Swiss researchers declare new record for exact pi figure
Swiss researchers said Monday they had calculated the mathematical constant pi to a new world-record level of exactitude, hitting 62.8 trillion figures using a supercomputer.
“The calculation took 108 days and nine hours” using a supercomputer, the Graubuenden University of Applied Sciences said in a statement.
Its efforts were “almost twice as fast as the record Google set using its cloud in 2019, and 3.5 times as fast as the previous world record in 2020”, according to the university’s Centre for Data Analytics, Visualisation and Simulation.
Researchers are waiting for the Guinness Book of Records to certify their feat, until then revealing only the final ten digits they calculated for pi: 7817924264.
The previous world-record pi calculation had achieved 50 trillion figures.
Pi represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, with an infinite number of digits following the decimal point.
Researchers nevertheless continue to push calculations for the constant—whose first 10 figures are 3.141592653—ever further using powerful computers.
The Swiss team said that the experience they built up calculating pi could be applied in other areas like “RNA analysis, simulations of fluid dynamics and textual analysis”.
Source:https://phys.org/news/2021-08-swiss-declare-exact-pi-figure.html
Physicists Have Figured Out How We Could Make Antimatter Out of Light.
A new study by scientists has demonstrated how researchers may be able to create an accelerating jet of antimatter from light.
A team of physicists has shown that high-intensity lasers can be used to generate colliding gamma photons – the most energetic wavelengths of light – to produce electron-positron pairs. This, they say, could help us understand the environments around some of the Universe’s most extreme objects: neutron stars.
The process of creating a matter-antimatter pair of particles – an electron and a positron – from photons is called the Breit-Wheeler process, and it’s extremely difficult to achieve experimentally.
The probability of it taking place when two photons collide is very small. You need very high-energy photons, or gamma rays, and a lot of them, in order to maximize the chances of observation.
Swiss researchers declare/Swiss researchers declare