Dead or alive, left-spinning or right-spinning—in the quantum world particles such as the famous analogy of Schrödinger's cat can be all these things at the same time. An international team, including researchers from several leading American universities, together with...
How do researchers explore nature on its most fundamental level? They build "supermicroscopes" that can resolve atomic and subatomic details. This won't work with visible light, but they can probe the tiniest dimensions of matter with beams of electrons,...
Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed the thinnest optical device in the world—a waveguide that is three layers of atoms thin.
The work is a proof of concept for scaling down optical devices to sizes that are orders...
Quantum computing and quantum cryptography are expected to give much higher capabilities than their classical counterparts. For example, the computation power in a quantum system may grow at a double exponential rate instead of a classical linear rate due...
Researchers have, for the first time, identified the sufficient and necessary conditions that the low-energy limit of quantum gravity theories must satisfy to preserve the main features of the Unruh effect.
In a new study, led by researchers from SISSA...
Vast interstellar events where clouds of charged matter hurtle into each other and spew out high-energy particles have now been reproduced in the lab with high fidelity. The work, by MIT researchers and an international team of colleagues, should...
The search for better materials for computers and other electronic devices has focused on a group of materials known as "topological insulators" that have a special property of conducting electricity on the edge of their surfaces like traffic lanes...
Technology to measure the flow of subatomic particles known as antineutrinos from nuclear reactors could allow continuous remote monitoring designed to detect fueling changes that might indicate the diversion of nuclear materials. The monitoring could be done from outside...
Scientists who use magnetic fields to bottle up and control on Earth the fusion reactions that power the sun and stars must correct any errors in the shape of the fields that contain the reactions. Such errors produce deviations...
Insights from quantum physics have allowed engineers to incorporate components used in circuit boards, optical fibers, and control systems in new applications ranging from smartphones to advanced microprocessors. But, even with significant progress made in recent years, researchers are...
When you pop a tray of water into the freezer, you get ice cubes. Now, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Toronto have achieved a similar transition using clouds of ultracold atoms.
In a study...
