can lead editors to be biased toward experimental results that match theoretical predictions. Jessica Thomas, the executive editor of the American Physical Society, which publishes the Physical Review journals, pushed back on Legg’s assertion. “I don’t think that when editors read papers, they’re thinking about a press release or [telling] an amazing story,” Thomas told MIT Technology Review . “I think they’re looking for really good science.” Describing science through narrative is a necessary part of communication, she says. “We feel a responsibility that science serves humanity, and if humanity can’t understand what’s in our journals, then we have a problem.” 

Frolov, whose independent review with Mourik of the Microsoft work spurred its retraction, said he and Mourik have had to repeatedly e-mail the Microsoft researchers and other involved parties to insist on data. “You have to learn how to be an asshole,” he told MIT Technology Review . “It shouldn’t be this hard.” 

At the meeting, editors pointed out that mistakes, misconduct, and retractions have always been a part of science in practice. “I don’t think that things are worse now than they have been in the past,” says Karl Ziemelis, an editor at Nature .

Ziemelis also emphasized that “retractions are not always bad.” While some retractions occur because of research misconduct, “some retractions are of a much more innocent variety—the authors having made or being informed of an honest mistake, and upon reflection, feel they can no longer stand behind the claims of the paper,” he said while speaking on a panel. Indeed, physicist James Hamlin of the University of Florida, one of the presenters and an independent reviewer of Dias’s work, discussed how he had willingly retracted a 2009 experiment published in Physical Review Letters in 2021 after another researcher’s skepticism prompted him to reanalyze the data. 

What’s new is that “the ease of sharing data has enabled scrutiny to a larger extent than existed before,” says Jelena Stajic, an editor at Science . Journals and researchers need a “more standardized approach to how papers should be written and what needs to be shared in peer review and publication,” she says.

Focusing on the scandals “can be distracting” from systemic problems in reproducibility, says attendee Frank Marsiglio, a physicist at the University of Alberta in Canada. Researchers aren’t required to make unprocessed data readily available for outside scrutiny. When Marsiglio has revisited his own published work from a few years ago, sometimes he’s had trouble recalling how his former self drew those conclusions because he didn’t leave enough documentation. “How is somebody who didn’t write the paper going to be able to understand it?” he says.

Problems can arise when researchers get too excited about their own ideas. “What gets the most attention are cases of fraud or data manipulation, like someone copying and pasting data or editing it by hand,” says conference organizer Brian Skinner, a physicist at Ohio State University. “But I think the much more subtle issue is there are cool ideas that the community wants to confirm, and then we find ways to confirm those things.”

But some researchers may publish bad data for a more straightforward reason. The academic culture, popularly described as “publish or perish,” creates an intense pressure on researchers to deliver results. “It’s not a mystery or pathology why somebody who’s under pressure in their work might misstate things to their supervisor,” said Eugenie Reich, a lawyer who represents scientific whistleblowers, during her talk.

Notably, the conference lacked perspectives from researchers based outside the US, Canada, and Europe, and from researchers at companies. In recent years, academics have flocked to companies such as Google, Microsoft, and smaller startups to do quantum computing research, and they have published their work in Nature , Science , and the Physical Review journals. Frolov says he reached out to researchers from a couple of companies, but “that didn’t work out just because of timing,” he says. He aims to include researchers from that arena in future conversations.

After discussing the problems in the field, conference participants proposed feasible solutions for sharing data to improve reproducibility. They discussed how to persuade the community to view data sharing positively, rather than seeing the demand for it as a sign of distrust. They also brought up the practical challenges of asking graduate students to do even more work by preparing their data for outside scrutiny when it may already take them over five years to complete their degree. Meeting participants aim to publicly release a paper with their suggestions. “I think trust in science will ultimately go up if we establish a robust culture of shareable, reproducible, replicable results,” says Frolov. 

Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business

People are seeking help from AI-generated avatars to process their grief after a family member passes away.

• Zeyi Yang archive page

Why Threads is suddenly popular in Taiwan

During Taiwan’s presidential election, Meta’s social network emerged as a surprise hit.

Technology is probably changing us for the worse—or so we always think

For nearly a hundred years in this publication (and long before that elsewhere) people have worried that new technologies could alter what it means to be human.

