Theorists turn to supercomputers to help build a 3D picture of the structures of protons and neutrons. Deep inside what we perceive as solid matter, the landscape is anything but stationary. The interior of the building blocks of the atom’s nucleus — particles called hadrons that a high school student would recognize as protons and neutrons — are made up of a seething mixture of interacting quarks and gluons, known collectively as partons. A group of physicists has now come…
TU Wien (Vienna) has succeeded in generating laser-synchronised ion pulses with a duration of well under 500 picoseconds, which can be used to observe chemical processes on material surfaces. If you want to photograph something very fast, you need a camera with a very short exposure time. The same principle applies everywhere in physics: for example, extremely short laser pulses are used to visualise the processes that take place within atoms. However, it is not only laser pulses that provide…
A different qubit architecture could enable easier manufacturing of quantum computer building blocks without compromising performance. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have shown that a type of qubit whose architecture is more amenable to mass production can perform comparably to qubits currently dominating the field. With a series of mathematical analyses, the scientists have provided a roadmap for simpler qubit fabrication that enables robust and reliable manufacturing of these quantum computer building blocks. This…
Researchers from the Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat have developed a method to model a central theory of quantum gravity in the laboratory. Their goal: to decipher previously unexplained phenomena in the quantum world. Gravity is no longer a mystery to physicists – at least when it comes to large distances: thanks to science, we can calculate the orbits of planets, predict tides, and send rockets into space with precision. However, the theoretical description of gravity reaches its limits at the…
A research team led by Prof JIANG Bin from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) proposed a novel approach to accurately describe electron transfer mediated nonadiabatic dynamics of molecules at metal surfaces. Their works were published in Physical Review Letters. Numerous experimental phenomena have demonstrated that non-adiabatic energy transfer is widespread in various interfacial processes. Therefore, studying non-adiabatic energy transfer is crucial for understanding interfacial processes such as chemical adsorption, electrochemistry, and plasmonic catalysis. However,…
Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope to confirm that supermassive black holes can starve their host galaxies of the fuel they need to form new stars. The international team, co-led by the University of Cambridge, used Webb to observe a galaxy roughly the size of the Milky Way in the early universe, about two billion years after the Big Bang. Like most large galaxies, it has a supermassive black hole at its centre. However, this galaxy is…
A team of researchers of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) in Hamburg, Germany and Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States has demonstrated a new way to study disorder in superconductors using terahertz pulses of light. Adapting methods used in nuclear magnetic resonance to terahertz spectroscopy, the team was able to follow the evolution of disorder in the transport properties up to the superconducting transition temperature for the first time. The work by…
Two researchers at the University of Warsaw developed a quantum-inspired super-resolving spectrometer for short pulses of light. The device designed in the Quantum Optical Devices Lab at the Centre for Quantum Optical Technologies, Centre of New Technologies and Faculty of Physics UW offers over a two-fold improvement in resolution compared to standard approaches. In the future, it can be miniaturized on a photonic chip and applied in optical and quantum networks as well as in spectroscopic studies of matter. The…
An international team of researchers has found a surprisingly simple relationship between the rates of energy and information transmission across an interface connecting two quantum field theories. Their work was published in Physical Review Letters on August 30. The interface between different quantum field theories is an important concept that arises in a variety of problems in particle physics and condensed matter physics. However, it has been difficult to calculate the transmission rates of energy and information across interfaces. Hirosi…
How “Big Algebra” could connect quantum physics and number theory. Several fields of mathematics have developed in total isolation, using their own ‘undecipherable’ coded languages. In a new study published in PNAS, Tamás Hausel, professor of mathematics at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), presents “big algebras,” a two-way mathematical ‘dictionary’ between symmetry, algebra, and geometry, that could strengthen the connection between the distant worlds of quantum physics and number theory. Big algebra surface and skeleton. The trident…
Hundreds of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have been recorded as part of an enormous global effort so extensive it “rivals the catalogue of deep-sky objects created by Messier 250 years ago”, astronomers say. GRBs are the most violent explosions in the Universe, releasing more energy than the Sun would in 10 billion years. They occur when either a massive star dies or two neutron stars merge. The explosions are so formidable that if one were to erupt within a distance of…
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg have succeeded in selectively manipulating the motion of the electron pair in the hydrogen molecule. The emission direction of a photoelectron released by light (a photon) relative to the remaining bound electron in the cleaved neutral hydrogen atom can be controlled by the time interval between two laser flashes on the scale of a few hundred attoseconds (10⁻¹⁸ s). The adjustable emission asymmetry is based on the quantum entanglement…
A new volcano has been spotted on Jupiter’s moon Io, the most geologically active place in the Solar System. Analysis of the first close-up images of Io in over 25 years, captured by the JunoCam instrument on NASA’s Juno mission, reveal the emergence of a fresh volcano with multiple lava flows and volcanic deposits covering an area about 180 kilometres by 180 kilometres. The findings have been presented at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) in Berlin this week. The new…
Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, in Sweden, have for the first time succeeded in combining two major research fields in photonics by creating a nanoobject with unique optical qualities. Since the object is a thousand times thinner than the human hair, yet very powerful, the breakthrough has great potential in the development of efficient and compact nonlinear optical devices. “My feeling is that this discovery has a great potential,” says Professor Timur Shegai, who led the study at Chalmers….
In conjunction with research staff from the Charles University of Prague and the CFM (CSIC-UPV/EHU) center in San Sebastian, CIC nanoGUNE’s Nanodevices group has designed a new complex material with emerging properties in the field of spintronics. This discovery, published in the journal Nature Materials, opens up a range of fresh possibilities for the development of novel, more efficient and more advanced electronic devices, such as those that integrate magnetic memories into processors. The discovery of two-dimensional materials with unique…
Physicists from Würzburg present a nanometre-sized light antenna with electrically modulated surface properties – a breakthrough that could pave the way for faster computer chips. Today’s computers reach their physical limits when it comes to speed. Semiconductor components usually operate at a maximum usable frequency of a few gigahertz – which corresponds to several billion computing operations per second. As a result, modern systems rely on several chips to divide up the computing tasks because the speed of the individual…
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