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Category: quantum physics – Page 7

Quantum heat circuits learn electronics’ oldest trick: Sharing a power supply

Every electronic and optoelectronic device generates heat, and today that heat is managed almost entirely from the outside. Heatsinks, fans, cold plates and refrigerators are bulky exterior measures bolted onto a chip or package after the fact. They treat heat as a single averaged quantity to be removed in bulk, even though the heat is actually produced locally, component by component, deep inside the circuitry.

Quantum thermal devices offer a fundamentally different approach. Because they are tiny, heat-management circuitry can, in principle, be built right next to each electronic or optoelectronic component that needs it.

Instead of one bulk, averaged solution for an entire chip, each component could have its own tailored thermal circuit beside it, steering heat away exactly where it arises. That is the long-term technological promise motivating this field.

Discovery of ‘slow’ electrons in 2D material could lead to new memory device

Over the last decade, researchers have developed two-dimensional materials with fascinating quantum effects that could be harnessed for next-generation technologies.

Such materials have shown superconductivity—conducting electricity without energy loss—and charge orders, where electrons arrange in frozen patterns rather than moving freely in the material.

At the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME), a research team discovered that one such material, Fe5GeTe2, exhibits a charge-ordered state in which electrons move collectively and unusually slowly while remaining quantum coherent.

Controlled cracking technique prints quantum dots into tiny pixels for sharper displays

Recent technological advances have enabled the development of increasingly sophisticated, sharper displays for electronic devices. Many modern displays use light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, tiny semiconductor-based components that emit light when an electrical current passes through them.

Quantum Heat Waves Spotted at Room Temperature for the First Time

The discovery could improve thermal management in electronics and support advances in quantum and next-generation computing technologies.

Heat usually spreads outward through a solid, making it difficult to control once it begins moving. Until now, a wavelike form of heat transport called phonon focusing had been observed only at extremely low, or cryogenic, temperatures, sharply limiting its study and possible applications.

Researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have now shown that phonons, quantum vibrations that carry heat through a material, can travel along concentrated, ray-like paths at room temperature. Rather than dispersing evenly in every direction, the heat followed routes determined by the underlying crystal structure, suggesting a new way to direct thermal energy in future electronics and quantum technologies.

UCLA scientists discover how to guide heat like light at room temperature

Scientists have demonstrated that heat can move through a crystal in focused, wave-like rays at room temperature instead of spreading randomly. The breakthrough could make it possible to route heat around sensitive parts of next-generation chips and quantum devices.

Quantum-Secure Ballots Demonstrated in the Lab

Quantum bits (qubits) enable these conditions. The quantum voting protocol involves creating a quantum state of many quantum-entangled qubits known as a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state, with one qubit for each voter. The state can be prepared so that each qubit measurement randomly produces 0 or 1, but the entanglement guarantees that the total number of 1s is either even or odd. These states can be prepared using, for example, photons as qubits, with 0 and 1 corresponding to distinct polarization states.

Such a protocol was proposed in 2022 by quantum information theorist Federico Centrone of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology in Spain and his co-workers [3]. Implementing it requires that the voters be able to verify that they have been given a true GHZ state and not some other state that subverts the protocol. Such verifications can be carried out, but each qubit can only be used once—either for voting or for verification. So extra sets of GHZ states must be produced for multiple rounds of verification.

Two research teams have now demonstrated the fundamental features of the protocol using photons as qubits, although several practical challenges remain before it can be used in a real election. Joey Marcellino, a PhD student at the University of Geneva, and his co-workers randomly assign each round as either a verification or a voting round [1]. Meanwhile, Laurent-Puig and his colleagues (including Centrone) simply chose to postpone the verification aspect of the protocol for future work [2].

Physicists watch a material’s electrons assemble, and reassemble, into coexisting phases

A tall glass of ice water isn’t just a thirst quencher; it’s also an everyday example of coexisting phases. Water can exist simultaneously in both liquid and solid phases. As it turns out, this phase duality can also exist in more exotic quantum materials, in ways that are far more complicated to tease apart.

A new study by MIT physicists sheds light on how two different phases of electron behavior can emerge and coexist in the same quantum material.

Their results, reported in the journal Nature Physics, can help explain how some materials host superconductivity, magnetism and other electronic phases. Untangling such phases and understanding how they emerge will help engineers control electronic behavior and design high-performance quantum devices.

Crossing into a mirror world: Particles turn to wisps of fog, and the magnetic monopole paradox dissolves

In Goethe’s ballad “Erlkönig,” immortalized in Schubert’s fevered 1815 setting, a dying boy riding through the night sees a spectral king beckoning from the darkness. His father calms him: “Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif”—my son, it is only a wisp of fog. In the poem, the father’s reassurance proves tragically wrong. In the quantum world, however, his words acquire an uncanny new meaning.

For four decades, physicists have been haunted by their own apparition: a particle that scatters off a magnetic monopole and seems to vanish from the theory entirely, its outgoing state missing from the books. A team of physicists from Ghent University, the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford now shows, in a paper published in Nature Physics, where such particles go.

Throwing quantum wave packets at a so-called “duality defect”—an interface stitching together two quantum worlds that are secretly descriptions of the same physics—they find that the particle is never reflected: it always passes through, with 100% probability, and reemerges as precisely what the father promised. A wisp of fog: faint, smeared out, trailing an invisible thread of quantum mist back to the mirror’s edge.

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