… dubbed the Enchilada. Sandia Labs produces its first devices capable of supporting 200 trapped ion qubits. Sandia National Laboratories has produced its first lot of a new world-class ion trap, a central component for certain quantum computers. The new device, dubbed the Enchilada Trap, enables scientists to build more powerful machines to advance the experimental but potentially revolutionary field of quantum computing. In addition to traps operated at Sandia, several traps will be used at Duke University for performing…

Researchers contact single graphene nanoribbons. Quantum technology is promising, but also perplexing. In the coming decades, it is expected to provide us with various technological breakthroughs: smaller and more precise sensors, highly secure communication networks, and powerful computers that can help develop new drugs and materials, control financial markets, and predict the weather much faster than current computing technology ever could. To achieve this, we need so-called quantum materials: substances that exhibit pronounced quantum physical effects. One such material is…

They used diamond crystal mirrors to make X-ray pulses run laps inside a vacuum chamber, demonstrating a key process needed for future generations of performance-enhanced X-ray lasers. Researchers have announced an important step in the development of a next-gen technology for making X-ray free-electron laser pulses brighter and more stable: They used precisely aligned mirrors made of high-quality synthetic diamond to steer X-ray laser pulses around a rectangular racetrack inside a vacuum chamber. Setups like these are at the heart…

Researchers in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science have developed a method that uses artificial intelligence to augment how cells are studied and could help scientists better understand and eventually treat disease. Images of organ or tissue samples contain millions of cells. And while analyzing these cells in situ is an important part of biological research, such images make it nearly impossible to identify individual cells, determine their function and understand their organization. A technique called spatial transcriptomics brings…

A team of scientists from Ames National Laboratory and Texas A&M University developed a new way to predict metal ductility. This quantum-mechanics-based approach fills a need for an inexpensive, efficient, high-throughput way to predict ductility. The team demonstrated its effectiveness on refractory multi-principal-element alloys. These are materials of interest for use in high-temperature conditions, however, they frequently lack necessary ductility for potential applications in aerospace, fusion reactors, and land-based turbines. Ductility describes how well a material can withstand physical strain…

…these electromagnetic waves had head-on collisions. A research team at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) has shown that it is possible to manipulate photons so that they can collide, interacting in new ways as they cross paths. The discovery, detailed in Nature Physics, will allow scientists who develop technologies rooted in electromagnetic wave propagation to make significant advances in telecommunications, optical computing and energy applications. The breakthrough took place in the lab of…

Over the past decade, scientists have made tremendous progress in generating quantum phenomena in mechanical systems. What seemed impossible only fifteen years ago has now become a reality, as researchers successfully create quantum states in macroscopic mechanical objects. By coupling these mechanical oscillators to light photons – known as “optomechanical systems”-, scientists have been able to cool them down to their lowest energy level close to the quantum limit, “squeeze them” to reduce their vibrations even further, and entangle them…

That the planet Mars had habitable surface environments early in its existence has been firmly established by the scientific community.  These environments provided water, energy sources, elements like carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, as well as critical catalytic transition metals associated with life as we know it. However, whether that potential stimulated further progression towards the independent evolution of life on Mars is unknown. A team of scientists comprised of Juergen Schieber, a Professor in the Department of Earth and…

Megastorms leave marks on Saturn’s atmosphere for centuries. The largest storm in the solar system, a 10,000-mile-wide anticyclone called the Great Red Spot, has decorated Jupiter’s surface for hundreds of years. A new study now shows that Saturn — though much blander and less colorful than Jupiter — also has long-lasting megastorms with impacts deep in the atmosphere that persist for centuries. The study was conducted by astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan, Ann…

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe executed a short maneuver on Aug. 3, 2023, that kept the spacecraft on track to hit the aim point for the mission’s sixth Venus flyby on Monday, Aug. 21, 2023. ​ Operating on preprogrammed commands from mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, Parker fired its small thrusters for 4.5 seconds, enough to adjust its trajectory by 77 miles and speed up – by 1.4 seconds – its closest approach…

MIT engineers developed a new way to create these arrays, by scaffolding quantum rods onto patterned DNA. Flat screen TVs that incorporate quantum dots are now commercially available, but it has been more difficult to create arrays of their elongated cousins, quantum rods, for commercial devices. Quantum rods can control both the polarization and color of light, to generate 3D images for virtual reality devices. Using scaffolds made of folded DNA, MIT engineers have come up with a new way…

…explores uncharted territory in search of new physics. Scientists working on Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment released the world’s most precise measurement yet of the magnetic moment of the muon, bringing particle physics closer to the ultimate showdown between theory and experiment that may uncover new particles or forces. Physicists now have a brand-new measurement of a property of the muon called the anomalous magnetic moment that improves the precision of their previous result by a factor of 2. An international…

Chip manufacturing, gravitational wave detectors and quantum computers could all benefit from better ways to measure a vacuum. A vacuum chamber is never perfectly empty. A small number of atoms or molecules always remain, and measuring the tiny pressures they exert is critical. For instance, semiconductor manufacturers create microchips in vacuum chambers that must be almost entirely devoid of atomic and molecular contaminants, and so they need to monitor the gas pressure in the chamber to ensure that the contaminant…

“As a cellular network researcher, you are in some ways a prisoner of your geographic position,” says CISPA researcher Dr. Adrian Dabrowski. Because of the large number of providers and networks, cellular network researchers have so far only been able to carry out tests and measurements in foreign cellular networks at immense expense. Together with Gabriel Gegenhuber from the University of Vienna and other research colleagues, Dabrowski has therefore developed MOBILEATLAS, a kind of infrastructure that allows testing from any…

A classic movie was once promoted with the punchline: ”In space, no one can hear you scream”. Physicists Zhuoran Geng and Ilari Maasilta from the Nanoscience Center at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, have demonstrated, on the contrary, that in certain situations sound can be transmitted strongly across a vacuum region! In a recent publication they show that in some cases a sound wave can jump or “tunnel” fully across a vacuum gap between two solids if the materials in…

Dr. Jaeyeon Pyo’s team at KERI developed a method for printing structural colors through nanoscale 3D printing of diffraction gratings, selected as a cover article for ACS Nano. The world’s first 3D printing technology that can be used in transparent displays and AR devices has been developed, which implements the physical phenomenon of chameleon’s changing skin color or peacock’s beautiful feather color. Dr. Jaeyeon Pyo’s team at KERI has succeeded in realizing a three-dimensional diffraction grating that can precisely control…