Wednesday, August 29, 2012

A quick scan of five years of high frequency trading...

NanexThe Rise of the HFT Machines

Soon to be clocking in at an all-time high speed via micro-wave relays...

ZeroHedgeFrom Chicago To New York And Back In 8.5 Milliseconds

And utilizing the drone industry  to cross the pond...

WiredRaging Bulls - How Wall Street Got Addicted to Light-Speed Trading


“They’re doing amazing things now with drones,” Dziejma said.

“Drones?”

Sure, he said. A fleet of unmanned, solar-powered drones carrying microwave relay stations could hover at intervals across the Atlantic.

And with these developments, new opportunities for insider traders...

Science NewsQuantum teleportation leaps forward


Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

110 nanoseconds of oblivion

Demonstration of temporal cloaking

Authors: Moti Fridman, Alessandro Farsi, Yoshitomo Okawachi, Alexander L. Gaeta
(Submitted on 11 Jul 2011)

Abstract: Recent research has uncovered a remarkable ability to manipulate and control electromagnetic fields to produce effects such as perfect imaging and spatial cloaking. To achieve spatial cloaking, the index of refraction is manipulated to flow light from a probe around an object in such a way that a "hole" in space is created, and it remains hidden. Alternatively, it may be desirable to cloak the occurrence of an event over a finite time period, and the idea of temporal cloaking was proposed in which the dispersion of the material is manipulated in time to produce a "time hole" in the probe beam to hide the occurrence of the event from the observer. This approach is based on accelerating and slowing down the front and rear parts, respectively, of the probe beam to create a well controlled temporal gap in which the event occurs so the probe beam is not modified in any way by the event. The probe beam is then restored to its original form by the reverse manipulation of the dispersion. Here we present an experimental demonstration of temporal cloaking by applying concepts from the time-space duality between diffraction and dispersive broadening. We characterize the performance of our temporal cloak by detecting the spectral modification of a probe beam due to an optical interaction while the cloak is turned off and on and show that the event is observed when the cloak is turned off but becomes undetectable when the cloak is turned on. These results are a significant step toward the development of full spatio-temporal cloaking.

More here:

First Demonstration of Time Cloaking

Physicists have created a "hole in time" using the temporal equivalent of an invisibility cloak

The device has some limitations. The Cornell time cloak lasts only for 110 nanoseconds--that's not long. And Fridman and co say the best it can achieve will be 120 microseconds.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

The Highest Freq Known to Man

... is in the attosecond range.

Firing away 180 attosecond pulses, the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik has measured the interval between a photon striking an atom and the emission of an electron. And so the record stands: 20 attosecondes.

Verzögerter Zeitpunkt Null

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Scanning Beyond SETI

Starry Messages: Searching for Signatures of Interstellar Archaeology
Richard A. Carrigan, Jr.,
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Searching for signatures of cosmic-scale archaeological artifacts such as Dyson spheres or Kardashev civilizations is an interesting alternative to conventional SETI. Uncovering such an artifact does not require the intentional transmission of a signal on the part of the original civilization. This type of search is called interstellar archaeology or sometimes cosmic archaeology. The detection of intelligence elsewhere in the Universe with interstellar archaeology or SETI would have broad implications for science. For example, the constraints of the anthropic principle would have to be loosened if a different type of intelligence was discovered elsewhere. A variety of interstellar archaeology signatures are discussed including non-natural planetary atmospheric constituents, stellar doping with isotopes of nuclear wastes, Dyson spheres, as well as signatures of stellar and galactic-scale engineering. The concept of a Fermi bubble due to interstellar migration is introduced in the discussion of galactic signatures. These potential interstellar archaeological signatures are classified using the Kardashev scale. A modified Drake equation is used to evaluate the relative challenges of finding various sources. With few exceptions interstellar archaeological signatures are clouded and beyond current technological capabilities. However SETI for so-called cultural transmissions and planetary atmosphere signatures are within reach.