Artificial intelligence assists quantum metrology for greater efficiency with an innovative model-free learning algorithm. Quantum sensing represents one of the most promising applications of quantum technologies, with the aim of using quantum resources to improve measurement sensitivity. In particular, sensing of optical phases is one of the most investigated problems, considered key to developing mass-produced technological devices. Optimal usage of quantum sensors requires regular characterization and calibration. In general, such calibration is an extremely complex and resource-intensive task — especially…

Astronomers from the University of Sheffield have found a new ring system in our Solar System. A new ring system discovered in our Solar System Astronomers from the University of Sheffield have found a new ring system in our Solar System The rings are around Quaoar, which is a Pluto-sized dwarf planet orbiting beyond Neptune Quaoar’s rings are unique, orbiting much further away from the planet than the rings around Saturn, posing a challenge to ring formation theories The discovery…

Research offers a new approach to studying complex light in complex systems, such as transporting classical and quantum light through optical fiber, underwater channels, living tissue and other highly aberrated systems. An exciting prospect in modern optics is to exploit “patterns of light”, how the light looks in its many degrees of freedom, often referred to as structured light. Each pattern could form an encoding alphabet for optical communication or might be used in manufacturing to enhance performance and productivity. Unfortunately,…

High-pressure study solves 60-year-old mystery. For the first time, researchers have recorded live and in atomic detail what happens to the material in an asteroid impact. The team of Falko Langenhorst from the University of Jena and Hanns-Peter Liermann from DESY simulated an asteroid impact with the mineral quartz in the lab and pursued it in slow motion in a diamond anvil cell, while monitoring it with DESY’s X-ray source PETRA III. The observation reveals an intermediate state in quartz…

New research demonstrates feasibility of photon-number doubling with a lithium-niobate-on-insulator (LNOI) platform. Can quantum optics be used for practical applications? A lot depends on whether a large number of photons can be gathered in quantum state. Among all quantum systems, photons are known for their weak interaction, which allows long coherence time to be achieved even at room temperature, making them suitable for transmitting quantum bits (also known as “qubits”) between distant locations. However, the weak interaction of photons restricts…

On a cold winter day, the warmth of the sun is welcome. Yet as humanity emits more greenhouse gases, the Earth’s atmosphere traps more and more of the sun’s energy, which steadily increases the Earth’s temperature. One strategy for reversing this trend is to intercept a fraction of sunlight before it reaches our planet. For decades, scientists have considered using screens or other objects to block just enough of the sun’s radiation — between 1 or 2 percent — to mitigate…

… that can solve big challenges of our time. Universal of Sussex and Universal Quantum scientists have, for the first time, connected quantum microchips together, like a jigsaw puzzle, to make powerful quantum computers and with record breaking connection speed and accuracy. Researchers from the University of Sussex and Universal Quantum have demonstrated for the first time that quantum bits (qubits) can directly transfer between quantum computer microchips and demonstrated this with record-breaking speed and accuracy.  This breakthrough resolves a…

In a recently published article in the leading physics journal “Nature Physics”, a team of researchers with the participation of the University of Augsburg reports about unexpectedly universal correlations between the thermal expansion and the glass-transition temperature of glass-forming materials, providing new insights into the complex nature of the transition from the liquid into the solid glass. Glasses are solid materials, however lacking the crystalline structure with a regular arrangement of the atoms that is typical for conventional solids. The…

A new study shows how large language models like GPT-3 can learn a new task from just a few examples, without the need for any new training data. Large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 are massive neural networks that can generate human-like text, from poetry to programming code. Trained using troves of internet data, these machine-learning models take a small bit of input text and then predict the text that is likely to come next. But that’s not all these…

Roughly 500 million light-years away, near the constellation Delphinus, two galaxies are colliding. Known as merging galaxy IIZw096, this luminous phenomenon is obscured by cosmic dust, but researchers first identified a bright, energetic source of light 12 years ago. Now, with a more advanced telescope — the James Webb Space Telescope that started its observations in July 2022 — the team has pinpointed the precise location of what they have dubbed the “engine” of the merging galaxy. They published their…

Engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, have finished testing the high-gain antenna for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. When it launches by May 2027, this NASA observatory will help unravel the secrets of dark energy and dark matter, search for and image exoplanets, and explore many topics in infrared astrophysics. Pictured above in a test chamber, the antenna will provide the primary communication link between the Roman spacecraft and the ground. It will downlink the…

The security of digital identities is threatened by future quantum technologies. In the hands of attackers, quantum computers will be able to break classical encryption methods. To fend off such attacks, four partners launched the Quant-ID project. In this project, they are researching the development of novel methods and systems that guarantee cryptographic security in the long term based on quantum random numbers and post-quantum cryptography. Highly critical areas, such as government institutions, banks or insurance companies, will thus receive…

Compact silicon photonic computing engine computes tiled matrix multiplication at a record-high 50 GHz clock frequency. “All things are numbers,” avowed Pythagoras. Today, 25 centuries later, algebra and mathematics are everywhere in our lives, whether we see them or not. The Cambrian-like explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) brought numbers even closer to us all, since technological evolution allows for parallel processing of a vast amounts of operations. Progressively, operations between scalars (numbers) were parallelized into operations between vectors and, subsequently,…

Trapped ions have previously only been entangled in one and the same laboratory. Now, teams led by Tracy Northup and Ben Lanyon from the University of Innsbruck have entangled two ions over a distance of 230 meters. The nodes of this network were housed in two labs at the Campus Technik to the west of Innsbruck, Austria. The experiment shows that trapped ions are a promising platform for future quantum networks that span cities and eventually continents. Trapped ions are…

Physicists using advanced muon spin spectroscopy at Paul Scherrer Institute PSI make the missing link between their recent breakthrough in a kagome metal and unconventional superconductivity. The team uncovered an unconventional superconductivity that can be tuned with pressure, giving exciting potential for engineering quantum materials. A year ago, a group of physicists led by PSI detected evidence of an unusual collective electron behaviour in a kagome metal, known as time-reversal symmetry-breaking charge order – a discovery that was published in…

A study of the upper atmosphere’s composition has successfully measured an increased presence of 18O, a heavier oxygen issotope with 10 instead of eight neutrons. Helmut Wiesemeyer (MPIfR Bonn) and his colleagues have measured the 18O fraction of the upper mesosphere/lower thermosphere for the first time, using the GREAT instrument aboard SOFIA and found that the upper atmosphere has an 18O fraction close to that of the lower atmosphere. A better understanding to what extent biological effects permeate Earth’s atmosphere…