• Timothy Maher archive page

Threads is giving Taiwanese users a safe space to talk about politics

But Meta's discomfort with political content could end up pushing them away.

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May 18: Sounds and smells of nature, and more...

Auroras in the ocean, robots lose to animals, how brown rats took over, and whale and primate language.

Social Sharing

On this week's episode of Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald:

The recent solar storm scrambled undersea sensors

The solar storm that lit up the evening sky with aurora recently was also detected by Canada's Ocean Network system of undersea oceanographic observatories off both coasts of the country and up in the Arctic. The compass instruments that normally provide the direction of ocean currents fluctuated by as much as 30 degrees at the height of the solar storm and were picked up as deep as 2.7 kilometres. Kate Moran , the CEO and President of Ocean Networks Canada, said these measurements could prove to be useful for solar scientists to understand the depth of the impact geomagnetic storms can have on our electromagnetic field. 

Robots are stronger, and faster, and better – but still lose to animals

Despite being built to run, robots still can't beat real animals in a race, says a new study published in Science Robotics . Researchers compared the physical abilities of animals to the latest generation of agile autonomous robots and showed that while they can exceed biology in strength and speed, robots still can't match the performance of animals. Simon Fraser University professor Max Donelan explained that biology has better integrated systems, which makes animals able to respond faster to the situation at hand. 

How European brown rats took over North America

The brown rat is the clear undisputed winner of the rat race, having established ecological dominance in most cities across the continent. A new study led by Eric Guiry from Trent University involved analyzing piles of rat bones from dig sites and centuries-old shipwrecks to put together a timeline of when and how brown rats took over North America. He found that brown rats came across the pond much earlier than expected, and surprisingly dominated over black rats very quickly, even though the two animals weren't actually in competition for the same food. The research was published in the journal Science Advances .

Decoding whale talk and primate calls 

Researchers analyzed thousands of clicks from the Eastern Caribbean whale clan to break down their vocabulary into a phonetic alphabet. Pratyusha Sharma , who is a PhD student in the computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the process of identifying the smallest units of whale talk is akin to creating robot communication. This research was published in Nature Communications .

Scientists studying primate communication haven't been so lucky. In a new paper published in PeerJ Life & Environment , Wendy Erb and her colleagues from Cornell Lab of Ornithology's K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics used multiple approaches, including several machine learning algorithms, to decipher the structure of these calls. But their analysis revealed the orangutans' calls to be much more complex than previously thought. 

Eavesdropping on nature sounds to save ecosystems in US National parks

In a basement at Penn State University, researchers with the Protected Areas Research Collaborative (PARC) Lab are listening to thousands of hours of recordings from the US National Park service in order to track every single noise - whether it be natural or human-made. This data is being used to understand how to preserve natural sounds in the parks, which have been shown to be beneficial to both humans, and wildlife. Now, the team is adopting machine learning and artificial intelligence to listen to more data than ever before. We spoke with co-principal investigator Peter Newman, and co-lab manager Morgan Crump. 

In a separate paper, recently published in Science Advances , researchers are calling attention to nature's smellscapes—the various chemicals put out by trees and animals—and how they can affect humans. The multidisciplinary, international team, led by Gregory Bratman from the University of Washington, provides a conceptual framework for investigating nature's smells, to fill in the gaps about what those scents are doing to humans, but also, to know what we're doing to those scents.

Facility for Rare Isotope Beams

At michigan state university, international research team uses wavefunction matching to solve quantum many-body problems, new approach makes calculations with realistic interactions possible.

FRIB researchers are part of an international research team solving challenging computational problems in quantum physics using a new method called wavefunction matching. The new approach has applications to fields such as nuclear physics, where it is enabling theoretical calculations of atomic nuclei that were previously not possible. The details are published in Nature (“Wavefunction matching for solving quantum many-body problems”) .

Ab initio methods and their computational challenges

An ab initio method describes a complex system by starting from a description of its elementary components and their interactions. For the case of nuclear physics, the elementary components are protons and neutrons. Some key questions that ab initio calculations can help address are the binding energies and properties of atomic nuclei not yet observed and linking nuclear structure to the underlying interactions among protons and neutrons.

