Predicting who wins the 2017 Nobel Prizes (4)

By: James V. Kohl | Published on: October 3, 2017

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As you wait to learn who won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics and in Chemistry, please consider how these recent reports will be linked from electrons to ecosystems. Every aspect must start with the creation of energy, which must link chemistry to biophysically constrained biologically based life on Earth in the context of the physiology of pheromone-controlled reproduction and Schrodinger’s claims in “What is Life? (1944). Without mention of the anti-entropic virucidal energy of sunlight, the theories of physicists and chemists have no explanatory power. Experimental evidence of top-down causation is expected to be part of the criteria for awarding these two Nobel Prizes. Will the experimental evidence include anything known to serious scientists about the anti-entropic virucidal energy of sunlight?
High-order multiphoton Thomson scattering

…the experiment’s potential to generate attosecond-duration hard X-ray pulses can enable the study of ultrafast nuclear dynamics.

Reported as: One billion suns: World’s brightest laser sparks new behavior in light

That phenomenon stemmed partly from a change in the electron, which abandoned its usual up-and-down motion in favor of a figure-8 flight pattern. As it would under normal conditions, the electron also ejected its own photon, which was jarred loose by the energy of the incoming photons. But the researchers found that the ejected photon absorbed the collective energy of all the scattered photons, granting it the energy and wavelength of an X-ray.

Hard Two-Photon Contribution to Elastic Lepton-Proton Scattering Determined by the OLYMPUS Experiment

The OLYMPUS Collaboration reports on a precision measurement of the positron-proton to electron-proton elastic cross section ratio, R2γ, a direct measure of the contribution of hard two-photon exchange to the elastic cross section.

Reported as: OLYMPUS experiment sheds light on structure of protons

…most of the time, only one of the photons has high energy, while the other must carry very little energy indeed, according to Richard Milner, a professor of physics and member of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science’s Hadronic Physics Group, who led the experiment.

The difference between the theoretical and experimental results means further experiments may need to be carried out in the future, at even higher energies where the two-photon exchange effect is expected to be larger, Hasell says.

Probing electronic binding potentials with attosecond photoelectron wavepackets

The central goal of attosecond science is to visualize, understand and ultimately control electron dynamics in matter over the fastest relevant timescales.

Reported as: First look at electrons escaping atoms

Electrons behave differently when they can feel the tug of sub-atomic forces from a nucleus and neighbor electrons, and the farther away they get from an atom, those forces diminish. Though breaking free takes less than a femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second), this study shows how an electron’s momentum changes many times along the way as it loses contact with individual parts of the atom. Those changes take place on the scale of attoseconds (thousandths of a femtosecond, or quintillionths of a second).

Ultraviolet Absorption Induces Hydrogen-Atom Transfer in G⋅C Watson–Crick DNA Base Pairs in Solution

The observation of these sequential EDPT mechanisms across intermolecular hydrogen bonds confirms an important and long debated pathway for the deactivation of photoexcited base pairs, with possible implications for the UV photochemistry of DNA.

UV-Induced Charge Transfer States in DNA Promote Sequence Selective Self-Repair

…excitation of a guanine (G) adenine (A) sequence leads to reformation of the intact thymine (T) bases. The involvement of two bases for the repair points to a long-living charge transfer state between G and A to be responsible for the repair.

Polarization-entangled photons from an InGaAs-based quantum dot emitting in the telecom C-band

The ability to generate entangled photons is a key prerequisite for several quantum applications like quantum information processing,

All energy-dependent information processing is quantum information processing because the quantized energy comes from sunlight.
Reported as: Researchers change wavelengths of entangled photons to those used in telecommunications

The researchers used quantum dots created from an indium arsenide and gallium arsenide platform, producing pure single photons and entangled photons. Unlike parametric down-conversion techniques, quantum dots allow for photons to be emitted only one at a time and on demand, crucial properties for quantum computing.

Collective chiral spin modes are propagating waves of electron spins that do not carry a charge current but modify the “spinning” directions of electrons. “Chiral” refers to entities, like your right and left hands, that are matching but asymmetrical and can’t be superimposed on their mirror image.

Chiral spin modes must be linked from energy-dependent changes in subatomic particles and chirality to biophysically constrained autophagy in the context of the physiology of reproduction in all living genera.
See for example: Soilborne fungi have host affinity and host-specific effects on seed germination and survival in a lowland tropical forest
Reported as: Tropical diversity takes root in relationships between fungi and seeds

…the fungi affected seed mortality and germination in a species-specific manner.

“One fascinating result was that if a fungus had a pathogenic effect on one plant species, it was likely to have the opposite effect on another,” said coauthor Paul-Camilo Zalamea, a Smithsonian postdoctoral fellow.

All biodiversity is energy-dependent and biophysically constrained by the physiology of reproduction. The anti-entropic virucidal energy comes from sunlight. Nothing takes root without it.

Indeed, in the case of higher animals we know the kind of orderliness they feed upon well enough, viz. the extremely well-ordered state of matter in more or less complicated organic compounds, which serve them as foodstuffs. After utilizing it they return it in a very much degraded form -not entirely degraded, however, for plants can still make use of it. (These, of course, have their most power supply of ‘negative entropy’ the sunlight.) (pp. 73 and 74)

Loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystem services from agricultural lands remain important challenges in the United States…

Reported as: Strips of prairie plants slow loss of soil, nutrients and water from ag fields, double biodiversity

Researchers report that replacing 10-20 percent of cropland with prairie strips increased biodiversity and ecosystem services with minimal impacts on crop production.

m1A and m1G disrupt A-RNA structure through the intrinsic instability of Hoogsteen base pairs

The different propensities to form Hoogsteen base pairs in B-DNA and A-RNA may help cells meet the opposing requirements of maintaining genome stability, on the one hand, and of dynamically modulating the structure of the epitranscriptome, on the other.