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    Julian Muñoz has a ‘ruler’ that could size up the early universe

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    Julian Muñoz has come up with a ruler to measure the early universe.

    A theoretical physicist, Muñoz studies the distant, dim period in the universe’s history known as cosmic dawn. That’s when stars first began flickering on, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, infusing the universe with initial glimmers of starlight and forming the first galaxies.

    Before the first stars, the universe was cold and dark — as Muñoz describes it, “boring.” Then, starlight began to reshape the universe. “It is a very dramatic epoch,” says Muñoz, of the University of Texas at Austin.

    That epoch is also poorly understood. Cosmic dawn is so unexplored that Muñoz compares it to an uncharted area on early maps of Earth. There, Muñoz says, “there could be dragons.” By studying this era, he hopes to reveal the behavior of one dragon of the cosmos, dark matter, the inscrutable substance whose mass binds galaxies.

    But to understand the cosmos, scientists have to be able to measure it. Looking far into space means looking deep into the past. The trouble is our 2-D view of the sky doesn’t readily reveal how far away things are. “When we look at the night sky, we’ve got no depth perception,” says cosmologist Adrian Liu of McGill University in Montreal.

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    Scientists have devised a variety of methods to get a handle on distances, including standard candles and standard rulers — objects of known brightness or length. If you know how bright an object is (compared with how bright it appears) or you know how long a particular feature is on the sky (compared with its apparent length), you can tell how far away it is. A ruler looks smaller from 20 meters away than from 10 meters away, and a 20-watt lightbulb looks dimmer the farther away it is. The same applies over cosmic distances.

    Scientists use certain types of exploding stars, for example, to estimate distances, because the blasts put out a predictable light show (SN: 5/8/12). Standard rulers or standard candles can be used to trace out how far away other objects of interest are and reveal how rapidly the universe has expanded over its history.

    But none of the known standard objects reach back to the cosmic dawn era. That’s where Muñoz’s ruler comes in. “This ability to reach that far back,” Liu says, “that’s the really valuable thing.”

    Sizing up cosmic dawn

    No one has ever seen a conclusive signature of cosmic dawn — the very first galaxies are too distant to observe directly. But there’s another way to spot cosmic dawn’s effects, one that’s been a long-sought target for astronomers. As the first stars formed, their light heated the surrounding hydrogen gas, causing it to absorb light with a wavelength of 21 centimeters, a number that results from the separation between energy levels in hydrogen atoms. Observing that 21-centimeter absorption signal is the aim of the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array, or HERA, collaboration, an effort that Muñoz and Liu both work on, using a radio telescope in South Africa.

    If it can be detected, this absorption signal should have subtle, ring-shaped patterns imprinted in it, Muñoz reported in 2019 in Physical Review Letters.

    Secrets of the universe’s cosmic dawn era are revealed in patterns of the absorption of light with a 21-centimeter wavelength, shown in a computer simulation. Regions with more absorption (red) correspond to denser pockets of stars, compared with sparsely populated regions with less absorption (blue). Sparse areas tend to be separated by distances of about half a billion light-years (arrow indicates one example); the same goes for dense areas.J.B. Muñoz

    Those patterns, the basis of his ruler, result from the differing behavior of dark matter and normal matter during an even earlier period, less than 400,000 years after the Big Bang. Sound waves careening through the plasma at that time would have pushed normal matter to high speeds while leaving dark matter at a standstill.

    This mismatch in velocities affected where galaxies formed during the later cosmic dawn era. To create a galaxy, dark matter must gravitationally reel in normal matter. But where the velocities differed, the normal matter zipped right on by. The early universe was left with sparsely populated regions of the sky, arranged in ring-shaped patterns with a predictable distance scale. The rings, which are too subtle to pick out by eye from the data but show up in statistical analyses, have radii of half a billion light-years – that’s one long measuring stick.

    The new standard ruler could reveal how fast the universe was expanding back then. That information can tell scientists what that youthful universe was made of, revealing the amount of dark matter, normal matter and dark energy, another hidden piece of the cosmic puzzle.

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    A new expansion measurement could also add fuel to one of the fiercest debates in cosmology. Currently, different measurements of the universe’s expansion rate clash with one another, leaving scientists pondering whether there are flaws in our understanding of the cosmos.

    Seeking to understand the unknown, including these shadowy cosmic realms, is “an integral component of human nature — like art and poetry,” Muñoz says. “You could live without it, but I really hope you don’t have to.”

