The quantum ground state of an acoustic wave of a certain frequency can be reached by completely cooling the system. In this way, the number of quantum particles, the so-called acoustic phonons, which cause disturbance to quantum measurements, can be reduced to almost zero and the gap between classical and quantum mechanics bridged. Over the past decade, major technological advances have been made, making it possible to put a wide variety of systems into this state. Mechanical vibrations oscillating between…

Large, all-glass metalens images sun, moon and nebulae. Metalenses have been used to image microscopic features of tissue and resolve details smaller than a wavelength of light. Now they are going bigger. Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a 10-centimeter-diameter glass metalens that can image the sun, the moon and distant nebulae with high resolution. It is the first all-glass, large-scale metalens in the visible wavelength that can be mass…

Researchers at the University of Basel have built a quantum memory element based on atoms in a tiny glass cell. In the future, such quantum memories could be mass-produced on a wafer. It is hard to imagine our lives without networks such as the internet or mobile phone networks. In the future, similar networks are planned for quantum technologies that will enable the tap-proof transmission of messages using quantum cryptography and make it possible to connect quantum computers to each…

A team at TU Wien has developed a “quantum ping-pong”: Using a special lens, two atoms can be made to bounce a single photon back and forth with high precision. Atoms can absorb and reemit light – this is an everyday phenomenon. In most cases, however, an atom emits a light particle in all possible directions – recapturing this photon is therefore quite hard. A research team from TU Wien in Vienna (Austria) has now been able to demonstrate theoretically…

An experiment outlined by a UCL-led team could test whether relatively large masses have a quantum nature, resolving the question of whether quantum mechanical description works at a much larger scale than that of particles and atoms. An experiment outlined by a UCL (University College London)-led team of scientists from the UK and India could test whether relatively large masses have a quantum nature, resolving the question of whether quantum mechanical description works at a much larger scale than that…

Ocean Networks Canada, an initiative of the University of Victoria, will extend its ocean monitoring outside Canadian waters. Canadian and European experts in polar observation are joining forces in a new partnership that will see Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) operating a subsea observatory at the Spanish Antarctic Station, providing year-round, near real-time data on ocean conditions there. This is the first time that ONC will extend its ocean monitoring outside Canadian waters. This partnership between ONC, a University of Victoria initiative, and…

Water enables a supercontinuum white laser covering an impressive spectral range. Scientists are making significant strides in the development of ultrabroadband white laser sources, covering a wide spectrum from ultraviolet to far infrared. These lasers find applications in diverse fields such as large-scale imaging, femto-chemistry, telecommunications, laser spectroscopy, sensing, and ultrafast sciences. However, the pursuit faces challenges, particularly in the selection of appropriate nonlinear mediums. Traditional solid materials, while efficient, are prone to optical damage under high peak power conditions….

A discovery from an experiment with magnets and lasers could be a boon to energy-efficient data storage. “We wanted to study the physics of light-magnet interaction,” said Rahul Jangid, who led the data analysis for the project while earning his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering at UC Davis under associate professor Roopali Kukreja. “What happens when you hit a magnetic domain with very short pulses of laser light?” Domains are areas within a magnet that flip from north to south…

…with successes and lessons. One year ago, Caltech’s Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1) launched into space to demonstrate and test three technological innovations that are among those necessary to make space solar power a reality. The spaceborne testbed demonstrated the ability to beam power wirelessly in space; it measured the efficiency, durability, and function of a variety of different types of solar cells in space; and gave a real-world trial of the design of a lightweight deployable structure to deliver and…

The precise control of electron beams in so-called transmission electron microscopes (TEM) makes it possible to analyze materials or molecules at the atomic level. Combined with short light pulses, these devices can also be used to analyze dynamic processes. Researchers from Göttingen and Switzerland have now shown for the first time how electrons can distinguish complex light states in a microscopic light storage in a TEM. How can we use light to store information? Or utilize it to transmit data…

By capturing more detailed thermal information, new approach could be useful for autonomous navigation, material identification, security and more. Researchers have developed a new technology that uses meta-optical devices to perform thermal imaging. The approach provides richer information about imaged objects, which could broaden the use of thermal imaging in fields such as autonomous navigation, security, thermography, medical imaging and remote sensing. “Our method overcomes the challenges of traditional spectral thermal imagers, which are often bulky and delicate due to…

Tidal disruption events and what they can reveal about black holes and stars in distant galaxies. At the center of most large galaxies lives a supermassive black hole (SMBH). The Milky Way has Sagittarius A*, a mostly dormant SMBH whose mass is around 4.3 million times that of the sun. But if you look deeper into the universe, there are vastly larger SMBHs with masses that can reach up to tens of billions of times the mass of our sun….

The first 3D map of magnetic fields in our galaxy explains star-forming regions. A team of astronomers including those from the University of Tokyo created the first-ever map of magnetic field structures within a spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. Previous studies on galactic magnetic fields only gave a very general picture, but the new study reveals that magnetic fields in the spiral arms of our galaxy break away from this general picture significantly and are tilted away from…

‘It’s a useful planet because it may be like an early Earth’ A team of astronomers have discovered a planet closer and younger than any other Earth-sized world yet identified. It’s a remarkably hot world whose proximity to our own planet and to a star like our sun mark it as a unique opportunity to study how planets evolve. Young, hot, Earth-sized planet HD 63433d sits close to its star in the constellation Ursa Major, while two neighboring, mini-Neptune-sized planets…

Astronomers analyzing 13 years of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have found an unexpected and as yet unexplained feature outside of our galaxy. “It is a completely serendipitous discovery,” said Alexander Kashlinsky, a cosmologist at the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, who presented the research at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans. “We found a much stronger signal, and in a different part of the sky, than the one we were looking for.” Intriguingly, the…

When light goes through a material, it often behaves in unpredictable ways. This phenomenon is the subject of an entire field of study called “nonlinear optics”, which is now integral to technological and scientific advances from laser development and optical frequency metrology, to gravitational wave astronomy and quantum information science. In addition, recent years have seen nonlinear optics applied in optical signal processing, telecommunications, sensing, spectroscopy, light detection and ranging. All these applications involve the miniaturization of devices that manipulate…