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EPFL researchers have collaborated with colleagues at Harvard and ETH Zurich on a new thin-film circuit that, when connected to a laser beam, produces finely tailorable terahertz-frequency waves. The device opens up a world of potential applications in optics and telecommunications.

Researchers led by Cristina Benea-Chelmus in the Laboratory of Hybrid Photonics (HYLAB) in EPFL’s School of Engineering have taken a big step toward successfully exploiting the so-called terahertz gap, which lies between about 300 to 30,000 gigahertz (0.3 to 30 THz) on the electromagnetic spectrum. This range is currently something of a technological dead zone, describing frequencies that are too fast for today’s electronics and telecommunications devices, but too slow for optics and imaging applications.

Now, thanks to an extremely thin chip with an integrated photonic circuit made of lithium niobate, the HYLAB researchers and colleagues at ETH Zurich and Harvard University have succeeded not just in producing terahertz waves, but in engineering a solution for custom-tailoring their frequency, wavelength, amplitude, and phase.

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A day may come when our technology permits vast prosperity for everyone, with robots and other automation producing plenty, but if that day never comes, what will life be like?

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Continue reading “What If We Never Become Post Scarcity?” »

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A data set funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative shows how research software and tools are used across disciplines — and helps developers gain credit for their work.

Long before we had quantum computers, classical computers, or even calculus, an ancient Greek philosopher known as Zeno of Elea used thought experiments to probe apparent paradoxes. Zeno imagined an arrow flying through the air. At each instant of time, he reasoned, the arrow is stationary. If the arrow’s trajectory is entirely composed of stationary instants, how can the arrow ever move through space? Motion is impossible!

Zeno’s ancient arrow paradox has since evolved into a quantum thought experiment, “the quantum Zeno effect,” whereby we can freeze the state of quantum systems by continuously observing them. In the latest installment of our Quantum Paradoxes content series, I explain the quantum Zeno effect, and show how we can test it out using Qiskit on quantum computers. Read on to find out how this counterintuitive quantum freezing works, and how to create your own quantum freezer game — which even works with entangled qubits! All the code you need is in this Jupyter Notebook, and you’ll also find a detailed explanation in our latest Quantum Paradoxes video.

Continue reading “The Quantum Zeno Effect: From Motionless Arrows to Entangled Freezers” »

Astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) have unveiled a first-of-its-kind map that could help answer decades-old questions about the origins of stars and the influences of magnetic fields in the cosmos.

The map reveals the likely magnetic field structure of the Local Bubble—a giant, 1,000-light-year-wide hollow in space surrounding our Sun. Like a hunk of Swiss cheese, our galaxy is full of these so-called superbubbles. The explosive supernova deaths of massive stars blow up these bubbles, and in the process, concentrate gas and dust—the fuel for making new stars —on the bubbles’ outer surfaces. These thick surfaces accordingly serve as rich sites for subsequent star and planet formation.

Continue reading “Cosmic superbubble’s magnetic field charted in 3D for the first time” »

NASA and Roscosmos are adjusting the International Space Station (ISS) flight plan after completing an investigation into a coolant leak on the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked to the station.

NASA hosted a joint media briefing on Wednesday, January 11, about the Roscosmos-led investigation to update the public on the Soyuz status and the forward strategy.

As a part of the work, Roscosmos engineers determined the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft is not viable for a normal crew return, but is available for crew return in an emergency aboard the space station. The Soyuz MS-22 will be replaced by the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft that will launch to the space station without a crew on Monday, February 20. NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin will return to Earth in the replacement Soyuz after spending several additional months on the station.

In a first, physicists have now found interference between two dissimilar subatomic particles. Researchers made the observation at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a colossal particle accelerator at Long Island’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. The finding broadens the way we understand entanglement and offers new opportunities to use it to study the subatomic world.

“With this new technique, we are able to measure the size and shape of the nucleus to about a tenth of a femtometer, a tenth of the size of an individual proton,” says James Daniel Brandenburg, a physicist at the Ohio State University and a member of RHIC’s STAR experiment, where the new phenomenon was seen. That’s 10 to 100 times more precise than previous measurements of high-energy atomic nuclei.

RHIC is designed to collide heavy ions, such as the nuclei of gold atoms. In this case, though, researchers were interested in near misses, not collisions. As the gold nuclei zing at near light speed through the collider, they create an electromagnetic field that generates photons. When two gold nuclei come close to one another but don’t collide, the photons may ping off the neighboring nuclei. These near misses used to be considered background noise, says STAR collaborator Raghav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli, a physicist at Vanderbilt University. But looking at the close-call events “opened up a whole new field of physics that initially was not accessible,” Kunnawalkam Elayavalli says.

Infinitum.

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