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New ‘hunter-killer’ chemistry captures and destroys forever chemicals

They can turn up in a nonstick frying pan, a waterproof jacket, a takeout food wrapper or the foam used to fight fires. Known as “forever chemicals,” these substances are ubiquitous in modern society, prized for their extreme durability and versatility. However, their charm comes with a curse: They are so durable they resist degradation, posing threats to human health and the environment.

Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, gained early widespread use in products such as Teflon, a coating that resists oil, heat, stains, grease and water. Today, they are everywhere, from paints and adhesives to furniture, carpets, cosmetics, semiconductors and waterproof fabrics. Unfortunately, they are also in our water, soil, food and even us.

Now, researchers at Arizona State University and their international colleagues are attacking the problem in a new way. Rather than filtering these harmful chemicals out of contaminated water, they have developed a technique to destroy them.

Normally forbidden emissions from graphene could expose quantum fluctuations in incoming light

Voltage fluctuations, light fluctuations, temperature fluctuations—any fluctuations are troublesome and thus undesirable. They don’t just cause discomfort; in engineering and medical applications, they affect the accuracy of measurements or introduce errors in controls. Even at the minute level of quantum phenomena, fluctuations are considered undesirable.

But what if some fluctuations can be made useful? A theoretical study from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) shows that structured quantum fluctuations in light can be used to sense and generate useful quantum optical signals.

Kartik Prabhu and professor Gopal Dixit of IIT Bombay’s Physics Department have proposed a new way to detect quantum fluctuations in light using the quantum material graphene as a sensor.

X-rays reveal surprisingly long-lived spin waves in copper oxide

Today’s computer technology, based on silicon chips, is slowly reaching its physical limits. Components cannot be miniaturized indefinitely, and clock speeds cannot be increased indefinitely. At the same time, huge AI data centers are being built in many places, and these consume an immense amount of electricity. This is why scientists around the world are searching for novel materials that can replace or complement silicon technology and consume significantly less electricity.

Using a combination of X-ray techniques, a research team at PSI has now been able to break down in detail the rapid interplay among different excitations in such a material—electronic, magnetic and lattice excitations.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Scientists redetermine a key strontium frequency with 50 times better precision for quantum technologies

The Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) has remeasured a key transition frequency of the strontium (Sr) atom for the first time in 88 years, since 1938, using a photonic grating chip. It has established a new absolute frequency value with a measurement uncertainty reduced by more than 50 times. By providing an accurate reference value for next-generation quantum technologies, this achievement is expected to contribute to the precise control and miniaturization of quantum devices, including atomic clocks and neutral-atom quantum computers. The work is published in the journal Metrologia.

Strontium is an atom widely used in precision quantum technologies such as optical lattice clocks and quantum sensors. To use strontium in these technologies, fast-moving atoms must be slowed down and trapped with precisely tuned lasers. This requires knowing the exact resonant frequency of the laser light for the atomic transition.

However, the previous frequency value was obtained in 1938 by comparing the solar spectrum with the arc light of strontium, and its uncertainty was too large for today’s precise laser frequency settings. As a result, researchers have had to observe the atoms’ response directly and adjust the laser frequency as needed, much like turning the dial of an analog radio to tune in to a station.

Physicists prove a long-suspected quantum speed limit for thermalization

Whether we are waiting for a car windshield to defrost in winter or a warm drink to cool down, how long it takes for an object to settle into a stable, even temperature within its environment (thermal equilibrium) depends on numerous factors. These can include surface area, the material properties of an object and airflow.

But when we zoom down to the subatomic scale, such as where qubits operate in a quantum computer, a different set of rules takes over. External conditions still matter, but according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Physics, quantum mechanics sets a fundamental speed limit on how quickly a process can bring different quantum systems into thermal equilibrium.

What makes the finding significant is that this boundary is universal. No matter how much energy is applied or how strongly a system is manipulated, the process cannot be forced to go any faster.

