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Spontaneous magnons synchronize with external signals at room temperature

Signals ride on waves of one kind or another: light, sound, radio. But new carriers are needed to relay information in next-generation devices. Disturbances or waves in magnetic materials called magnons could be an efficient option—if scientists can tame them.

A team led by researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U. of I.) has developed a method to generate spontaneous magnons in a material called yttrium iron garnet (YIG) that can be tuned to an external signal.

The results, reported in Nature Communications, establish a pathway toward controllable magnons that are relevant for next-generation microelectronics, wireless communication and quantum information processing.

Quantum advantage reassessed: More realistic benchmarks for quantum algorithms

Quantum advantage refers to the point at which a quantum computer solves a clearly defined task faster or more efficiently than any classical computer—or makes it solvable in the first place. For many practical applications, this has not yet been demonstrated. Research therefore relies heavily on theoretical models and simulations to explore where and under what conditions such an advantage may realistically be achieved in the future.

Quantum simulation is considered a promising path toward genuine quantum advantage.

However, many existing approaches in quantum chemistry rely on simplifying assumptions: They describe molecules as closed systems perfectly isolated from their environment, model only unitary dynamics and focus on calculating ground states within the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. In nature, none of these assumptions fully hold.

Scientists Discover a Hidden Problem in Decades of Spacecraft Data

Different processes can produce similar spacecraft observations, making it difficult to determine how particles move through Earth’s radiation belt.

A spacecraft passing through Earth’s radiation belts can record particle behavior that looks random even when the underlying motion is highly organized. New research suggests that the limited resolution of spacecraft measurements can hide fine structures in high-energy particle populations, making predictable movement resemble diffusion.

The International Space Science Institute (ISSI) research team, led by the University of Birmingham and the Czech Academy of Science, reports in Physical Review Research that distinctly structured particle motion can produce observations nearly indistinguishable from patterns usually attributed to random scattering.

Scientists Detect a Nuclear Reactor’s Ghostly Signal After Shutdown

Antineutrinos from residual radioactive decay can reveal activity inside nuclear reactors even after they have been shut down.

A nuclear reactor does not become completely silent when it shuts down. Long after power production stops, radioactive, long-lived fission products continue decaying for months or years, releasing a faint stream of particles called antineutrinos. (Anti)neutrinos are the lightest and among the most elusive particles known in the Universe, passing through reactor structures and shielding with little obstruction.

The Double Chooz collaboration has now directly measured this lingering antineutrino emission for the first time. Led by Anthony Onillon and Thierry Lasserre of the Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik (MPIK) in Heidelberg, Germany, the research was recently published in Physical Review Letters.

MIT Physicists Zapped a Quantum Crystal With Lasers — and Discovered Something Surprising

MIT physicists have uncovered a surprising split in the behavior of electrons inside a quantum material: two nearly identical electronic patterns rebuild themselves in fundamentally different ways.

Electrons inside a solid do not always behave like independent particles. Under the right conditions, enormous numbers of them can reorganize together, producing entirely new states of matter with properties that the original material did not appear to possess.

MIT physicists have now watched that collective reorganization unfold in unusual detail. Their experiments reveal that two electronic phases occupying the same quantum material can form through fundamentally different mechanisms, even though both involve the same underlying type of electron order.

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