Scientists have developed an ‘atomic television’ that uses lasers and atom clouds to carry a video signal that meets the traditional 480i resolution (480 horizontal lines) standard.
Just don’t expect it to be installed as part of your home entertainment setup any time soon.
Getting atoms to do what you want isn’t easy – but it’s at the heart of a lot of groundbreaking research in physics.
Creating and controlling the behavior of new forms of matter is of particular interest and an active area of research.
Our new study, published in Physical Review Letters, has uncovered a brand new way of sculpting ultracold atoms into different shapes using laser light.
Physicists from TU Delft, ETH Zürich and the University of Tübingen have built a quantum scale heat pump made from particles of light. This device brings scientists closer to the quantum limit of measuring radio frequency signals, which may be useful in the hunt for dark matter. Their work will be published as an open-access article in Science Advances on Aug. 26.
If you bring two objects of different temperature together, such as putting a warm bottle of white wine into a cold chill pack, heat usually flows in one direction, from hot (the wine) to cold (the chill pack). And if you wait long enough, the two will both reach the same temperature, a process known in physics as reaching equilibrium: a balance between the heat flow one way and the other.
If you are willing to do some work, you can break this balance and cause heat to flow in the “wrong” way. This is the principle used in your refrigerator to keep your food cold, and in efficient heat pumps that can steal heat from the cold air outside to warm your house. In their publication, Gary Steele and his co-authors demonstrate a quantum analog of a heat pump, causing the elementary quantum particles of light, known as photons, to move “against the flow” from a hot object to a cold one.
Two-dimensional materials, which consist of a single layer of atoms, exhibit unusual properties that could be harnessed for a wide range of quantum and microelectronics systems. But what makes them truly special are their flaws.
“That’s where their true magic lies,” said Alexander Weber-Bargioni at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
Defects down to the atomic level can influence the material’s macroscopic function and lead to novel quantum behaviors, and there are so many kinds of defects that researchers have barely begun to understand the possibilities. One of the biggest challenges in the field is systematically studying these defects at relevant scales, or with atomic resolution.
Physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics have managed to entangle more than a dozen photons efficiently and in a defined way. They are thus creating a basis for a new type of quantum computer. Their study is published in Nature.
The phenomena of the quantum world, which often seem bizarre from the perspective of the common everyday world, have long since found their way into technology. For example, entanglement: a quantum-physical connection between particles that links them in a strange way over arbitrarily long distances. It can be used, for example, in a quantum computer—a computing machine that, unlike a conventional computer, can perform numerous mathematical operations simultaneously. However, in order to use a quantum computer profitably, a large number of entangled particles must work together. They are the basic elements for calculations, so-called qubits.
“Photons, the particles of light, are particularly well suited for this because they are robust by nature and easy to manipulate,” says Philip Thomas, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching near Munich. Together with colleagues from the Quantum Dynamics Division led by Prof. Gerhard Rempe, he has now succeeded in taking an important step towards making photons usable for technological applications such as quantum computing: For the first time, the team generated up to 14 entangled photons in a defined way and with high efficiency.
A new study by theoretical physicists has made progress toward identifying how particles and cells give rise to large-scale dynamics that we experience as the passage of time.
A central feature of how we experience the world is the flow of time from the past to the future. But it is a mystery precisely how this phenomenon, known as the arrow of time, arises from the microscopic interactions among particles and cells. Researchers at the CUNY Graduate Center Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences (ITS) are helping to unravel this enigma with the publication of a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters. The findings could have important implications in a wide range of disciplines, including physics, neuroscience, and biology.
Fundamentally, the arrow of time emerges from the second law of thermodynamics. This is the principle that microscopic arrangements of physical systems tend to increase in randomness, moving from order to disorder. The more disordered a system becomes, the more difficult it is for it to find its way back to an ordered state, and the stronger the arrow of time. In short, the universe’s propensity toward disorder is the fundamental reason why we experience time flowing in one direction.
One hypothesis for the nature of dark matter is that some of it could be self-interacting, meaning the individual particles interact slightly with one another.
Exactly like a quasicrystal, this arrangement is ordered without repetition. Similar to a quasicrystal, it’s a single-dimensional representation of a 2-dimensional pattern. As a consequence of the flattening of dimensions, the system is given two time symmetries instead of just one: the system is given another dimension of time that does not exist.
Nevertheless, quantum computers remain extremely complex experimental systems, so it is not yet known whether the benefits of the theory will hold true in actual qubits.
The experientialists tested the theory using Quantinuum’s quantum computer. Periodically and using Fibonacci sequences, laser light was pulsed at the computer’s qubits.
We might start to see atoms interacting with each other in ways “we have not yet seen.”
University of Birmingham researchers have demonstrated how unique vibrations, which are caused by interactions between the two stars’ tidal fields as they approach each other, affect gravitational-wave observations.
Taking these movements into account could significantly improve our understanding of the data collected by the Advanced LIGO and Virgo instruments, according to a press release published on the institute’s official website on Thursday.
A team of Chinese scientists report on a new method for entangling photons that they say could make quantum networks and quantum computing more practical, according to the South China Post.
In a study published in Nature Photonics, the team from the University of Science and Technology of China said that the new way to produce entangled photons is extremely efficient. The work was led by Jian-Wei Pan, one of the world’s leading quantum researcher from the Hefei National Research Center for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, the University of Science and Technology of China and CAS Center for Excellence in Quantum Information and Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China.
Entangled photons are needed for certain forms of quantum communication and computing. These technologies require the ability to efficiently produce large numbers of particles — in this case, photons — that can remain entangled even when separated by vast distances to process and protect information. Specifically, the technology could be used in quantum relays that are used in long-distance, attack-proof quantum communication, the newspaper reports.
