Something from Nothing? A Vacuum Can Yield Flashes of Light
"Virtual particles" can become real photons--under the right conditions

A vacuum might seem like empty space, but scientists have discovered a new way to seemingly get something from that nothingness, such as light. And the finding could ultimately help scientists build incredibly powerful quantum computers or shed light on the earliest moments in the universe's history.

Quantum physics explains that there are limits to how precisely one can know the properties of the most basic units of matter—for instance, one can never absolutely know a particle's position and momentum at the same time. One bizarre consequence of this uncertainty is that a vacuum is never completely empty, but instead buzzes with so-called “virtual particles” that constantly wink into and out of existence.

These virtual particles often appear in pairs that near-instantaneously cancel themselves out. Still, before they vanish, they can have very real effects on their surroundings. For instance, photons—packets of light—can pop in and out of a vacuum. When two mirrors are placed facing each other in a vacuum, more virtual photons can exist around the outside of the mirrors than between them, generating a seemingly mysterious force that pushes the mirrors together.

This phenomenon, predicted in 1948 by the Dutch physicist Hendrick Casimir and known as the Casimir effect, was first seen with mirrors held still . Researchers also predicted a dynamical Casimir effect that can result when mirrors are moved, or objects otherwise undergo change. Now quantum physicist Pasi Lähteenmäki at Aalto University in Finland and his colleagues reveal that by varying the speed at which light can travel, they can make light appear from nothing.

The speed of light in a vacuum is constant, according to Einstein's theory of relativity, but its speed passing through any given material depends on a property of that substance known as its index of refraction. By varying a material's index of refraction, researchers can influence the speed at which both real and virtual photons travel within it. Lähteenmäki says one can think of this system as being much like a mirror, and if its thickness changes fast enough, virtual photons reflecting off it can receive enough energy from the bounce to turn into real photons. "Imagine you stay in a very dark room and suddenly the index of refraction of light [of the room] changes," Lähteenmäki says. "The room will start to glow."

The researchers began with an array of 250 superconducting quantum-interference devices, or SQUIDs—circuits that are extraordinarily sensitive to magnetic fields. They inserted the array inside a refrigerator. By carefully exerting magnetic fields on this array, they could vary the speed at which microwave photons traveled through it by a few percent. The researchers then cooled this array to 50 thousandths of a degree Celsius above absolute zero. Because this environment is supercold, it should not emit any radiation, essentially behaving as a vacuum. "We were simply studying these circuits for the purpose of developing an amplifier, which we did," says researcher Sorin Paraoanu, a theoretical physicist at Aalto University. "But then we asked ourselves—what if there is no signal to amplify? What happens if the vacuum is the signal?"

The researchers detected photons that matched predictions from the dynamical Casimir effect. For instance, such photons should display the strange property of quantum entanglement—that is, by measuring the details of one, scientists could in principle know exactly what its counterpart is like, no matter where it is in the universe, a phenomenon Einstein referred to as "spooky action at a distance." The scientists detailed their findings online February 11 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...s-of-light
(Nos hicieron traducir hasta la mitad más o menos)

The rise and fall of voice

Voice controlled computers are the dream of many but they remain stubbornly in the realm of science fiction.

Transcribing words

Current voice recognition systems use statistics to turn sounds into words. Once sounds have been transformed into a list of characteristic properties by a signal processor, the list is fed into two statistical models. The acoustic model tries to match up sounds to units of speech that form individual words – if the first part of a word begins with a certain sound then the next sound is a choice of the possible sounds that would complete the word. The language model works in a similar way and looks at which words are likely to occur next to each other. The models rely on an analysis of masses of text from books and newspapers along with hours of voice recordings that has identified certain pairings and patterns as being more probable.

Not surprisingly, background noise, accents and poor sound quality all adversely affect the accuracy of voice recognition systems, but having more data won’t necessarily help, “the performance improvements people report at conferences every year are matters of fractions of a per cent on incredibly hard tasks” says Roger Moore, professor of spoken language processing at the University of Sheffield.

Another big challenge is adapting to different surroundings and contexts. In particular, the fast, conversational speech used in casual situations is hard for computers to understand – speakers merge words into each other and leave computers trying to comprehend incomplete sounds. Again, it’s not simply more data that’s needed, “the more important and more interesting thing is using the data in a smarter way and getting better acoustic and language models” says Steve Renals, Professor of Speech Technology at Edinburgh University.

Systems like Google Voice Search and Dragon Dictation basically transcribe sounds into words, but getting a computer to understand and act on what you say is a very different and more complex task. In certain limited scenarios voice control can work well, “if you can limit the domain or topic of conversation then you can do much better than in an open domain, discussing philosophy for example” says Roger.
http://www.physics.org/featuredetail.asp?id=76
(Este pidieron la traducción completa creo)