Poli imagines using quantum gravity sensors to monitor groundwater or magma beneath volcanoes, or to help archaeologists uncover hidden tombs or other artifacts without having to dig them up (SN: 11/2/17). These devices could also help farmers check soil quality or help engineers inspect potential construction sites for unstable ground.

“There are many tools to measure gravity,” says Xuejian Wu, an atomic physicist at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., who wasn’t involved in the study. Some devices measure how far gravity pulls down a mass hanging from a spring. Other tools use lasers to clock how fast an object tumbles down a vacuum chamber. But free-falling atoms, like those in quantum gravity sensors, are the most pristine, reliable test masses out there, Wu says. As a result, quantum sensors promise to be more accurate and stable in the long run than other gravity probes.

Rice University lab manipulates ultracold Rydberg atoms to mimic quantum interactions.

Our spatial sense doesn’t extend beyond the familiar three dimensions, but that doesn’t stop scientists from playing with whatever lies beyond.

Rice University physicists are pushing spatial boundaries in new experiments. They’ve learned to control electrons in gigantic Rydberg atoms with such precision they can create “synthetic dimensions,” important tools for quantum simulations.

Yesterday, LHCb submitted for publication new results of matter-antimatter oscillations using decays of charm particles, significantly improving the current experimental knowledge!

Read our news: https://lhcb-outreach.web.cern.ch/2022/02/21/high-precision-…ht-mesons/

Today, the LHCb Collaboration submitted for publication a paper that reports the results of the high precision measurement of the charm oscillation (mixing) parameter y_CP – y_CP^Kπ using two body D⁰ meson decays. The result is more precise than the current world average value by a factor of four.

The neutral meson particle-antiparticle systems, B_s⁰−B_s⁰, B⁰–B⁰, D⁰–D⁰ and K⁰–K⁰ oscillate (transform into their antiparticle and back) with very different frequencies. The B_s⁰−B_s⁰ oscillations are the fastest, about 3 million million times per second (3×10¹²). The oscillations B⁰–B⁰ are about 37 times slower while the oscillations D⁰–D⁰ are even slower; the oscillation period is over one hundred times larger than the average lifetime of a D⁰ meson. Therefore only very few D⁰ mesons have the time to oscillate before decaying.

The quantum mechanical treatment of neutral charm meson oscillations leads to two neutral mesons, D₁ and D₂, each with their own mass, m₁ and m₂, and typical lifetime represented by their decay width, Γ₁ and Γ₂. The D⁰-D⁰ oscillations are described by the two dimensionless parameters, x=(m₁-m₂)/Γ, determining the frequency of oscillations, and y=(Γ₁-Γ₂)/Γ, in which Γ is the average width, (Γ₁+Γ₂)/2.

Our spatial sense doesn’t extend beyond the familiar three dimensions, but that doesn’t stop scientists from playing with whatever lies beyond.

Rice University physicists are pushing spatial boundaries in new experiments. They’ve learned to control electrons in gigantic Rydberg atoms with such precision they can create “synthetic dimensions,” important tools for quantum simulations.

The Rice team developed a technique to engineer the Rydberg states of ultracold strontium atoms by applying resonant microwave electric fields to couple many states together. A Rydberg state occurs when one electron in the atom is energetically bumped up to a highly excited state, supersizing its orbit to make the atom thousands of times larger than normal.