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Inside atoms and molecules, electrons zip around at extreme speeds. Their motions can only be captured with super short pulses of light — like camera flashes that last billionths of a billionth of a second. The 2023 Nobel Prize in physics goes to three physicists who have helped create such “attosecond” blasts of laser light.

By offering superfast snapshots of electrons, their research is changing our view of the inner workings of atoms and molecules.

Continue reading “Efforts to create ultrafast light pulses win 2023 physics Nobel” »

Researchers highlight the potential of cobalt-tin-sulfur in spintronic devices, revealing its capability to reduce energy consumption and heralding a new era in electronics.

A team of researchers has made a significant breakthrough that could revolutionize next-generation electronics by enabling non-volatility, large-scale integration, low power consumption, high speed, and high reliability in spintronic devices.

Details of their findings were published recently in the journal Physical Review B.

Researchers led by Giulia Galli at University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering report a computational study that predicts the conditions to create specific spin defects in silicon carbide. Their findings, published online in Nature Communications, represent an important step towards identifying fabrication parameters for spin defects useful for quantum technologies.

Electronic spin defects in semiconductors and insulators are rich platforms for quantum information, sensing, and communication applications. Defects are impurities and/or misplaced atoms in a solid and the electrons associated with these atomic defects carry a spin. This quantum mechanical property can be used to provide a controllable qubit, the basic unit of operation in quantum technologies.

Yet the synthesis of these spin defects, typically achieved experimentally by implantation and annealing processes, is not yet well understood, and importantly, cannot yet be fully optimized. In silicon carbide —an attractive host material for spin qubits due to its industrial availability—different experiments have so far yielded different recommendations and outcomes for creating the desired spin defects.

Quantum entanglement is one of the most astonishing properties of quantum mechanics. If two particles are entangled, the state of one particle cannot be described independently from the other. This is a unique property of the quantum world and forms a crucial difference between classical and quantum theories of physics. It is so important, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science”.

The large mass of the top quark, which is greater than any other particle, remains one of the most enduring mysteries of the Standard Model. Why this is so remains unexplained, however, the top quark has many unique properties to exploit as a result. The top quark is so heavy that it is extremely unstable and decays before it has time to hadronise, transferring all of its quantum numbers to its decay particles. Physicists can detect these decay particles and thus reconstruct the quantum state of a top quark, a feat that is impossible with any other quark. Most importantly, they can measure its spin and use it to show that entanglement can be studied in top-quark-pair production at the LHC.

Entanglement has indeed been measured in the past, but not quite like this. Most previous entanglement measurements involved low non-relativistic energies, typically utilising photons or electrons. The LHC collides protons with an incredibly high centre-of-mass energy. The data used in ATLAS’ new measurement were obtained from collisions at 13 TeV collected between 2015 and 2018. This means researchers are delving into an energy scale over 12 orders of magnitude (a thousand billion times) higher than typical laboratory experiments.

Scientists unveil exciting possibilities for the development of highly efficient quantum devices.

Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics that explores the properties and interactions of particles at very small scale, such as atoms and molecules. This has led to the development of new technologies that are more powerful and efficient compared to their conventional counterparts, causing breakthroughs in areas such as computing, communication, and energy.

A quantum leap in engine design.

Back in 2018, a tank of the purest water, buried under kilometers of rock in Ontario, Canada, flashed as barely detectable particle slammed through its molecules.

It was the first time that water has been used to detect a particle known as an antineutrino, which originated from a nuclear reactor more than 240 kilometers (150 miles) away. This incredible breakthrough promises neutrino experiments and monitoring technology that use inexpensive, easily acquirable and safe materials.

As some of the most abundant particles in the Universe, neutrinos are odd little things with a lot of potential for revealing deeper insights into the Universe. Unfortunately they are almost massless, carry no charge, and barely interact with other particles at all. They mostly stream through space and rock alike, as though all matter was incorporeal. There’s a reason they’re known as ghost particles.

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Ultimate in miniaturization.

For the first time, Stanford researchers have found a way to create and stabilize an extremely rare form of gold that has lost two negatively charged electrons, denoted Au²⁺. The material stabilizing this elusive version of the valued element is a halide perovskite—a class of crystalline materials that holds great promise for various applications including more-efficient solar cells, light sources, and electronics components.

Surprisingly, the Au²⁺ perovskite is also quick and simple to make using off-the-shelf ingredients at room temperature.

“It was a real surprise that we were able to synthesize a stable material containing Au²⁺ —I didn’t even believe it at first,” said Hemamala Karunadasa, associate professor of chemistry at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and senior author of the study published Aug. 28 in Nature Chemistry. “Creating this first-of-its-kind Au²⁺ perovskite is exciting. The gold atoms in the perovskite bear strong similarities to the copper atoms in high-temperature superconductors, and heavy atoms with unpaired electrons, like Au²⁺, show cool magnetic effects not seen in lighter atoms.”

More than 400 years ago, Galileo showed that many everyday phenomena—such as a ball rolling down an incline or a chandelier gently swinging from a church ceiling—obey precise mathematical laws. For this insight, he is often hailed as the founder of modern science. But Galileo recognized that not everything was amenable to a quantitative approach. Such things as colors, tastes and smells “are no more than mere names,” Galileo declared, for “they reside only in consciousness.” These qualities aren’t really out there in the world, he asserted, but exist only in the minds of creatures that perceive them. “Hence if the living creature were removed,” he wrote, “all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.”

Since Galileo’s time the physical sciences have leaped forward, explaining the workings of the tiniest quarks to the largest galaxy clusters. But explaining things that reside “only in consciousness”—the red of a sunset, say, or the bitter taste of a lemon—has proven far more difficult. Neuroscientists have identified a number of neural correlates of consciousness —brain states associated with specific mental states—but have not explained how matter forms minds in the first place. As philosopher David Chalmers asked: “How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?” He famously dubbed this quandary the “hard problem” of consciousness.

Continue reading “Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?” »