New monolithic ion trap opens quantum simulations to more researchers

Some quantum systems are so complex that even the most powerful supercomputers struggle to simulate their behavior. One solution is quantum simulation: building a controllable quantum system in the lab and tuning it to mimic the one researchers want to understand.

In a trapped-ion simulator, a row of individual charged atoms, or ions, is held in place by electric fields inside a device called an ion trap. Lasers are used to make the ions interact in a manner that simulates the quantum system, and then researchers measure the information encoded in the ions to reveal the system’s properties.

Rice University’s Guido Pagano, along with collaborators at Duke University and Translume Inc., has developed a new kind of trapped-ion simulator, called a monolithic segmented 3D ion trap. This trap allowed the team to study these complex systems using heavy ions like ytterbium.

Hybrid diamond chip strengthens interactions between light and quantum bits

Researchers have developed and demonstrated a new hybrid photonic platform that integrates quantum emitters with photonic devices, providing a way to reliably control the interaction between photons and quantum information carriers. The chip-based platform, which combines gallium phosphide (GaP) with a diamond substrate, could help make quantum networks more practical by providing a way to connect quantum devices over long distances.

Scaling up quantum technology to create communication networks requires connecting quantum memories, or qubits, over long distances. Although fiber-optic networks offer a promising way to do this using optical signals, a key challenge is reliably converting information stored in qubits into optical photons that can travel through the network.

“We show that our hybrid-integrated GaP-on-diamond nanophotonic platform can address this challenge by realizing reliably controlled interactions between photons and a type of qubit called a silicon-vacancy (SiV) center in diamond,” said the paper’s first author, Nicholas S. Yama from the University of Washington. “GaP also has strong nonlinear properties that enable optical frequency conversion, switching and modulation, all of which are needed for networking applications.”

A new way to detect stabilizing properties of optical devices

In optical fibers, chips and other light-guiding devices, minor defects can scatter photons and disrupt their path. A new study demonstrates a way to reveal properties which, in certain systems, help light wave behavior withstand such flaws. The method could help speed up the search for new kinds of electronics and optical technologies, and contribute to more reliable quantum devices.

Reporting in Physical Review Letters, researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology demonstrate a programmable chip that can detect and measure “topological properties,” or features of wave behavior that don’t change even when a system is altered.

KTH Associate Professor Ali Elshaari says understanding these properties can help devices keep working despite imperfections.

What Kills Schrödinger’s Cat? Scientists Just Ruled Out a 60-Year-Old Theory

Gravity has been proposed as a reason quantum superpositions become difficult to observe in everyday objects. A new experiment challenges one longstanding model of this process.

A detector buried deep beneath an Italian mountain has challenged a decades-old theory about why quantum behavior disappears from the world we experience. After 62 days of measurements, researchers found no trace of the faint radiation predicted by a model in which gravity disrupts quantum states. The result rules out this particular explanation while leaving open the possibility that gravity contributes to quantum decoherence.

Decoherence helps explain why particles can display unusual quantum behavior, such as existing in superpositions of different states, while everyday objects appear to follow classical physics. “One of the deepest questions in modern physics is why the strange quantum behavior that governs atoms and elementary particles seems to disappear in the macroscopic world we experience every day,” says Catalina Curceanu, director of research and spokesperson for the VIP Collaboration at the National Laboratory of Frascati of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN-LNF) in Italy.

Scientists Turn Ordinary Plastic Into Billions of Tiny Diamonds Using Powerful Lasers

Diamonds recovered from plastic contain roughly 3,000 atoms each and could be modified with other elements for future use in medical imaging.

Powerful lasers can turn plastic into tiny diamonds, but recovering the crystals means catching them as they shoot out at speeds comparable to a meteorite impact. Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and the University of Rostock have now collected those diamonds intact, showing that they survive the return from extreme pressure and temperature to ordinary conditions.

The recovered particles averaged three nanometers across, or three billionths of a meter, with roughly 3,000 carbon atoms in each diamond. The laser technique produces a combination of high purity, exceptionally small size, and closely matched particle sizes that conventional methods, including explosions, cannot achieve.