Yet, some ab initio methods struggle to produce reliable calculations for systems with complex interactions. One such method is quantum Monte Carlo simulations. In quantum Monte Carlo simulations, quantities are computed using random or stochastic processes. While quantum Monte Carlo simulations can be efficient and powerful, they have a significant weakness: the sign problem. The sign problem develops when positive and negative weight contributions cancel each other out. This cancellation results in inaccurate final predictions. It is often the case that quantum Monte Carlo simulations can be performed for an approximate or simplified interaction, but the corresponding simulations for realistic interactions produce severe sign problems and are therefore not possible.

Using ‘plastic surgery’ to make calculations possible

The new wavefunction-matching approach is designed to solve such computational problems. The research team—from Gaziantep Islam Science and Technology University in Turkey; University of Bonn, Ruhr University Bochum, and Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany; Institute for Basic Science in South Korea; South China Normal University, Sun Yat-Sen University, and Graduate School of China Academy of Engineering Physics in China; Tbilisi State University in Georgia; CEA Paris-Saclay and Université Paris-Saclay in France; and Mississippi State University and the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University (MSU)—includes  Dean Lee , professor of physics at FRIB and in MSU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and head of the Theoretical Nuclear Science department at FRIB, and  Yuan-Zhuo Ma , postdoctoral research associate at FRIB.

“We are often faced with the situation that we can perform calculations using a simple approximate interaction, but realistic high-fidelity interactions cause severe computational problems,” said Lee. “Wavefunction matching solves this problem by doing plastic surgery. It removes the short-distance part of the high-fidelity interaction, and replaces it with the short-distance part of an easily computable interaction.”

This transformation is done in a way that preserves all of the important properties of the original realistic interaction. Since the new wavefunctions look similar to that of the easily computable interaction, researchers can now perform calculations using the easily computable interaction and apply a standard procedure for handling small corrections called perturbation theory.  A team effort

The research team applied this new method to lattice quantum Monte Carlo simulations for light nuclei, medium-mass nuclei, neutron matter, and nuclear matter. Using precise ab initio calculations, the results closely matched real-world data on nuclear properties such as size, structure, and binding energies. Calculations that were once impossible due to the sign problem can now be performed using wavefunction matching.

“It is a fantastic project and an excellent opportunity to work with the brightest nuclear scientist s in FRIB and around the globe,” said Ma. “As a theorist , I'm also very excited about programming and conducting research on the world's most powerful exascale supercomputers, such as Frontier , which allows us to implement wavefunction matching to explore the mysteries of nuclear physics.”

While the research team focused solely on quantum Monte Carlo simulations, wavefunction matching should be useful for many different ab initio approaches, including both classical and  quantum computing calculations. The researchers at FRIB worked with collaborators at institutions in China, France, Germany, South Korea, Turkey, and United States.

“The work is the culmination of effort over many years to handle the computational problems associated with realistic high-fidelity nuclear interactions,” said Lee. “It is very satisfying to see that the computational problems are cleanly resolved with this new approach. We are grateful to all of the collaboration members who contributed to this project, in particular, the lead author, Serdar Elhatisari.”

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the German Research Foundation, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences President’s International Fellowship Initiative, Volkswagen Stiftung, the European Research Council, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Security Academic Fund, the Rare Isotope Science Project of the Institute for Basic Science, the National Research Foundation of Korea, the Institute for Basic Science, and the Espace de Structure et de réactions Nucléaires Théorique.

Michigan State University operates the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) as a user facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE-SC), supporting the mission of the DOE-SC Office of Nuclear Physics. Hosting what is designed to be the most powerful heavy-ion accelerator, FRIB enables scientists to make discoveries about the properties of rare isotopes in order to better understand the physics of nuclei, nuclear astrophysics, fundamental interactions, and applications for society, including in medicine, homeland security, and industry.

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of today’s most pressing challenges. For more information, visit energy.gov/science.

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Dozens of Egyptian pyramids, some in Giza, sat along a branch of the Nile, study says

The pyramids in and around Giza have presented a fascinating puzzle for millennia. 

How did ancient Egyptians move limestone blocks, some weighing more than a ton, without using wheels? Why were these burial structures seemingly built in the remote and inhospitable desert? 

