Physicists have long suspected that dielectric materials may significantly disrupt ion-trap quantum computers. Now, researchers led by Tracy Northup have developed a new method to quantify this source of error for the first time. For the future operation of quantum computers with very many quantum bits, such noise sources need to be eliminated already during the design process if possible. Quantum technologies are based on quantum properties of light, electrons, and atoms. In recent decades, scientists have learned to master…
Four planets locked in a perfect rhythm around a nearby star are destined to be pinballed around their solar system when their sun eventually dies, according to a study led by the University of Warwick that peers into its future. Astronomers from University of Warwick and University of Exeter modelling the future of unusual planetary system found a solar system of planets that will ‘pinball’ off one another Today, the system consists of four massive planets locked in a perfect…
Laser-produced high energy density plasmas, akin to those found in stars, nuclear explosions, and the core of giant planets, may be the most extreme state of matter created on Earth. Now scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), building on nearly a decade of collaboration with the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), have designed a novel X-ray crystal spectrometer to provide high-resolution measurements of a challenging feature…
The field of ultrafast nonlinear photonics has now become the focus of numerous studies, as it enables a host of applications in advanced on-chip spectroscopy and information processing. The latter in particular requires a strongly intensity-dependent optical refractive index that can modulate optical pulses faster than even picosecond timescales and on sub-millimeter scales suitable for integrated photonics. Despite the tremendous progress made in this field, there is currently no platform providing such features for the ultraviolet (UV) spectral range, which…
Holographic ‘movie’ of bubbles and high-pressure shockwave created by research team led by Göttingen University. Everyone is familiar with tiny gas bubbles gently rising up in sparkling water. But the bubbles that were created by intense focused lasers in this experiment were ten times smaller and contained water vapour at a pressure around a hundred thousand times higher. Under these conditions, the bubble expands at supersonic speed and pushes a shockwave, consisting of a spherical shell of highly compressed water,…
Artificial intelligence spots coronal holes to automate space weather. Scientists from the University of Graz (Austria), Skoltech and their colleagues from the US and Germany have developed a new neural network that can reliably detect coronal holes from space-based observations. This application paves the way for more reliable space weather predictions and provides valuable information for the study of the solar activity cycle. The paper was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Much like our life on Earth depends…
Understanding how magnetic correlations change over very short timescales could be harnessed to control magnetism for applications including data storage and superconductivity. What happens when very short pulses of laser light strike a magnetic material? A large international collaboration led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory set out to answer this very question. As they just reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the laser suppressed magnetic order across the entire material for…
Light trapped in a cavity can be used to create a new kind of particle in a solid, consisting of three components at once: light (photons), electronic excitations (excitons) and lattice vibrations (phonons). The use of trapped light represents a completely new way to change the behavior of a material by introducing new interactions between its microscopic components. These findings by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure of Matter (MPSD) in Hamburg, Germany, and the Massachusetts Institute…
Study provides new tools to probe novel spintronic devices. Like all metals, silver, copper, and gold are conductors. Electrons flow across them, carrying heat and electricity. While gold is a good conductor under any conditions, some materials have the property of behaving like metal conductors only if temperatures are high enough; at low temperatures, they act like insulators and do not do a good job of carrying electricity. In other words, these unusual materials go from acting like a chunk…
Novel crystalline form of silicon could potentially be used to create next-generation electronic and energy devices. A team led by Carnegie’s Thomas Shiell and Timothy Strobel developed a new method for synthesizing a novel crystalline form of silicon with a hexagonal structure that could potentially be used to create next-generation electronic and energy devices with enhanced properties that exceed those of the “normal” cubic form of silicon used today. Their work is published in Physical Review Letters. Silicon plays an…
Scientists found a new and promising qubit at a place where there is nothing. In the world of quantum mechanics, researchers can even make empty space, the lack of something, do their bidding. Scientists from the Katsaros group at the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria together with an international team of researchers have now created a new setup to control the absence of electrons in a solid material. They want to use these holes as a basis for…
This striking image showcases the unusually contorted appearance of NGC 2276, an appearance caused by two different astrophysical interactions — one with the superheated gas pervading galaxy clusters, and one with a nearby galactic neighbour. The interaction of NGC 2276 with the intracluster medium — the superheated gas lying between the galaxies in galaxy clusters — has ignited a burst of star formation along one edge of the galaxy. This wave of star formation is visible as the bright, blue-tinged…
The quasi-quantized Hall effect is a three-dimensional relative of the Quantum Hall effect in two-dimensional systems. The quantum Hall effect traditionally only plays a role in two-dimensional electron systems. Recently, however, a three-dimensional version of the quantum Hall effect was described in the Dirac semimetal ZrTe5. It has been suggested that this version results from a magnetic field-induced Fermi surface instability that transforms the original three-dimensional electron system into a stack of two-dimensional electron systems. Now scientists at the Max…
Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) Collaboration directly observed a spectral softening of helium nuclei at about 34TeV for the first time. This work was based on measurements data of the helium spectrum with kinetic energies from 70 GeV to 80 TeV (17.5 GeV/n to 20 TeV/n for per nucleon) recorded by the DAMPE. The relevant results were published in Physical Review Letters. Galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) offers important ways to deeply understand the astrophysical particle origin and accelerators and the…
Recently, the researchers from Institute of Solid State Physics, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, by using valence engineering, developed three manganese oxides as electrodes with different Mn valences for high-performance capacitive desalination. Reverse osmosis and thermal distillation are widely used to treat salt water with high salt concentration, but they have disadvantages including high energy consumption and high cost. As an alternative method, capacitive deionization (CDI) technology can remove charged ions from desalt…
A paper by Kazan Federal University saw light in Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter. The authors, Kirill Vasin and Mikhail Eremin, contribute to the theory of electronic and structural properties of FeCr2O4 ferrimagnet. Due to the specific quantum state and the symmetry of FeO4 fragment, it has unusual electric and magnetic properties. Below TOO~150K, it lowers the symmetry with the macroscopic deformations due to the cooperative Jahn-Teller effect. The coupling between macroscopic deformation of the crystal FeCr2O4 and its inner…
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