Center for Theoretical Physics

MIT physicists have found that “the presence of a tiny black hole speeding through the solar system could be identified by the gentle gravitational nudge it exerted on the Earth and other planets, which would alter their orbital paths by no more than a few feet,” reports Noah Haggerty for The Los Angeles Times. “It’s just fantastic that the most conceptually conservative response is to say, ‘It’s just super tiny black holes that were made a split second after the Big Bang,’” says Prof. David Kaiser. “It’s not inventing new forms of matter that have not yet been detected. It’s not changing the laws of gravity.”

A new study by MIT researchers suggests that miniscule black holes could briefly wobble the orbit of Mars and that these tiny black holes may pass through our solar system once every decade or so, reports Jess Thomson for Newsweek. “The researchers modeled the orbits of every large body in the solar system,” writes Thomson, “and found that tiny wobbles in the orbit of Mars could indicate one of the asteroid-mass black holes passing through.”

Science News reporter Emily Conover spotlights a new study by MIT researchers that proposes a new method to search for microscopic primordial black holes, which, if they exist, “could explain some or all of the universe’s dark matter.” The researchers suggest that when a primordial black hole passes close to a planet, it could “produce noticeable effects despite its tiny size.”
 

PBS Space Time host Matt O’Dowd highlights research by Prof. David Kaiser and graduate student Elba Alonso-Monsalve delving into the composition of primordial black holes and potentially confirming the existence of color-charged black holes. “It may stand to reason, that colorful black holes were once the most natural thing in the world,” O’Dowd muses. 

Researchers at MIT have discovered the composition of primordial black holes, “potentially discovering an entirely new type of exotic black hole in the process,” reports Jacopo Prisco for CNN. “We were making use of Stephen Hawking’s famous calculations about black holes, especially his important result about the radiation that black holes emit,” says Prof. David Kaiser. “These exotic black holes emerge from trying to address the dark matter problem — they are a byproduct of explaining dark matter.”

Researchers at MIT have “analyzed how primordial black holes with a trait known as color charge could have formed in the soup of particles that composed the early universe,” reports Leah Crane for New Scientist. “They’re not really colors,” explains Prof. David Kaiser. “If we zoomed in with a microscope we wouldn’t see colors with our eyes, but it’s a way of accounting for the fact that nature seems to only allow color-neutral combinations.” 

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have proposed a new method to look for primordial black holes (PMBs), reports Jackie Appel for Popular Mechanics. “If there are as many as the team thinks there should be, and they interact with gravity as we expect them to, they should be zooming around in a way that some of them should pass close by various objects in our solar system – including Earth,” explains Appel. “And if that happens, it should actually be enough to disturb the natural orbits of these objects in a way that we can measure.” 

Prof. Tracy Slatyer and Prof. Janet Conrad speak with Scientific American reporter Clara Moskowitz about their favorite discoveries in the field of physics. Slatyer notes that “the accelerating expansion of the universe has to be a strong contender.” For Conrad, “I think my favorite event in physics was the prediction of the existence of the neutrino [a subatomic particle with no charge and very little mass] because so much of our fundamental approach to physics today grew out of that moment.”

Gizmodo reporter Isaac Schultz writes that researchers from MIT, Caltech and elsewhere have found that “quantum systems can imitate wormholes, theorized shortcuts in spacetime, in that the systems allow the instantaneous transit of information between remote locations.” Grad student Alexander Zlokapa explains that: “We performed a kind of quantum teleportation equivalent to a traversable wormhole in the gravity picture. To do this, we had to simplify the quantum system to the smallest example that preserves gravitational characteristics so we could implement it.”

Physicists from MIT and elsewhere have created a small “wormhole” effect between two quantum systems on the same processor and were able to send a signal through it, reports Charlotte Hu for Popular Science. This new model is a “way to study the fundamental problems of the universe in a laboratory setting,” writes Hu. 

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have created a holographic wormhole using Google’s Sycamore quantum computer, reports Sarah Wells for Vice. “The researchers created an entangled state (a quantum mechanical phenomena where distant particles can still communicate with each other) between two halves of a quantum computer and sent a message in between,” writes Wells. “This message was scrambled as it entered the system and, through entanglement, unscrambled on the other side.”

A team of researchers, including scientists from MIT, “simulated a pair of black holes in a quantum computer and sent a message between them through a shortcut in space-time called a wormhole,” reports Dennis Overbye for The New York Times. The development is another “step in the effort to understand the relation between gravity, which shapes the universe, and quantum mechanics, which governs the subatomic realm of particles,” writes Overbye.

Diverse Issues in Higher Education reporter Lois Elfman spotlights Shirley Ann Jackson '68 PhD '73 for her distinguished professional career in academia, industry, and government. “Sometimes, a window in time opens for you, and if you are prepared to step through then it can create opportunities for you to make a real difference in the world,” says Jackson. “I’ve had that kind of extraordinary set of opportunities. I have always felt it’s important to make a difference and leave and imprint.”

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.

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.”