New research — published Thursday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment — offers a possible answer, providing new evidence that an extinct branch of the Nile River once weaved through the landscape in a much wetter climate. Dozens of Egyptian pyramids across a 40-mile-long range rimmed the waterway, the study says, including the best-known complex in Giza.

The waterway allowed workers to transport stone and other materials to build the monuments, according to the study. Raised causeways stretched out horizontally, connecting the pyramids to river ports along the Nile’s bank. 

Drought, in combination with seismic activity that tilted the landscape, most likely caused the river to dry up over time and ultimately fill with silt, removing most traces of it.

The research team based its conclusions on data from satellites that send radar waves to penetrate the Earth’s surface and detect hidden features. It also relied on sediment cores and maps from 1911 to uncover and trace the imprint of the ancient waterway. Such tools are helping environmental scientists map the ancient Nile, which is now covered by desert sand and agricultural fields. 

Experts have suspected for decades that boats transported workers and tools to build the pyramids. Some past research has put forward hypotheses similar to the new study; the new findings solidify the theory and map a much broader area.  

“The mapping of the Nile’s ancient channel system has been fragmented and isolated,” an author of the new study, Eman Ghoneim, a professor of earth and ocean sciences at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, wrote in an email. “Ancient Egyptians were using waterways for transportation more often than we thought.”

The study looks at 31 pyramids between Lisht, a village south of Cairo, and Giza. They were constructed over roughly 1,000 years, beginning about 4,700 years ago. The pyramid complexes contained tombs for Egyptian royals. High officials were often buried nearby. 

Some of the granite blocks used to construct them were sourced from locations hundreds of miles south of their sites. In some cases, the blocks could be “mammoth,” weighing several tons, said Peter Der Manuelian, a professor of Egyptology at Harvard University and the director of the Harvard Museum’s Museum of the Ancient East.

Manuelian, who was not involved in the new study, said wheels were not used to move the large blocks, which is one reason researchers have long suspected the Egyptians moved materials by water.

“It’s all sledges,” he said. “Water helps an awful lot.”  

In the past, researchers have posited that the Egyptians might have carved canals to the pyramid sites. 

“Canals and waterway systems have been in the consciousness for decades now,” Manuelian said. But newer theories suggest that the Nile was closer to the pyramids than researchers once thought, he added, and new tools can provide some proof. 

“Archaeology has gotten more scientific, and you have ground-penetrating radar and satellite imagery,” he said.

He added that the new study helps improve maps of ancient Egypt.

The findings suggest that millennia ago, the Egyptian climate was wetter overall and the Nile carried a higher volume of water. It separated into multiple branches, one of which — the researchers call it the Ahramat Branch — was about 40 miles long. 

The locations of the pyramid complexes included in the study correspond in time with estimates of the river branch’s location, according to the authors, as water levels ebbed and flowed over centuries. 

In addition, several pyramid temples and causeways appear to line up horizontally with the ancient riverbed, which suggests that they were directly connected to the river and most likely used to transport building materials. 

The study builds on research from 2022 , which used ancient evidence of pollen grains from marsh species to suggest that a waterway once cut through the present-day desert.

Hader Sheisha, an author of that study who is now an associate professor in the natural history department at the University Museum of Bergen, said the new findings add much-needed evidence to bolster and expand the theory. 

“The new study, in concordance to our study, shows that when the pyramids were built, the landscape was different from that we see today and shows how the ancient Egyptians could interact with their physical world and harness their environment to achieve their immense projects,” Sheisha said in an email. 

Ghoneim and her team explain in the study that the Ahramat Branch shifted eastward over time, a process that might have been propelled by drought about 4,050 years ago. Then it gradually dissolved, only to be covered in silt. 

She said they plan to expand their map and work to detect additional buried branches of the Nile floodplain. Determining the outline and shape of the ancient river branch could help researchers locate the remains of settlements or undiscovered sites before the areas get built over. 

Manuelian said that today, “housing almost goes right up to the edge of the Giza plateau. Egypt is a vast outdoor museum, and there’s more to be discovered.”

Evan Bush is a science reporter for NBC News. He can be reached at [email protected].

