World's Fastest Supercomputer Reveals the Largest-Ever Universe Simulation

The world's fastest supercomputer, Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has recently unveiled the largest-ever simulation of the universe!. This groundbreaking simulation models both atomic matter and dark matter across vast universe-sized scales.

In early November 2024, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory used Frontier, the fastest supercomputer on the planet, to run the largest astrophysical simulation of the universe ever conducted.

Frontier can perform up to 1.1 exaFLOPS (1.1 quintillion calculations per second). The Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code (HACC) was used, which models the evolution of the universe.

The simulation tracks the formation and movement of galaxies over billions of years. This simulation will help match observational data with theoretical models, providing deeper insights into cosmic structures and the role of dark matter.

In the video below, it shows the formation of the largest object in the Frontier-E simulation. The left panel shows a 64x64x76 Mpc/h subvolume of the simulation (roughly 1e-5 the full simulation volume) around the large object, with the right panel providing a closer look. In each panel, we show the gas density field colored by its temperature. In the right panel, the white circles show star particles and the open black circles show AGN particles.

For the 1st Time Scientists Found Experimental Evidence of Graviton-like Particle

Gravitons are fascinating hypothetical particles that play a pivotal role in our understanding of gravity. These are the fundamental particles that mediate the force of gravitational interaction in the realm of quantum field theory.

In simpler terms, they carry the gravitational force, much like how photons carry the electromagnetic force. When you toss something upward, and it gracefully descends due to gravity, it's essentially the gravitons at work.

Like photons, gravitons are expected to be massless and electrically uncharged. Gravitons too travel at the speed of light, zipping through the fabric of spacetime. Their existence is rooted in the quest for a unified theory that combines quantum mechanics and gravity.

Gravitons are the focus of the search for the "theory of everything", which would unify Einstein's General Relativity (GR) theory of gravity with quantum theory

Gravitons remain elusive and unobserved and continue to intrigue scientists as we seek to unravel the mysteries of gravity and the cosmos.

In a latest however, scientists have glimpsed into graviton-like particles and these particles of gravity have shown their existence in a semiconductor.

An international research team led by Chinese scientists has, for the first time, presented experimental evidence of a graviton-like particle called chiral graviton modes (CGMs), with the findings published in the scientific journal Nature on Thursday.

By putting a thin layer of semiconductor under extreme conditions and exciting its electrons to move in concert, researchers from eastern China’s Nanjing University, the United States and Germany found the electrons to spin in a way that is only expected to exist in gravitons.

Despite the breakthrough, Loren Pfeiffer at Princeton University, who wrote the paper of this findings, said "This is a needle in a haystack [finding]. And the paper that started this whole thing is from way back in 1993." He wrote that paper with several colleagues including Aron Pinczuk, who passed away in 2022 before they could find hints of the gravitons.

The discovery of chiral graviton modes (CGMs) and their shared characteristics with gravitons, a still-undiscovered particle predicted to play a critical role in gravity, could potentially connect two subfields of physics: high-energy physics, which operates across the largest scales of the universe, and condensed matter physics, which studies materials and the atomic and electronic interactions that give them their unique properties.

Scientists in China, the US and Germany used polarised laser light to measure graviton-like excitation and spin in a quantum material. (Image - SCMP.org)

The ability to study graviton-like particles in the lab could help fill critical gaps between quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theories of relativity, solving a major dilemma in physics and expanding our understanding of the universe.

The term "graviton" was coined in 1934 by Soviet physicists Dmitrii Blokhintsev and F. M. Gal'perin. Paul Dirac later reintroduced the term, envisioning that the energy of the gravitational field should come in discrete quanta—these quanta he playfully dubbed "gravitons."

Just as Newton anticipated photons, Laplace also foresaw "gravitons," albeit with a greater speed than light and no connection to quantum mechanics or special relativity.