An international team of physicists has achieved a significant advance in laser science, demonstrating for the first time a practical route to dramatically boosting the intensity of high-power laser light.
One of the biggest open questions in particle physics today is how the Higgs boson interacts with itself. This "self-coupling" could help explain the evolution of the early universe and the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles. To try to shed light on this fundamental interaction, the ATLAS Collaboration has recently studied one of the "golden" decay channels of a pair of Higgs bosons, where one Higgs boson decays into two photons and the other into a pair of bottom quarks.
When you throw a ball in the air, the equations of classical physics will tell you exactly what path the ball will take as it falls, and when and where it will land. But if you were to squeeze that same ball down to the size of an atom or smaller, it would behave in ways beyond anything that classical physics can predict.
A new method developed at LMU overcomes fundamental resolution limits and may provide insights into high-temperature superconductivity. Physicist Dr. Sebastian Paeckel has developed a method that can be used to calculate spectral functions of complex quantum systems much more precisely than was possible previously. His approach reconstructs precise energy spectra without requiring lengthy calculations.
It was a head-spinning discovery. In 2018, researchers in Japan claimed to find concrete evidence of an elusive particle, a Majorana fermion, in a quantum spin liquid called ruthenium trichloride. Majoranas are highly sought-after by quantum materials scientists because when a pair are localized, or trapped, they can securely encode information and form a stable qubit—the building block of quantum computing.
Researchers in the US and Germany have unveiled a theoretical blueprint for an atomic clock driven by a highly synchronized laser, where atoms work in concert rather than independently. Publishing their results in Physical Review Letters, Jarrod Reilly at the University of Colorado, Simon Jäger at the University of Bonn, and their colleagues in the US and Germany revived an idea first proposed in the 1990s—possibly charting a course toward the narrowest-linewidth lasers ever achieved.
Quantum computers, devices that process information leveraging quantum mechanical effects, could tackle some tasks that are difficult or impossible to solve using classical computers. These systems represent data as qubits, units of information that can exist in multiple states at once, unlike the bits used by classical computers that represent data using binary values ("0" or "1").
Semiconductor spin qubits are a promising candidate for the building blocks of next-generation quantum computers due to their high potential for integration and compatibility with existing semiconductor technologies. Qubits—like the 0s and 1s of a traditional computer—serve as a basic unit of information for quantum computers. However, the practical realization of these computers requires a massive number of qubits, making the development of more efficient adjustment methods a critical challenge for the field.
The most demanding calculations in quantum chemistry can now be solved with graphics processing unit (GPU) supercomputers. A recently published study shows that software adapted to use GPU hardware can provide not just speed, but also the accuracy needed to solve complex chemistry problems. The work solved the two chemical structures often seen as too complex and expensive to tackle. The advance, published in the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, could allow researchers to make meaningful progress in designing new catalysts and improve predicted behaviors of magnetic and electronic materials.
In materials science, if you can understand the "texture" of a material—how its internal patterns form and shift—you can begin to design how it behaves. That's the focus of the work of Zhenglu Li, assistant professor in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Li's recently published paper in PNAS, titled "Moiré excitons in generalized Wigner crystals," demonstrates that the way electrons organize themselves inside a material determines how that material responds to light—and how this organization can be engineered.
A novel approach for realizing the one-way quantum synchronization of phonons has been proposed by three theoretical physicists at RIKEN. Importantly, this method is remarkably resilient against practical challenges such as imperfections and environmental noise. Their paper, "Nonreciprocal quantum synchronization," is published in Nature Communications.
Three RIKEN researchers have demonstrated a way to stop problematic "dark modes" from squelching intriguing effects in quantum systems. This advance could help with the development of more versatile quantum devices that can be used to control the storage and transmission of quantum information. The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.
The detection and study of isotopes, atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons, could expand the scope of physics research and enable new scientific discoveries. So far, rare isotopes have been primarily detected using a technique known as accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS), which accelerates atoms, to then measure their mass and charge.
A study by University of Wollongong (UOW) physicist Dr. Enbang Li has demonstrated that gravity can subtly influence the behavior of light, a breakthrough that could underpin future technologies for monitoring groundwater, tracking glacier melt, locating mineral deposits and detecting underground changes linked to volcanic activity and carbon storage.
Some innovations in physics come from entirely new technologies, others from fresh theoretical insights. Others still take shape by bringing together existing tools in new ways, working out how to combine them to outperform other solutions. The branch of particle physics that studies weakly interacting particles—such as neutrinos and some types of dark-matter candidates—could use innovative detection approaches: technological challenges in this research area quickly become practical as well as economic, as increases in detector volume and spatial resolution improve the sensitivity to the processes producing the particles of interest. Similarly, demanding targets on instrument capability apply to the calorimeters used in collider experiments.
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