    Looking into dark corners

    Muñoz’s interest in dark matter drew him to the cosmic dawn. The first galaxies grew off a scaffold of dark matter. So information about how and when those galaxies formed can reveal dark matter’s properties. In a report published in 2018 in Nature, for example, Muñoz and colleagues suggested that, if some of the universe’s dark matter had a tiny electric charge, a millionth of an electron’s, that could alter the expected cosmic dawn signal.

    He has also developed important computational tools, like a new technique that allows for lightning-fast simulations of the cosmic dawn, reported in May in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The time it takes to perform these simulations has previously limited what scientists can study.

    “He’s got an eye for interesting ideas,” says theoretical physicist Marc Kamionkowski of Johns Hopkins University, Muñoz’s Ph.D. adviser. But the cosmic ruler, “that’s probably the most singular idea that he’s had.”

    Becoming a physicist, in itself, was uncharted territory for Muñoz. As a child, he liked science. He recalls being amazed by fossilized shark teeth that were millions of years old — perhaps his first experience grappling with such grand timescales.

    But Muñoz didn’t have a scientific role model; his parents didn’t finish high school. He focused his attention on video games and coding until a high school physics teacher encouraged his scientific streak. He turned to physics, he says, where “it was possible to channel all this nerdy energy for knowledge.” That’s what drives Muñoz to explore the questions that swirl around dark corners of the cosmos. “I do it because I think the answers enrich the human experience.”

    Julian Muñoz is one of this year’s SN 10: Scientists to Watch, our list of 10 early and mid-career scientists who are making extraordinary contributions to their field. We’ll be rolling out the full list throughout 2023.

    Want to nominate someone for the SN 10? Send their name, affiliation and a few sentences about them and their work to sn10@sciencenews.org. More

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      Physicists stored data in quantum holograms made of twisted light

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      Particles of twisted light that have been entangled using quantum mechanics offer a new approach to dense and secure data storage.

      Holograms that produce 3-D images and serve as security features on credit cards are usually made with patterns laid down with beams of laser light. In recent years, physicists have found ways to create holograms with entangled photons instead. Now there is, literally, a new twist to the technology.

      Entangled photons that travel in corkscrew paths have resulted in holograms that offer the possibility of dense and ultrasecure data encryption, researchers report in a study to appear in Physical Review Letters.

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      Light can move in a variety of ways, including the up-and-down and side-to-side patterns of polarized light. But when it carries a type of rotation known as orbital angular momentum, it can also propagate in spirals that resemble twisted rotini pasta.

      Like any other photons, the twisted versions can be entangled so that they essentially act as one entity. Something that affects one of an entangled photon pair instantly affects the other, even if they are very far apart.

      In previous experiments, researchers have sent data through the air in entangled pairs of twisted photons (SN: 8/5/15). The approach should allow high-speed data transmission because light can come with different amounts of twist, with each twist serving as a different channel of communication.

      Now the same approach has been applied to record data in holograms. Instead of transmitting information on multiple, twisted light channels, photon pairs with different amounts of twist create distinct sets of data in a single hologram. The more orbital angular momentum states involved, each with different amounts of twist, the more data researchers can pack into a hologram.

      In addition to cramming more data into holograms, increasing the variety of twists used to record the data boosts security. Anyone who wants to read the information out needs to know, or guess, how the light that recorded it was twisted.

      For a hologram relying on two types of twist, says physicist Xiangdong Zhang of the Beijing Institute of Technology, you would have to pick the right combination of the twists from about 80 possibilities to decode the data. Bumping that up to combinations of seven distinct twists leads to millions of possibilities. That, Zhang says, “should be enough to ensure our quantum holographic encryption system has enough security level.”

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      The researchers demonstrated their technique by encoding words and letters in holograms and reading the data back out again with twisted light. Although the researchers produced images from the holographic data, says physicist Hugo Defienne of the Paris Institute of Nanosciences, the storage itself should not be confused with holographic images.

      Defienne, who was not involved with the new research, says that other quantum holography schemes, such as his efforts with polarized photons, produce direct images of objects including microscopic structures.

      “[Their] idea there is very different . . . from our approach in this sense,” Defrienne says. “They’re using holography to store information,” rather than creating the familiar 3-D images that most people associate with holograms.

