An instrument that uses high-energy electrons to take "snapshots" of ultrafast chemical processes at the atomic and molecular level just got a major upgrade. Researchers have conducted the first experiment using a new detector, installed in the megaelectronvolt ultrafast electron diffraction (MeV-UED) instrument, at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
The electrons that power our society flow left and right through the circuitry in our electronics, back and forth along the transmission lines that make up our power grid, and up and down to light up every floor of every building. But the electrons in newly discovered "moiré crystals" move in much stranger ways. They can move left and right, back and forth, or up and down in our three-dimensional world, but these electrons also act as if they can teleport in and out of a mysterious fourth dimension of space that is perpendicular to our perceivable reality.
Quantum mechanics tells us that a particle can never be perfectly still. But how precisely can it be oriented? A research team at the University of Vienna, together with colleagues at TU Wien and Ulm University, has now cooled the rotational motion of a levitated silica nanorotor all the way to its quantum ground state—in two orientational degrees of freedom.
Most people think of diamonds as high-end adornments. Not Ania Bleszynski Jayich. The UC Santa Barbara physicist sees diamonds, which she grows in the UC Quantum Foundry, as a potentially powerful foundation for quantum sensors. Sensors are currently much farther along in their development than other potential quantum applications. Diamond sensors are particularly promising because diamonds require relatively few quantum bits (qubits) to operate, whereas a quantum computer, for instance, requires more than 100,000, perhaps as many as a million, qubits to handle error correction, one of the main hurdles for quantum computing.
The doctoral thesis of Sophia Hollick, Ph.D. '25, a recent graduate of Yale's Wright Lab in professor Reina Maruyama's group, has significantly contributed to answering a decades-long question in her field about whether or not a signal observed in an experiment that has taken data since 1997 was indicative of a direct detection of dark matter. The results of her analysis, which have excluded the dark matter explanation with greater confidence, were published in Physics Review Letters in the article "Combined Annual Modulation Dark Matter Search with COSINE-100 and ANAIS-112."
Materials that repel water are used in countless applications, including industrial separation processes, routine laboratory pipetting, and medical devices. When water touches these surfaces, the interface where they meet tends to acquire a small electrical charge—an effect that is ubiquitous, yet poorly understood. KAUST researchers have now studied this in detail and their findings could have broad implications. The findings are published in the journal Langmuir.
Mid-circuit measurements are one of the biggest practical hurdles in quantum error correction on encoded qubits. Researchers in Innsbruck and Aachen have now proposed and experimentally demonstrated that a universal fault-tolerant quantum algorithm can be executed without such measurements. Using a trapped-ion quantum processor, the team successfully ran Grover's quantum search algorithm on three logical qubits.
Near-infrared spectroscopy, or fNIRS, offers a way to monitor brain activity without surgery or radiation by tracking changes in blood flow and oxygenation. Light sources placed on the scalp send near-infrared light into the head, and detectors measure the light that scatters back. Because this light must pass through the scalp and skull before reaching the brain, the measured signal always includes a mix of superficial and cerebral contributions. Separating those signals has long been a central challenge for fNIRS researchers.
In a new Nature Physics publication, University of Amsterdam researchers introduce human-made materials that spring to life. These 'metamaterials' don't just learn to change shape, but can autonomously adapt their shape-changing strategy, perform reflex actions and move around like living systems do.
Nearly every object we interact with in our lives has a mass, but where does this mass come from? Modern physics says matter acquires its mass from interaction with a physical vacuum—it is not an empty space, but contains a complex structure. Investigating the system of a meson—a composite particle made of a quark, an elementary particle, and its anti-matter, anti-quark—bound to an atomic nucleus, a mesic nucleus, provides precious insight into the vacuum structure, or mass generation mechanism. Scientists are now one step closer to further understanding the origin of mass thanks to new experimental results on a completely new type of mesic nucleus.
When fundamental particles are heavier or lighter than expected, physicists' understanding of the universe can tip into the unknown. A particle that is just beyond its predicted mass can unravel scientists' assumptions about the forces that make up all of matter and space. But now, a new precision measurement has reset the balance and confirmed scientists' theories, at least for one of the universe's core building blocks.
Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have reported important progress in quantum physics and materials science by optically initializing, controlling, and reading out nuclear spin states in a molecular material for the first time. Because of their weak interaction with the environment, nuclear spins are particularly stable quantum information carriers. The research, published in Nature Materials, shows that molecular nuclear spins could be a promising building block for future quantum technologies.
A new analysis reveals what happens when very short or narrow electron beams encounter a particle. The research is published in the New Journal of Physics. Scientists should be able to achieve a new level of control over high-energy electrons interacting with a particle, according to the theoretical analysis by a RIKEN physicist and two colleagues.
For years, Rutgers physicist David Shih solved Rubik's Cubes with his children, twisting the colorful squares until the scrambled puzzle returned to order. He didn't expect the toy to connect to his research, but recently he realized the logic behind the puzzle was exactly what he needed to solve a problem involving particle physics.
Researchers at ETH Zurich have realized particularly stable quantum logical operations with qubits made of neutral atoms. Since these operations, called quantum gates, are based on geometric phases, they are extremely robust against experimental noise and can be used in quantum computers in the future.
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