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The performance of some quantum technologies could be boosted by exploiting interactions between nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centres and defects on the surface of diamond – according to research done by two independent teams of scientists in the US.

NV centres in diamond have emerged as a promising solid-state platform for quantum sensing and information processing. They are defects in the diamond lattice in which two carbon atoms are replaced with a single nitrogen atom, leaving one lattice site vacant. NV centres are a two-level spin system into which quantum information can be written and read out using laser light and microwaves. An important property of NV centres is that once they have been put into a specific quantum state, they can remain in that state for a relatively long “coherence” time – which makes them technologically useful.

Professors Miguel Ángel Herrada of the University of Seville and Jens G. Eggers of the University of Bristol have uncovered a mechanism that explains the erratic movement of bubbles rising in water. The findings, published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could provide insights into the behavior of particles that fall between solid and gas states.

Leonardo da Vinci observed five centuries ago that air bubbles, if big enough, periodically deviate in a zigzag or spiral from a straight-line movement. However, no quantitative description of the phenomenon or physical mechanism to explain this periodic motion had ever been found.

Physicists are increasingly using ultracold molecules to study quantum states of matter. Many researchers contend that molecules have advantages over other alternatives, such as trapped ions, atoms or photons. These advantages suggest that molecular systems will play important roles in emerging quantum technologies. But, for a while now, research into molecular systems has advanced only so far because of long-standing challenges in preparing, controlling and observing molecules in a quantum regime.

Now, as chronicled in a study published in Nature (“Probing site-resolved correlations in a spin system of ultracold molecules”), Princeton researchers have achieved a major breakthrough by microscopically studying molecular gases at a level never before achieved by previous research. The Princeton team, led by Waseem Bakr, associate professor of physics, was able to cool molecules down to ultracold temperatures, load them into an artificial crystal of light known as an optical lattice, and study their collective quantum behavior with high spatial resolution such that each individual molecule could be observed.

“We prepared the molecules in the gas in a well-defined internal and motional quantum state. The strong interactions between the molecules gave rise to subtle quantum correlations which we were able to detect for the first time,” said Bakr.

Spintronics is a technology that utilizes the spin of electrons — in addition to their charge — in order to store and process information. Unlike traditional electronics, which rely on the movement of electrons to perform their functions, spintronics uses the intrinsic angular momentum of electrons to achieve the same results. Spintronics offers the potential to address some limitations of traditional, charge-based computing and it has the potential for developing new types of devices such as spin-based transistors and logic gates.

Accidental discovery shows that N-heterocyclic carbenes can act as sources of atomic carbon.

When molecules form from many atoms, the atoms can combine in different ways. Two forms of the same molecule can have the same composition but have different arrangements of atoms, giving rise to isomers. Some isomers may have structures that are mirror images of each other. Such molecules are called chiral molecules. Scientists are interested in studying such molecules, for example, penicillin, because one arrangement can be a lifesaver while the other could be fatal!

Researchers shine extremely short pulses of light on molecules to take their videos during the processes of interest so that they can study the structure or formation of the molecule. The pulses are so short that they are measured in attoseconds. An attosecond is a billionth of a billionth of a second.

The light needs to be what is called circularly polarised to study chiral molecules. Different arrangements of a chiral molecule respond differently to circularly polarised light, making it possible to distinguish each arrangement. Though polarised attosecond pulses are a great tool for studying chiral molecules, generating such light pulses can be daunting, expensive, and needs bulky apparatus.

The strong force holds our atoms together. Scientists may have observed its small-scale fluctuations for the first time.

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Science Asylum video on Schrodinger Equation:

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Only by knowing the average number of friends each person has, scientists at Complexity Science Hub (CSH) were able to predict the group sizes of people in a computer game. For this purpose, they modeled the formation of social groups on an example from physics, namely the self-organization of particles with spin.

Sociologists have focused on how social groups are forming and the mechanism behind it for a long time. The urge to avoid stress, as well as homophily—the tendency of people to join groups with others who share similar features, traits, or opinions—have been observed in many different contexts.

“Although multiple models have been studied, little is known about how homophily and stress avoidance affect the formation of human groups, and in particular the size distribution of them—whether there are many small groups or few large ones, for example,” explains Jan Korbel from CSH and first author of the study. By using two contemporary fields from physics, called self-assembly and spin glasses, scientists now shed new light on social group formation.