      The twisted light data storage that Zhang and his colleagues demonstrated is slow, requiring nearly 20 minutes to decode an image of the acronym “BIT,” for the Beijing Institute of Technology where the experiments were performed. And the security that the researchers have demonstrated is still relatively low because they included only up to six forms of twisted light in their experiments.

      Zhang is confident that both limitations can be overcome with technical improvements. “We think that our technology has potential application in quantum information encryption,” he says, “especially quantum image encryption.” More

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      in Space & Astronomy

      Two black holes merged despite being born far apart in space

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      Signals buried deep in data from gravitational wave observatories imply a collision of two black holes that were clearly born in different places.

      Almost all the spacetime ripples that experiments like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, see come from collisions among black holes and neutron stars that are probably close family members (SN: 1/21/21). They were once pairs of stars born at the same time and in the same place, eventually collapsing to form orbiting black holes or neutron stars in old age.

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      Now, a newly noted marriage of black holes, found in existing data from U.S.–based LIGO and its sister observatory Virgo in Italy, seems to be of an unrelated pair. Evidence for this stems from how they were spinning as they merged into one, researchers report in a paper in press at Physical Review D. Black holes that are born in the same place tend to have their spins aligned, like a pair of toy tops spinning on a table, as they orbit each other. But the pair in this case have no correlation between their respective spins and orbits, implying that they were born in different places.

      “This is telling us we’ve finally found a pair of black holes that must come from the non-grow-old-and-die-together channel,” says Seth Olsen, a physicist at Princeton University.

      Previous events that have turned up in gravitational wave observations show back holes merging that aren’t perfectly aligned, but most are close enough to strongly imply family connections. The new detection, which Olsen and colleagues found by sifting through data that the LIGO-Virgo collaboration released to the public, is different. One of the black holes is effectively spinning upside down.

      That can’t easily happen unless the two black holes come from separate places. They probably met late in their stellar lives, unlike the black hole littermates that seem to make up the bulk of gravitational wave observations.

      In addition to the merger between unrelated black holes, Olsen and his collaborators identified nine other black hole mergers that had slipped through the prior LIGO-Virgo studies (SN: 8/4/21).

      “This is actually the nice thing about this type of analysis,” says LIGO scientific collaboration spokesperson Patrick Brady, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee who was not affiliated with the new study. “We deliver the data in a format that can be used by other people and then [they] will have access to try out new techniques.”

      To compile so many new signals in data that had already been gone over by other researchers, Olsen’s group lowered the analytical bar a little.

      “Out of the 10 new ones,” Olsen says, “there are about three of them, statistically, that probably come from noise,” rather than being definitive black hole merger detections. Assuming that the merger of black holes strangers is not among the errant signals, it almost certainly tells a tale of black hole histories distinct from the others seen so far.

      “It would be [extremely] unlikely for this to come from two black holes that have been together for their whole lifespan,” Olsen says. “This must have been a capture. That’s cool because we’re finally able to start probing that region of the [black hole] population.”

      Brady notes that “we don’t understand the theory [of black hole mergers] well enough to be able to confidently predict all of these types of things.” But the recent study may point to new and interesting opportunities in gravitational wave astronomy. “Let’s follow this clue to see if it really is reflecting something rare,” he says. “Or if not, well, we’ll learn other things.” More

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      in Physics

      Experiments hint at why bird nests are so sturdy

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      To build its nest, a bird won’t go for any old twig. Somehow, birds pick and choose material that will create a cozy, sturdy nest.

      “That’s just totally mystifying to me,” says physicist Hunter King of the University of Akron in Ohio. Birds seem to have a sense for how the properties of an individual stick will translate to the characteristics of the nest. That relationship “is something we don’t know the first thing about predicting,” King says.

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      A bird’s nest is a special version of a granular material: a substance, such as sand, made up of many smaller objects (SN: 4/30/19). King and colleagues combined laboratory experiments and computer simulations to better understand the quirks of nestlike granular materials, the researchers report in a study to appear in Physical Review Letters.

      In the experiments, a piston repeatedly compressed 460 bamboo rods scattered inside a cylinder. The computer simulations let researchers analyze the points where sticks touched, which is key to understanding the material, the team says.

      The more force the piston applied to the pile, the stiffer the pile became, meaning it resisted further deformation. As the piston bore down, sticks slid against one another, and the contact points between them rearranged. That stiffened the pile by allowing additional contact points to form between sticks, which prevented them from flexing further, the simulations showed.