Has Science Discovered Animal Consciousness?

by Tim Sommers

Here’s the gist of it. I think a recent declaration on animal consciousness, being signed by a growing number of philosophers and scientists, is largely correct about nonhuman animals possessing consciousness, but misleading. It insinuates that animal consciousness is a recent discovery – made in the last five to ten years – based on new experimental work. As exciting and revelatory as recent work on the minds of nonhuman animals is, animal consciousness is hardly a new discovery. In fact, I am not sure the declaration is really a scientific manifesto so much as a moral one. We ought to be treating nonhuman animals better because many seem to have some level of consciousness, but implying we should do so because of new “scientific evidence” may be a mistake.

NBC recently reported that “ discoveries…in the last five years” show that a “surprising range of creatures” exhibit “evidence of conscious thought or experience, including insects, fish and some crustaceans.” 

“That has prompted a group of top researchers on animal cognition to publish a new pronouncement that they hope will transform how scientists and society view — and care — for animals.” 

“Nearly 40 researchers signed The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness , which was first presented at a conference at New York University.” Many more have signed the Declaration since then, and many more are likely to sign it in the near future.

Here is The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness in its entirety.

“Which animals have the capacity for conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide agreement have emerged.

First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds.

Second, the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).

Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.”

When I read this my first reaction was “I can’t believe it, they’ve solved the ‘other minds’ problem!” A leading problem in philosophy, after all, has been ‘How do we even know other humans have consciousness?’ – much less nonhuman animals. In fact, one of the signatories to the declaration, leading philosopher of mind David Chalmers, is well-known for arguing that there might be beings (“philosophical zombies”) that look and behave just as we do, but have no consciousness. In other words, recognizing there is a philosophical problem about how we can be justified in attributing consciousness to others.

I don’t want to defend the view that we don’t know if other humans have consciousness, any more than I would want to defend the argument that we live in a simulation, but it’s worth noting that a solution to the problem is unlikely to be empirical or the outcome of an experiment. Moreover, given that we are very similar to other humans and have the ability to communicate with them, of course, we tend to attribute consciousness to each other. However, given our differences with other animals, the problem of nonhuman consciousness becomes orders of magnitude more difficult than the other minds problem. 

Before I say more about the NY Declaration, I ought to note that it has a distinguished predecessor. In 2012, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness concluded: 

“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”

That declaration also prominently features claims that their conclusions are based on “new techniques and strategies…of research,” though it seems to have been endorsed exclusively by scientists, unlike the NY Declaration where 28 of original signatories are philosophers. On the other hand, the Cambridge Declaration did not confine itself to experts in the field. (Stephen Hawkings attended the signing, for whatever that’s worth.) But the key to this earlier declaration is the way it frequently repeats the word “substrates.” To oversimplify, their arguments are based on the claim that many animals have the right neural anatomy (sufficiently similar to ours) to be capable of some kind of consciousness, even where the neural machinery is very different in many ways. The Cambridge Declaration , in other words, reads like a tacit rejection of functionalism. 

Functionalism is the view that minds or states of mind – sentience, consciousness, cognition, etc. – are to be understood in terms of their functions or causal role. They do not depend for their existence on some underlying, fundamental substance, but on the role they play in the mind as a system. Mental states are multiply-realizable, then. Humans, dogs, octopuses, insects, and maybe alien or artificial beings, too, can all feel pain, on this view, even if the underlying neural substrate is very different. Some functionalists even argue that absolutely anything is potentially sufficient for realizing mentality – even enough people attached to each other by ropes. My point is that the evidence offered in the Cambridge Declaration , even though it countenances variety and does not demand too strict an isomorphism between human and nonhuman neural architecture, reinforces what functionalists deny. Namely, that the particularities of the system don’t matter at all.

What sort of the evidence does the NY Declaration adduce? In order to keep to a reasonable length, I am going to mention just one piece of evidence, but I think it is representative. I urge you to check out the “Background” section of the NY Declaration if you disagree. In fact, I urge you to check it out either way. This research is fascinating and amazing. Again, my only disagreement is with how the Declaration as a whole is presented. 

