Free-range atoms, roaming around without restrictions, have been captured on camera for the first time – enabling physicists to take a closer look at long predicted quantum phenomena.
It’s a bit like snapping a shot of a rare bird in your back garden, after a long time of only ever hearing reports of them in the area, and seeing the food in your bird feeder diminish each day. Instead of birdwatching, though, we’re talking about quantum physics.
The US researchers behind the breakthrough carefully constructed an “atom-resolved microscopy” camera system that first puts atoms in a contained cloud, where they roam freely. Then, laser light freezes the atoms in position to record them.
IN A NUTSHELL 🔬 Scientists have measured the speed of quantum entanglement for the first time, marking a major milestone in quantum physics. 💡 The study uses attosecond precision to track electron motion, offering unprecedented insight into quantum dynamics. 🔗 Quantum entanglement shows how particles can be interconnected over vast distances, defying traditional physics. 🚀
Quantum technologies, which leverage quantum mechanical effects to process information, could outperform their classical counterparts in some complex and advanced tasks. The development and real-world deployment of these technologies partly relies on the ability to transfer information between different types of quantum systems effectively.
A long-standing challenge in the field of quantum technology is converting quantum signals carried by microwave photons (i.e., particles of electromagnetic radiation in the microwave frequency range) into optical photons (i.e., visible or near visible light particles). Devices designed to perform this conversion are known as microwave-to-optical transducers.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology recently developed a new microwave-to-optical transducer based on rare-earth ion-doped crystals. Their on-chip transducer, outlined in a paper published in Nature Physics, was implemented using ytterbium-171 ions doped in a YVO4 crystal.
The blazar BL Lacertae, a supermassive black hole surrounded by a bright disk and jets oriented toward Earth, provided scientists with a unique opportunity to answer a longstanding question: How are X-rays generated in extreme environments like this?
NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) collaborated with radio and optical telescopes to find answers. The results, available on the arXiv preprint server and set to be published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, show that interactions between fast-moving electrons and particles of light, called photons, must lead to this X-ray emission.
Scientists had two competing possible explanations for the X-rays, one involving protons and one involving electrons. Each of these mechanisms would have a different signature in the polarization of X-ray light. Polarization is a property of light that describes the average direction of the electromagnetic waves that make up light.
Future space missions could use quantum technologies to help us understand the physical laws that govern the universe, explore the composition of other planets and their moons, gain insights into unexplained cosmological phenomena, or monitor ice sheet thickness and the amount of water in underground aquifers on Earth.
NASA’s Cold Atom Lab (CAL), a first-of-its-kind facility aboard the International Space Station, has performed a series of trailblazing experiments based on the quantum properties of ultracold atoms. The tool used to perform these experiments is called an atom interferometer, and it can precisely measure gravity, magnetic fields, and other forces.
Atom interferometers are currently being used on Earth to study the fundamental nature of gravity and are also being developed to aid aircraft and ship navigation, but use of an atom interferometer in space will enable innovative science capabilities.
Neutrinos and antineutrinos are elementary particles with small but unknown mass. High-precision atomic mass measurements at the Accelerator Laboratory of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, have revealed that beta decay of the silver-110 isomer has a strong potential to be used for the determination of electron antineutrino mass. The result is an important step in paving the way for future antineutrino experiments.
The mass of neutrinos and their antineutrinos is one of the big unanswered questions in physics. Neutrinos are elementary particles in the Standard Model of particle physics and are very common in nature. They are produced, for example, by nuclear reactions in the sun. Every second, trillions of solar neutrinos travel through us.
“Their mass determination would be of utmost importance,” says Professor Anu Kankainen from the University of Jyväskylä. “Understanding them can give us a better picture of the evolution of the universe.”
A new way of explaining gravity could bring us a step closer to resolving the heretofore irresolvable differences it has with quantum mechanics.
Physicists Mikko Partanen and Jukka Tulkki at Aalto University in Finland have devised a new way of thinking about gravity that they say is compatible with the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory describing the other three fundamental forces in the Universe – strong, weak, and electromagnetic.
It’s not quite a theory of quantum gravity… but it could help us get there.
In an unassuming industrial park 30 miles outside Boston, engineers are building a futuristic machine to replicate the energy of the stars. If all goes to plan, it could be the key to producing virtually unlimited, clean electricity in the United States in about a decade.
The donut-shaped machine Commonwealth Fusion Systems is assembling to generate this energy is simultaneously the hottest and coldest place in the entire solar system, according to the scientists who are building it.
It is inside that extreme environment in the so-called tokamak that they smash atoms together in 100-million-degree plasma. The nuclear fusion reaction is surrounded by a magnetic field more than 400,000 times more powerful than the Earth’s and chilled with cryogenic gases close to absolute zero.