      Changes in the pile’s stiffness seemed to lag behind the piston’s motion, a phenomenon called hysteresis. That effect caused the pile to be stiffer when the piston pushed in than when the material bounced back as the piston retracted. Simulations suggest that the hysteresis arose because the initial friction between sticks needed to be overcome before the contact points started to rearrange.

      Beyond bird nests, this research could be applied to other materials made of disordered arrangements of long fibers, such as felt. With a better understanding of the physical qualities of such materials, engineers could use them to create new structures designed to protect not only bird eggs, but other cargo that humans consider precious. More

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      in Space & Astronomy

      Gravitational waves gave a new black hole a high-speed ‘kick’

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      This black hole really knows how to kick back.

      Scientists recently observed two black holes that united into one, and in the process got a “kick” that flung the newly formed black hole away at high speed. That black hole zoomed off at about 5 million kilometers per hour, give or take a few million, researchers report in a paper in press in Physical Review Letters. That’s blazingly quick: The speed of light is just 200 times as fast.

      Ripples in spacetime, called gravitational waves, launched the black hole on its breakneck exit. As any two paired-up black holes spiral inward and coalesce, they emit these ripples, which stretch and squeeze space. If those gravitational waves are shot off into the cosmos in one direction preferentially, the black hole will recoil in response.

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      It’s akin to a gun kicking back after shooting a bullet, says astrophysicist Vijay Varma of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany.

      Gravitational wave observatories LIGO and Virgo, located in the United States and Italy, detected the black holes’ spacetime ripples when they reached Earth on January 29, 2020. Those waves revealed details of how the black holes merged, hinting that a large kick was probable. As the black holes orbited one another, the plane in which they orbited rotated, or precessed, similar to how a top wobbles as it spins. Precessing black holes are expected to get bigger kicks when they merge.

      So Varma and colleagues delved deeper into the data, gauging whether the black hole got the boot. To estimate the kick velocity, the researchers compared the data with various predicted versions of black hole mergers, created based on computer simulations that solve the equations of general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity (SN: 2/3/21). The recoil was so large, the researchers found, that the black hole was probably ejected from its home and kicked to the cosmic curb.

      Dense groups of stars and black holes called globular clusters are one locale where black holes are thought to partner up and merge. The probability that the kicked black hole would stay within a globular cluster home is only about 0.5 percent, the team calculated. For a black hole in another type of dense environment, called a nuclear star cluster, the probability of sticking around was about 8 percent.

      The black hole’s great escape could have big implications. LIGO and Virgo detect mergers of stellar-mass black holes, which form when a star explodes in a supernova and collapses into a black hole. Scientists want to understand if black holes that partner up in crowded clusters could partner up again, going through multiple rounds of melding. If they do, that could help explain some surprisingly bulky black holes previously seen in mergers (SN: 9/2/20). But if merged black holes commonly get rocketed away from home, that would make multiple mergers less likely.

      “Kicks are very important in understanding how heavy stellar-mass black holes form,” Varma says.

      Previously, astronomers have gleaned evidence of gravitational waves giving big kicks to supermassive black holes, the much larger beasts found at the centers of galaxies (SN: 3/28/17). But that conclusion hinges on observations of light, rather than gravitational waves. “Gravitational waves, in a way, are cleaner and easier to interpret,” says astrophysicist Manuela Campanelli of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, who was not involved in the new study.

      LIGO and Virgo data had already revealed some evidence of black holes getting small kicks. The new study is the first to report using gravitational waves to spot a black hole on the receiving end of a large kick.

      That big kick isn’t a surprise, Campanelli says. Earlier theoretical predictions by Campanelli and colleagues suggested that such powerful kicks were possible. “It’s always exciting when someone can measure from observations what you predicted from calculations.” More

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      in Space & Astronomy

      Levitating plastic beads mimic the physics of spinning asteroids

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      Some asteroids can barely hold it together.

      Rather than solid lumps of rock, ‘rubble pile’ asteroids are loose collections of material, which can split apart as they rotate (SN: 3/16/20). To understand the inner workings of such asteroids, one team of scientists turned to levitating plastic beads. The beads clump together, forming collections that can spin and break up, physicist Melody Lim of the University of Chicago reported March 15 at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Chicago.

      It’s an elegant dance that mimics the physics of asteroid formation, which happens too slowly to observe in real-life space rocks. “These ‘tabletop asteroids’ compress phenomena that take place over kilometers [and] over hundreds of thousands of years to just centimeters and seconds in the lab,” Lim said. The results are also reported in a paper accepted in Physical Review X.