Here’s the study mentioned. “Questions of self-awareness in animals have long been explored using the “mirror-mark test,” which tests whether an animal, upon seeing a mark on their own body in a mirror, will try to remove that mark. In a   surprising   series  of   studies  between 2019 and 2023, researchers showed that cleaner wrasse fish can pass the four phases of the test. First, when exposed to a mirror, the fish react aggressively as though they believe they see a rival fish. Second, the aggression fades and the fish begin performing unusual behaviors in front of the mirror, such as swimming upside down. Third, the fish seem to study themselves in the mirror. Finally, after the experimenters place a colored mark on the fish, the fish, on seeing the mark in the mirror, attempt to remove it by scraping against an available surface.”

Here’s the thing. The mirror-mark test was developed 54 years ago and has been used many times on a wide-variety of animals. It’s cool that wrasse fish can pass it, but it’s another of many examples accumulated over many years, not a new development appropriately classed under the title of “Recent Rapid Advances,” as it is in the NY Declaration . More to the point, why do we even need mirror-mark tests, or the like, to conclude most, if not all, animals possess at least a minimal “phenomenal consciousness” or “sentience”? Hasn’t any of the signatories had a dog or a car? We have plenty of evidence that animals can feel pleasure and pain and more.

The point is not that the declaration is wrong when it says that “when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal.” It’s just that Bentham said the same thing better in 1789 when he said that when it comes to nonhuman animals, “ The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk?   but, Can they suffer?   Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? ”

If we let our duty to take more seriously the welfare of nonhuman animals turn on scientific evidence of more sophisticated kinds of consciousness or cognition among animals than previously recognized, we make the case for kindness more, not less, tenuous. I get that this goes against most people’s intuition that moral propositions are more subjective or tenuous than factual ones, so let me end with a thought experiment. 

Consider these two propositions. “The Earth goes around the Sun.” And “It’s wrong to torture kittens for fun.” Could anything change your mind about either of these? Setting aside claims like the kitten is not really a kitten but a robot and the sun is just an illusion created by aliens, it’s conceivable to me, however unlikely, that you could tell me a story that accounted for all of the scientific of heliocentrism but which ultimately put the Earth back at the center of the solar system. But it’s inconceivable to me that there is a story you could tell to convince me that it is not wrong torture kittens. I believe that in the web of belief, a principle forbidding such torture is less open to revision than facts about the orbit of the Sun and the Earth. Moral principles need moral, not scientific, justification.

Microsoft Research Blog

Research focus: week of may 13, 2024.

Published May 15, 2024

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Welcome to Research Focus, a series of blog posts that highlights notable publications, events, code/datasets, new hires and other milestones from across the research community at Microsoft.

NEW RESEARCH

Injecting new knowledge into large language models via supervised fine-tuning .

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in generating text similar to that created by people, proving to be a valuable asset across various applications. However, adapting these models to incorporate new, out-of-domain knowledge remains a challenge, particularly for facts and events that occur after the model’s training knowledge cutoff date.

In a recent paper: Injecting New Knowledge into Large Language Models via Supervised Fine-Tuning , researchers from Microsoft investigate the effectiveness of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a method for knowledge injection in LLMs, specifically focusing on recent sporting events. They compare different dataset generation strategies—token-based and fact-based scaling—to create training data that helps the model learn new information. Their experiments on GPT-4 demonstrate that while token-based scaling can lead to improvements in Q&A accuracy, it may not provide uniform coverage of new knowledge. Fact-based scaling, on the other hand, offers a more systematic approach to ensure even coverage across all facts. The researchers present a novel dataset generation process that leads to more effective knowledge ingestion through SFT, and results show considerable performance improvements in Q&A tasks related to out-of-domain knowledge. 

A Reflection on Human-Notebook Experiences in the Era of AI

Computational notebooks provide an interactive way to work with data. They have been widely used by data professionals to write code, explore data, and generate visualizations, all in one document. Previous research has revealed unique pain points around the user experience in computational notebooks. However, as AI tools like ChatGPT or Copilot have emerged, it is unclear whether these pain points have been reduced or changed, or whether new pain points have arisen. Due to the fast pace of advances in AI technology, most of the development of new AI tools has been primarily driven by technology and not by user experience.

In a recent paper: A Reflection on Human-Notebook Experiences in the Era of AI , researchers from Microsoft summarize literature on how new AI technology has impacted human-notebook interaction and human-computer interaction (HCI) paradigms, new challenges and user behavior around using AI assistants, and recent research on AI assistants in computational notebook scenarios. They outline gaps in existing literature and suggest a future focus on improving macro human-notebook experiences throughout a user’s workflow, measuring and quantifying the value of AI systems, and establishing a set of standards and best practices for AI tools.

