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Humans may be predisposed to understanding the complexities of music

There is a long-standing debate in the field of music cognition about the impact of musical training and whether formal training is needed to pick up higher-order tonal structures—the overarching harmonic framework of a piece of music.

New research from the University of Rochester, published in Psychological Science, offers fresh insight into that discussion. The findings suggest that nonmusicians have a surprisingly sophisticated ear when it comes to music.

“Formal training in music—including music theory—fine-tunes the ear to pick up tonal patterns in music, like tonic, dominant, and cadences,” says Elise Piazza, an assistant professor in the Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Neuroscience and the senior author of the study. “But it turns out that with zero training, people are actually picking up on those structures just from listening to music over the lifespan.”

Advanced quantum detectors are reinventing the search for dark matter

When it comes to understanding the universe, what we know is only a sliver of the whole picture.

Dark matter and dark energy make up about 95% of the universe, leaving only 5% “ordinary matter,” or what we can see. Dr. Rupak Mahapatra, an experimental particle physicist at Texas A&M University, designs highly advanced semiconductor detectors with cryogenic quantum sensors, powering experiments worldwide and pushing the boundaries to explore this most profound mystery.

Mahapatra likens our understanding of the universe—or lack thereof—to an old parable: “It’s like trying to describe an elephant by only touching its tail. We sense something massive and complex, but we’re only grasping a tiny part of it.”

Solving quantum computing’s longstanding ‘no cloning’ problem with an encryption workaround

A team of researchers at the University of Waterloo have made a breakthrough in quantum computing that elegantly bypasses the fundamental “no cloning” problem. The research, “Encrypted Qubits can be Cloned,” appears in Physical Review Letters.

Quantum computing is an exciting technological frontier, where information is stored and processed in tiny units—called qubits. Qubits can be stored, for example, in individual electrons, photons (particles of light), atoms, ions or tiny currents.

Universities, industry, and governments around the world are spending billions of dollars to perfect the technology for controlling these qubits so that they can be combined into large, reliable quantum computers. This technology will have powerful applications, including in cybersecurity, materials science, medical research and optimization.

Blazar Ton 599’s complex variability investigated by long-term observations

Using the Whole Earth Blazar Telescope (WEBT), an international team of astronomers have performed long-term photometric observations of a luminous blazar known as Ton 599. Results of the observations, published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal, shed more light on the optical variability of this object.

Blazars are very compact quasi-stellar objects (quasars) associated with supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centers of active, giant elliptical galaxies. They are the most luminous and extreme subclass of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). The characteristic features of blazars are highly collimated relativistic jets oriented very close to our line of sight.

Based on their optical emission properties, astronomers generally divide blazars into two classes: flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) that feature prominent and broad optical emission lines, and BL Lacertae objects (BL Lacs), which do not.

New framework unifies space and time in quantum systems

Quantum mechanics and relativity are the two pillars of modern physics. However, for over a century, their treatment of space and time has remained fundamentally disconnected. Relativity unifies space and time into a single fabric called spacetime, describing it seamlessly. In contrast, traditional quantum theory employs different languages: quantum states (density matrix) for spatial systems and quantum channels for temporal evolution.

A recent breakthrough by Assistant Professor Seok Hyung Lie from the Department of Physics at UNIST offers a way to describe quantum correlations across both space and time within a single, unified framework. Assistant Professor Lie is first author, with Professor James Fullwood from Hainan University serving as the corresponding author. Their collaboration creates new tools that could significantly impact future studies in quantum science and beyond. The study has been published in Physical Review Letters.

In this study, the team developed a new theoretical approach that treats the entire timeline as one quantum state. This concept introduces what they call the multipartite quantum states over time. In essence, it allows us to describe quantum processes at different points in time as parts of a single, larger quantum state. This means that both spatially separated systems and systems separated in time can be analyzed using the same mathematical language.

Electrons that lag behind nuclei in 2D materials could pave way for novel electronics

One of the great successes of 20th-century physics was the quantum mechanical description of solids. This allowed scientists to understand for the first time how and why certain materials conduct electric current and how these properties could be purposefully modified. For instance, semiconductors such as silicon could be used to produce transistors, which revolutionized electronics and made modern computers possible.

To be able to mathematically capture the complex interplay between electrons and atomic nuclei and their motions in a solid, physicists had to make some simplifications. They assumed, for example, that the light electrons in an atom follow the motion of the much heavier atomic nuclei in a crystal lattice without any delay. For several decades, this Born-Oppenheimer approximation worked well.

Researchers build plasma accelerator that boosts electron energy and brightness at the same time

Researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), have designed innovative technology that can generate both high-energy and high-brightness electron bunches in an accelerator that is a fraction of the size of current particle accelerators.

This breakthrough has the potential to shrink the size of future particle colliders and X-ray free-electron lasers that researchers use to gain insight into nature’s fundamental building blocks and processes.

In the new study, the UCLA-led team developed a novel plasma wakefield accelerator (PWFA), in which electrons gain energy by “surfing” a plasma wave rather than drawing energy from the electromagnetic field inside metal structures of conventional accelerators.

‘Pocket-type’ high-temperature superconducting coil achieves 44.86 tesla combined magnetic field

A research team led by Kuang Guangli and Jiang Donghui at the High Magnetic Field Laboratory of the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CHMFL), has developed a “pocket-type” high-temperature superconducting (HTS) coil, achieving a record combined magnetic field of 44.86 tesla.

The coil, wound using domestically produced REBa₂Cu₃O₇₋ₓ (REBCO) tapes, generated 28.20 T at zero field in a liquid helium bath and produced an additional 10.36 T inside the 34.5 T steady-state magnetic field of the WM5 water-cooled magnet.

Steady high magnetic fields are critical for frontier research in materials science, physics, and biology, enabling scientists to observe new phenomena and explore new laws of matter. REBCO high-temperature superconducting material has become one of the optimal choices for developing devices that generate higher magnetic fields, owing to its high current-carrying capacity and favorable mechanical properties.

Error-correction technology to turn quantum computing into real-world power

Ripples spreading across a calm lake after raindrops fall—and the way ripples from different drops overlap and travel outward—is one image that helps us picture how a quantum computer handles information.

Unlike conventional computers, which process digital data as “0 or 1,” quantum computers can process information in an in-between state where it is “both 0 and 1.” These quantum states behave like waves: they can overlap, reinforcing one another or canceling one another out. In computations that exploit this property, states that lead to the correct answer are amplified, while states that lead to wrong answers are suppressed.

Thanks to this interference between waves, a quantum computer can sift through many candidate answers at once. Our everyday computers take time because they evaluate each candidate one by one. Quantum computers, by contrast, can narrow down the answer in a single sweep—earning them the reputation of “dream machines” that could solve in an instant problem that might take hundreds of years on today’s computers.

Worms as particle sweepers: How simple movement, not intelligence, drives environmental order

When observing small worms under a microscope, one might observe something very surprising: the worms appear to make a sweeping motion to clean their own environment. Physicists at the University of Amsterdam, Georgia Tech and Sorbonne Université/CNRS have now discovered the reason for this unexpected behavior.

When centimeter-long aquatic worms, such as T. tubifex or Lumbriculus variegatus, are placed in a Petri dish filled with sub-millimeter-sized sand particles, something surprising happens. Over time, the worms begin to spontaneously clean up their surroundings. They sweep particles into compact clusters, gradually reshaping and organizing their environment.

In a study that was published in Physical Review X this week, a team of researchers show that this remarkable sweeping behavior does not require a brain, or any kind of complex interaction between the worms and the particles. Instead, it emerges from the natural undulating motion and flexibility that the worms possess.

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