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      Lim and colleagues used sound waves to levitate the plastic beads, which arranged themselves into two-dimensional clumps. Acoustic forces attract the beads to one another, mimicking the gravitational attraction between bits of debris in space. Separate clumps then coalesced similarly to how asteroids are thought to glom onto one another to grow.

      [embedded content]
      Levitated by sound waves, plastic beads, which are about 150 micrometers across, clump together into a loosely bound 2-D conglomeration (shown at 1/50th the original speed). When spun too fast, one such structure deforms then splits apart (shown at 1/70th the original speed).

      When the experimenters gave the structures a spin using the sound waves, the clumps changed shape above a certain speed, becoming elongated. That could help scientists understand why ‘rubble pile’ asteroids, can have odd structures, such as the ‘spinning tops’ formed by asteroids Bennu and Ryugu (SN: 12/18/18).

      Eventually, the fast-spinning clumps broke apart. This observation could help explain why asteroids are typically seen to spin up to a certain rate, but not beyond: Speed demons get split up. More

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      in Heart

      Freshwater ice can melt into scallops and spikes

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      Water’s wacky density leads to strange effects that researchers are still uncovering.

      Typically, liquids become denser the more they cool. But freshwater is densest at 4° Celsius. As it cools below that temperature, the water becomes less dense and rises. As a result, ice columns submerged in liquid water can melt into three different shapes, depending on the water’s temperature, researchers report in the Jan. 28 Physical Review Letters.  

      “Almost everything” about the findings was surprising, says mathematician Leif Ristroph of New York University.

      Ristroph and colleagues anchored ultrapure ice cylinders up to 30 centimeters long in place and submerged them in tanks of water at temperatures from 2° to 10° C.

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      The ice melted into smooth, downward-pointing spikes if placed in water lower than about 5° C. Simulations showed “a strange thing — that the cold liquid water near the ice is actually buoyant” due to being less dense than the rest of the water in the tank, Ristroph says. So that upward flow draws warmer water closer to the ice’s base, causing it to melt faster than the top.  

      The opposite occurred above about 7° C; the ice formed an upward-pointing spike. That’s because colder water near the ice is denser than the surrounding water and sinks, pulling in warmer water at the top of the ice and causing it to melt faster than the bottom, simulations showed. This matches “what your intuition would expect,” Ristroph says. 

      Between about 5° to 7° C, the ice melted into scalloped columns. “Basically, the water is confused,” Ristroph says, so it forms different layers, some of which tend to rise and others which tend to sink, depending on their density. Ultimately, the water organizes into “swirls or vortices of fluid that carve the weird ripples into the ice.”

      More work is needed to understand the complex interplay of factors that may generate these and other shapes on ice melting in nature (SN: 4/9/21). More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Space & Astronomy

      Neutron star collisions probably make more gold than other cosmic smashups

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      The cosmic origins of elements heavier than iron are mysterious. One elemental birthplace came to light in 2017 when two neutron-rich dead stars collided and spewed out gold, platinum and other hefty elements (SN: 10/16/17). A few years later, a smashup of another neutron star and a black hole left scientists wondering which type of cosmic clash was the more prolific element foundry (SN: 6/29/21).

      Now, they have an answer. Collisions of two neutron stars probably take the cake, scientists report October 25 in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

      To create heavy elements after either type of collision, neutron star material must be flung into space, where a series of nuclear reactions called the r-process can transform the material (SN: 4/22/16).

      How much material escapes into space, if any, depends on various factors. For example, in collisions of a neutron star and black hole, the black hole has to be relatively small, or “there’s no hope at all,” says astrophysicist Hsin-Yu Chen of MIT. “It’s going to swallow the neutron star right away,” without ejecting anything.

      Questions remain about both types of collisions, spotted via the ripples in spacetime that they kick up. So Chen and colleagues considered a range of possibilities for the properties of neutron stars and black holes, such as the distributions of their masses and how fast they spin. The team then calculated the mass ejected by each type of collision under those varied conditions. In most scenarios, the neutron star–black hole mergers made a smaller quantity of heavy elements than the neutron star duos — in one case only about a hundredth the amount.