Spotlight: On-demand video

AI Explainer: Foundation models ​and the next era of AI

Explore how the transformer architecture, larger models and more data, and in-context learning have helped advance AI from perception to creation.

Jacdac: Service-Based Prototyping of Embedded Systems

The traditional approach to programming embedded systems is monolithic: firmware on a microcontroller contains both application code and the drivers needed to communicate with sensors and actuators, using low-level protocols such as I2C, SPI, and RS232. In comparison, software development for the cloud has moved to a service-based development and operation paradigm: a service provides a discrete unit of functionality that can be accessed remotely by an application, or other service, but is independently managed and updated.

In a recent paper: Jacdac: Service-Based Prototyping of Embedded Systems (opens in new tab) , researchers from Microsoft propose, design, implement, and evaluate a service-based approach to prototyping embedded systems called  Jacdac (opens in new tab) . Jacdac defines a service specification language, designed especially for embedded systems, along with a host of specifications for a variety of sensors and actuators. With Jacdac, each sensor/actuator in a system is paired with a low-cost microcontroller that advertises the services that represent the functionality of the underlying hardware over an efficient and low-cost single-wire bus protocol. A separate microcontroller executes the user’s application program, which is a client of the Jacdac services on the bus. 

Three Jacdac kits, comprising over twenty modules, have been produced by third-party manufacturers: KittenBot (opens in new tab) and Forward Education (opens in new tab) .

PARIKSHA: A Scalable, Democratic, Transparent Evaluation Platform for Assessing Indic Large Language Models

Evaluation of multilingual LLMs is challenging due to a variety of factors – the lack of benchmarks with sufficient linguistic diversity, contamination of popular benchmarks into LLM pre-training data, and the lack of local, cultural nuances in translated benchmarks. Hence, it is difficult to extensively evaluate LLMs in a multilingual setting, leading to lack of fair comparisons between models and difficulties in replicating the evaluation setup used by some models. Recently, several Indic (Indian language) LLMs have been created to help build more locally and culturally relevant LLMs.

In a recent paper: PARIKSHA: A Scalable, Democratic, Transparent Evaluation Platform for Assessing Indic Large Language Models , researchers from Microsoft present an evaluation framework, which is the first comprehensive evaluation of Indic LLMs using a combination of human and LLM-based evaluation. The researchers conduct a total of 90,000 human evaluations and 50,000 LLM-based evaluations of 29 models to present leaderboards for 10 Indic languages. Pariksha provides inclusive evaluation by engaging a community of workers that represent India’s large and diverse workforce and also serves as a research platform for improving the process of evaluation. For transparency on the process, the evaluation artifacts will be released. Conducting Pariksha at regular intervals, the researchers aim to enable models to improve over time with insights and artifacts from their evaluations. 

Tinker, Tailor, Configure, Customize: The Articulation Work of Customizing AI Fairness Checklists

Many responsible AI resources, such as toolkits, playbooks, and checklists, have been developed to support AI practitioners in identifying, measuring, and mitigating potential fairness-related harms. These resources are often designed to be general purpose, in order to address a variety of use cases, domains, and deployment contexts. However, this can lead to decontextualization, where such resources lack the level of relevance or specificity needed to use them.

To understand how AI practitioners might contextualize one such resource, an AI fairness checklist, for their particular use cases, domains, and deployment contexts, researchers from Microsoft conducted a retrospective contextual inquiry with 13 AI practitioners from seven organizations. In a recent paper: Tinker, Tailor, Configure, Customize: The Articulation Work of Customizing AI Fairness Checklists , they identify how contextualizing this checklist introduces new forms of work for AI practitioners and other stakeholders, while opening up new sites for negotiation and contestation of values in AI. The researchers also identify how the contextualization process may help AI practitioners develop a shared language around AI fairness. They also identify dynamics related to ownership over this process that suggest larger issues of accountability in responsible AI work. 

