Atomic-scale imaging reveals that chalcogen atoms play a crucial role in Cooper pairing in Fe-based superconductors, offering new insights into high-Tc superconductivity mechanisms. Superconductivity in quantum materials, whether the Cooper pairing on the Fermi surface is mediated by phonons or b
Teleportation isn’t just science fiction anymore — scientists have found a way to send information more clearly and efficiently than ever before.
Using an incredibly tiny material called a nanophotonic platform, researchers dramatically improved how well quantum information can travel, even with just single particles of light. This breakthrough means teleportation could one day be part of real-world communication networks, opening the door to a future where information zips through space in ways once thought impossible.
Nonlinear optics: the key to quantum communication.
One of the most famous findings in physics could be wrong – the double-slit experiment was long thought to confirm that light can be a wave, but its results can be fully explained using only quantum particles
Researchers have demonstrated a new quantum sensing technique that widely surpasses conventional methods, potentially accelerating advances in fields ranging from medical imaging to foundational physics research, as shown in a study published in Nature Communications.
For decades, the performance of quantum sensors has been limited by decoherence, which is unpredictable behavior caused by environmental noise.
“Decoherence causes the state of a quantum system to become randomly scrambled, erasing any quantum sensing signal,” said Eli Levenson-Falk, senior author of the study, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
This commentary celebrates the 50th anniversary of the seminal paper by John F. Nye and Michael V. Berry published in 1974 that described topological wave singularities. Originally termed “wave dislocations,” they are now known as “wave vortices” and occur in diverse systems, such as tides, quantum matter waves, and most notably, light.
It’s easy to solve a 3×3 Rubik’s cube, says Shantanu Chakrabartty, the Clifford W. Murphy Professor and vice dean for research and graduate education in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Just learn and memorize the steps then execute them to arrive at the solution.
Computers are already good at this kind of procedural problem solving. Now, Chakrabartty and his collaborators have developed a tool that can go beyond procedure to discover new solutions to complex optimization problems in logistics to drug discovery.
Chakrabartty and his collaborators introduced NeuroSA, a problem-solving neuromorphic architecture modeled on how human neurobiology functions, but that leverages quantum mechanical behavior to find optimal solutions—guaranteed—and find those solutions more reliably than state-of-the-art methods.
An atomic clock research team from the National Time Service Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has proposed and implemented a compact optical clock based on quantum interference enhanced absorption spectroscopy, which is expected to play an important role in micro-positioning, navigation, timing (μPNT) and other systems.
Inspired by the successful history of the coherent population trapping (CPT)-based chip-scale microwave atomic clock and the booming of optical microcombs, a chip-scale optical clock was also proposed and demonstrated with better frequency stability and accuracy, which is mainly based on two-photon transition of Rubidium atom ensemble.
However, the typically required high cell temperatures (~100 ℃) and laser powers (~10 mW) in such a configuration are not compliant with the advent of a fully miniaturized and low-power optical clock.
He Qinglin’s group at the Center for Quantum Materials Science, School of Physics, has reported the first observation of non-reciprocal Coulomb drag in Chern insulators. This breakthrough opens new pathways for exploring Coulomb interactions in magnetic topological systems and enhances our understanding of quantum states in such materials. The work was published in Nature Communications.
Coulomb drag arises when a current in one conductor induces a measurable voltage in a nearby, electrically insulated conductor via long-range Coulomb interactions.
Chern insulators are magnetic topological materials that show a quantized Hall effect without external magnetic fields, due to intrinsic magnetization and chiral edge states.
Many atomic nuclei have a magnetic field similar to that of Earth. However, directly at the surface of a heavy nucleus such as lead or bismuth, it is trillions of times stronger than Earth’s field and more comparable to that of a neutron star. Whether we understand the behavior of an electron in such strong fields is still an open question.
A research team led by TU Darmstadt at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research has now taken an important step toward clarifying this question. Their findings have been published in Nature Physics. The results confirm the theoretical predictions.
Hydrogen-like ions, i.e., atomic nuclei to which only a single electron is bound, are theoretically particularly easy to describe. In the case of heavy nuclei with a high proton number—bismuth, for example, has 83 positively charged protons in its nucleus—the strong electrical attraction binds the electron close to the nucleus and thus within this extreme magnetic field. There, the electron aligns its own magnetic field with that of the nucleus like a compass needle.