      Still, the ultimate element factory ranking remains up in the air. The scientists compared just these two types of collisions, not other possible sources of heavy elements such as exploding stars (SN: 7/7/21). More

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      in Heart

      Work on complex systems, including Earth’s climate, wins the physics Nobel Prize

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      Earth’s climate is a vastly complex system on a grand scale. On a microscopic level, so is the complicated physics of atoms and molecules found within materials. The 2021 Nobel Prize in physics knits together the work of three scientists who illuminated such intricate physical systems by harnessing basic tools of physics. 

      Half of the prize goes to climate scientists Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University and Klaus Hasselmann of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, for their work on simulations of Earth’s climate and predictions of global warming, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced October 5. The other half of the 10 million Swedish kronor (more than $1.1 million) prize goes to physicist Giorgio Parisi of Sapienza University of Rome, who worked on understanding the roiling fluctuations within disordered materials.

      All three researchers used a similar strategy of isolating a specific piece of a complex system in a model, a mathematical representation of something found in nature. By studying that model, and then integrating that understanding into more complicated descriptions, the researchers made progress on understanding otherwise perplexing systems, says physicist Brad Marston of Brown University. “There’s an art to constructing a model that is rich enough to give you interesting and perhaps surprising results, but simple enough that you can hope to understand it.”

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      The prize, normally an apolitical affair, sends a message to world leaders: “The notion of global warming is resting on solid science,” said Göran Hansson, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, during the announcement of the prize winners. Human emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, have increased Earth’s average temperature by more than 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial times. That warming is affecting every region on Earth, exacerbating extreme weather events such as heat waves, wildfires and drought (SN: 8/9/21). 

      Syukuro Manabe of Princeton University (left) and Klaus Hasselmann of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (right) worked on early simulations of Earth’s climate, laying the foundation for today’s more detailed climate models that are used to grapple with the potential impacts of global warming.From left: Bengt Nyman/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0); Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy Stock Photo

      Manabe’s work laid the foundation for climate modeling, said John Wettlaufer of Yale University, a member of the Nobel Committee for Physics. “He really did construct the models from which all future climate models were built,” Wettlaufer explained during an interview after the prize announcement. “That scaffolding is essential for the improvement of predictions of climate.” 

      Manabe studied how rising carbon dioxide levels would change temperatures on Earth. A simplified climate model from a 1967 paper coauthored by Manabe simulated a single column of the atmosphere in which air masses rise and fall as they warm and cool, which revealed that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased the temperature by over 2 degrees C. This understanding could then be integrated into more complex models that simulated the entire atmosphere or included the effects of the oceans, for example (SN: 5/30/70). 

      “I never imagined that this thing I would begin to study had such huge consequences,” Manabe said at a news conference at Princeton. “I was doing it just because of my curiosity.”

      Hasselmann studied the evolution of Earth’s climate while taking into account the variety of timescales over which different processes operate. The randomness of daily weather stands in contrast to seasonal variations and much slower processes like gradual heating of the Earth’s oceans. Hassleman’s work helped to show how the short-term jitter could be incorporated into models to understand the long-term change in climate. 

      Giorgio Parisi of Sapienza University of Rome is known for his work delving into the physics of disordered materials, such as spin glasses, in which different atoms can’t come to agreement about which direction to point their spins. Lorenza Parisi/Wikimedia Commons

      The prize is an affirmation of scientists’ understanding of climate, says Michael Moloney, CEO of the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Md. “The climate models which we depend on in order to understand the impact of the climate crisis are world-class science up there with all the other great discoveries that are recognized [by] Nobel Prizes of years past.”

      In a spin glass, illustrated here, iron atoms (red), within a lattice of copper atoms (blue), have spins (black arrows) that can’t agree on a direction to point.C. Chang

      Much like the weather patterns on Earth, the inner world of atoms within materials can be complex and disorderly. Parisi’s work took aim at understanding the processes within disordered systems such as a type of material called a spin glass (SN: 10/18/02). In spin glasses, atoms behave like small magnets, due to a quantum property called spin. But the atoms can’t agree on which direction to point their magnets, resulting in a disordered arrangement.

      That’s similar to more familiar types of glass — a material in which atoms don’t reach an orderly arrangement. Parisi came up with a mathematical description for such spin glasses. His work also touches on a variety of other complex topics, from turbulence to flocking patterns that describe the motions of animals such as starlings (SN: 7/31/14). 

      Although his work doesn’t directly focus on climate, in an interview during the Nobel announcement, Parisi commented on that half of the prize: “It’s clear that for the future generation we have to act now in a very fast way.” 

      Carolyn Gramling contributed to reporting this story. More