A study published in the journal Physical Review Letters by researchers in Japan solves a long-standing problem in quantum physics by redefining the uncertainty principle.
Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a key and surprising feature of quantum mechanics, and he can thank his hay fever for it. Miserable in Berlin in the summer of 1925, the young German physicist vacationed on the remote, rocky island of Helgoland, in the North Sea off the northern German coast. His allergies improved, and he was able to continue his work trying to understand the intricacies of Bohr’s model of the atom, developing tables of internal atomic properties, such as energy, position and momentum.
When he returned to Göttingen, his advisor, Max Born, recognized these tables could each be formed into a matrix—essentially a two-dimensional table of values. Together with the 22-year-old Pasqual Jordan, they refined their work into matrix mechanics—the first successful theory of quantum mechanics—the physical laws that describe tiny objects like atoms and electrons.
Quantum information scientists are always on the hunt for winning combinations of materials, materials that can be manipulated at the molecular level to reliably store and transmit information. Following a recent proof-of-principle demonstration, researchers are adding a new combination of compounds to the quantum materials roster.
In a study reported in ACS Photonics, researchers combined two nanosized structures—one made of diamond and one of lithium niobate—onto a single chip. They then sent light from the diamond to the lithium niobate and measured the fraction of light that successfully made it across.
The greater that fraction, the more efficient the coupling of the materials, and the more promising the pairing as a component in quantum devices.
Quantum physics, the science of the very small, often challenges our common sense and intuition. But it also offers new possibilities for technological innovations that go beyond the limits of classical physics. One of these possibilities is the quantum battery, which uses quantum phenomena to store, transfer, and deliver energy more effectively than conventional batteries.
Quantum batteries
Quantum batteriesQuantum batteries are not yet ready for commercial use. Still, they can revolutionize fields that require low-power and portable energy sources, such as smart devices, sensors, and even electric vehicles.
A nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center is a defect in the crystal structure of diamond, where a nitrogen atom replaces a carbon atom in the diamond lattice and a neighboring site in the lattice is vacant. This and other fluorescent defects in diamond, known as color centers, have attracted researchers’ attention owing to their quantum properties, such as single-photon emission at room temperature and with long coherence time. Their many applications include quantum information encoding and processing, and cell marking in biological studies.
Microfabrication in diamond is technically difficult, and nanodiamonds with color centers have been embedded in custom-designed structures as a way of integrating these quantum emitters into photonic devices. A study conducted at the University of São Paulo’s São Carlos Institute of Physics (IFSC-USP) in Brazil has established a method for this, as described in an article published in the journal Nanomaterials.
“We demonstrated a method of embedding fluorescent nanodiamonds in microstructures designed for this purpose, using two-photon polymerization [2PP],” Cleber Mendonça, a professor at IFSC-USP and last author of the article, told Agência FAPESP. “We studied the ideal concentration of nanodiamond in the photoresist to achieve structures with at least one fluorescent NV center and good structural and optical quality.” The photoresist is a light-sensitive material used in the fabrication process to transfer nanoscale patterns to the substrate.
Recent research has unlocked key aspects of high-critical-temperature superconductors, identifying their unique ‘strange metal’ state and a crucial quantum critical point. This discovery, resulting from collaborative efforts and extensive experiments, paves the way for advanced superconducting technologies.
Taking a significant step forward in superconductivity research, the discovery could pave the way for sustainable technologies and contribute to a more environmentally friendly future.
The study just published in Nature Communications by researchers from Politecnico di Milano, Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, and Sapienza University of Rome sheds light on one of the many mysteries of high-critical-temperature copper-based superconductors: even at temperatures above the critical temperature, they are special, behaving like “strange” metals. This means that their electrical resistance changes with temperature differently than that of normal metals.
Detection efficiency is 1,000 times higher than conventional ion detectors due to high sensitivity.
An international research team led by quantum physicist Markus Arndt (University of Vienna) has achieved a breakthrough in the detection of protein ions: Due to their high energy sensitivity, superconducting nanowire detectors achieve almost 100% quantum efficiency and exceed the detection efficiency of conventional ion detectors at low energies by a factor of up to a 1,000. In contrast to conventional detectors, they can also distinguish macromolecules by their impact energy. This allows for more sensitive detection of proteins and it provides additional information in mass spectrometry. The results of this study were recently published in the journal Science Advances.
Advancements in Mass Spectrometry.
A groundbreaking study introduces advanced nanometric optomechanical cavities, paving the way for more efficient quantum networks and improving quantum computing and communication technologies.
The ability to transmit information coherently in the band of the electromagnetic spectrum from microwave to infrared is vitally important to the development of the advanced quantum networks used in computing and communications.
A study conducted by researchers at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil, in collaboration with colleagues at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and TU Delft in the Netherlands, focused on the use of nanometric optomechanical cavities for this purpose. These nanoscale resonators promote interaction between high-frequency mechanical vibrations and infrared light at wavelengths used by the telecommunications industry.
Bulky and hard to wrangle, molecules have long defied physicists’ attempts to lure them into a state of controlled quantum entanglement, whereby the molecules are intimately linked even at a distance.
Now, for the first time, two separate teams have succeeded in entangling pairs of ultra-cold molecules using the same method: microscopically precise optical ‘tweezer traps’
Quantum entanglement is a bizarre yet fundamental phenomenon of the quantum realm that physicists are trying to tap into to create the first, commercial quantum computers.