MS MARCO Web Search: A Large-scale Information-rich Web Dataset with Millions of Real Click Labels

LLMs are becoming indispensable tools for many creative and information related tasks, but they still come with limitations, including a tendency to fabricate content. State-of-the-art algorithms pair the LLM with an external, dynamically updated knowledge base to ground the LLM’s answers and provide up-to-date information. However, these techniques require large amounts of relevant, labeled training data that have not previously been publicly available. 

In a recent paper: MS MARCO Web Search: A Large-scale Information-rich Web Dataset with Millions of Real Click Labels presented at the 2024 ACM Web Conference, researchers from Microsoft introduce a novel dataset that closely mimics real-world web document and query distribution. MS MARCO Web Search contains 10 million unique queries across 93 languages with millions of relevant labeled query-document pairs. It uses ClueWeb22’s 10 billion high-quality web pages as the document corpus and provides rich information for various kinds of downstream tasks. 

This dataset unlocks several new research directions that previous datasets cannot well support, including generic end-to-end neural indexer models, generic embedding models, and next generation information access systems with LLMs. MS MARCO Web Search offers a retrieval benchmark with three web scale retrieval challenge tasks, each with automatic evaluation and leaderboard. These tasks demand innovation in both machine learning and information retrieval systems. The researchers intend for MS MARCO Web Search to lay the groundwork for future advancements in AI and systems research.

• AI Case Studies for Natural Science Research with Bonnie Kruft

Among the stunning changes and disruptions driven by AI, one of the most significant is the impact on scientific discovery. In her presentation at EmTech Digital 2024 (opens in new tab) , Bonnie Kruft, partner deputy director at Microsoft Research AI for Science, outlined some examples of how generative AI enables groundbreaking research in the natural sciences. Recent breakthroughs aided by AI include small molecular inhibitors for treating infectious disease, the discovery of new materials for energy storage, and new drug development. 

Catch a replay of the presentation , including a follow-up Q&A with the audience, and hear how researchers are reducing discovery times from years to months. The discussion explores safe and responsible AI practices, how large language models can work with science-based models, and what lies ahead for AI in science. 

Microsoft Research in the news

The tiny glass blocks that can preserve your data for centuries  .

The Times UK | April 27, 2024

Microsoft’s Project Silica is an innovative form of long-term storage – potentially revolutionizing how important data can be preserved for future generations.

These Recyclable Circuit Boards Could Stem E-Waste  

IEEE Spectrum | May 2, 2024

New research from the University of Washington and Microsoft show that vitrimer-based PCBs can be broken down into a gel for repeated reuse. The research stems from the Microsoft Research Climate Initiative .

Today’s AI models are impressive. Teams of them will be formidable  

The Economist | May 13, 2024

Teams of LLMs are more capable and intelligent than solitary agents because a single job can be split into many smaller, more specialized tasks, says Chi Wang, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington.

You Only Cache Once: Decoder-Decoder Architectures for Language Models  

Microsoft Research LinkedIn | May 11, 2024

YOCO is a novel decoder-decoder architecture for LLMs, enhancing memory efficiency by caching key-value pairs only once. It slashes KV cache memory and prefilling time and makes 1M-length LLMs practical.

Peter Lee discusses new technologies that will drive the future of drug discovery  

AAPS | May 10, 2024

The president of Microsoft Research explores how new advances in technologies, such as AI and machine learning, are transforming biotechnology, in the closing plenary of the AAPS National Biotechnology Conference (NBC) on Thursday, May 16.

PKSHA develops advanced LLMs in collaboration with Microsoft Japan  

Business Wire | April 29, 2024

PKSHA Technology has developed one of the first Japanese-English LLMs in collaboration with Microsoft Japan. This development primarily focuses on boosting productivity within contact centers and corporate help desks.

BRAID fellowships include three collaborations with Microsoft Research  

Bridging Responsible AI Divides | May 2024

BRAID fellowships support individual researchers in partnership with public and private organizations to address challenges in the field of responsible AI. Among the latest fellowships are three supported by Microsoft Research.

Related publications

Injecting new knowledge into large language models via supervised fine-tuning, research areas.

Research Groups

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• Technology and Empowerment | India
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• FATE: Fairness, Accountability, Transparency & Ethics in AI

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• GenAI for Industry
• Project VeLLM
• Project FarmVibes
• Jacdac: Connect and code electronics. Instantly.
• AI Fairness Checklist

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