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A way of shrinking the devices used in quantum sensing systems has been developed by researchers at the UK Quantum Technology Hub Sensors and Timing, which is led by the University of Birmingham.

Sensing devices have a huge number of industrial uses, from carrying out ground surveys to monitoring volcanoes. Scientists working on ways to improve the capabilities of these sensors are now using quantum technologies, based on cold atoms, to improve their sensitivity.

Machines developed in laboratories using quantum technology, however, are cumbersome and difficult to transport, making current designs unsuitable for most industrial uses.

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Ultimately, the MIT engineers hope that their giant atoms lead to a simpler, enhanced form of quantum computers.

“This allows us to experimentally probe a novel regime of physics that is difficult to access with natural atoms,” MIT engineer Bharath Kannan said in a press release. “The effects of the giant atom are extremely clean and easy to observe and understand.”

Scientists have found that a physical property called ‘quantum negativity’ can be used to take more precise measurements of everything from molecular distances to gravitational waves.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, Harvard and MIT, have shown that quantum particles can carry an unlimited amount of information about things they have interacted with. The results, reported in the journal Nature Communications, could enable far more precise measurements and power new technologies, such as super-precise microscopes and quantum computers.

Metrology is the science of estimations and measurements. If you weighed yourself this morning, you’ve done metrology. In the same way as quantum computing is expected to revolutionize the way complicated calculations are done, quantum metrology, using the strange behavior of subatomic particles, may revolutionize the way we measure things.

Extensive power outages and satellite blackouts that affect air travel and the internet are some of the potential consequences of massive solar storms. These storms are believed to be caused by the release of enormous amounts of stored magnetic energy due to changes in the magnetic field of the sun’s outer atmosphere—something that until now has eluded scientists’ direct measurement. Researchers believe this recent discovery could lead to better “space weather” forecasts in the future.

“We are becoming increasingly dependent on space-based systems that are sensitive to space weather. Earth-based networks and the electrical grid can be severely damaged if there is a large eruption,” says Tomas Brage, Professor of Mathematical Physics at Lund University in Sweden.

Solar flares are bursts of radiation and charged particles, and can cause geomagnetic storms on Earth if they are large enough. Currently, researchers focus on sunspots on the surface of the sun to predict possible eruptions. Another and more direct indication of increased solar activity would be changes in the much weaker magnetic field of the outer solar atmosphere—the so-called Corona.

Superconducting giant atoms are realized in a waveguide by coupling small atoms to the waveguide at multiple discrete locations, producing tunable atom–waveguide coupling and enabling decoherence-free interactions.

Quantum computers have enormous potential for calculations using novel algorithms and involving amounts of data far beyond the capacity of today’s supercomputers. While such computers have been built, they are still in their infancy and have limited applicability for solving complex problems in materials science and chemistry. For example, they only permit the simulation of the properties of a few atoms for materials research.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago (UChicago) have developed a method paving the way to using quantum computers to simulate realistic molecules and complex materials, whose description requires hundreds of atoms.

The research team is led by Giulia Galli, director of the Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials (MICCoM), a group leader in Argonne’s Materials Science division and a member of the Center for Molecular Engineering at Argonne. Galli is also the Liew Family Professor of Electronic Structure and Simulations in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and a Professor of Chemistry at UChicago. She worked on this project with assistant scientist Marco Govoni and graduate student He Ma, both part of Argonne’s Materials Science division and UChicago.

International team of scientists with Mainz participation proposes plans for high-intensity gamma radiation source at CERN.

The ‘Gamma Factory initiative’ – an international team of scientists – is currently exploring a novel research tool: They propose to develop a source of high-intensity gamma rays using the existing accelerator facilities at CERN. To do this, specialized ion beams will be circulated in the SPS and LHC storage rings, which will then be excited using laser beams so that they emit photons. In the selected configuration, the energies of the photons will be within the gamma radiation range of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is of particular interest in connection with spectroscopic analysis of atomic nuclei. Furthermore, the gamma rays will be designed to have a very high intensity, several orders of magnitude higher than those of systems currently in operation.

Materials scientists studying recharging fundamentals made an astonishing discovery that could open the door to better batteries, faster catalysts and other materials science leaps.

Scientists from the University of California San Diego and Idaho National Laboratory scrutinized the earliest stages of lithium recharging and learned that slow, low-energy charging causes electrodes to collect atoms in a disorganized way that improves charging behavior. This noncrystalline “glassy” lithium had never been observed, and creating such amorphous metals has traditionally been extremely difficult.

The findings suggest strategies for fine-tuning recharging approaches to boost battery life and—more intriguingly—for making glassy metals for other applications. The study was published on July 27 in Nature Materials.

In a study published in Nature Astronomy, an international team of researchers has presented a new, detailed look inside the “central engine” of a large solar flare accompanied by a powerful eruption first captured on Sept. 10, 2017 by the Owens Valley Solar Array (EOVSA)—a solar radio telescope facility operated by New Jersey Institute of Technology’s (NJIT) Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research (CSTR).

The new findings, based on EOVSA’s observations of the event at microwave wavelengths, offer the first measurements characterizing the magnetic fields and particles at the heart of the explosion. The results have revealed an enormous electric current “sheet” stretching more than 40,000 kilometers through the core flaring region where opposing magnetic field lines approach each other, break and reconnect, generating the intense energy powering the flare.

Notably, the team’s measurements also indicate a magnetic bottle-like structure located at the top of the flare’s loop-shaped base (known as the flare arcade) at a height of nearly 20,000 kilometers above the Sun’s surface. The structure, the team suggests, is likely the primary site where the flare’s highly energetic electrons are trapped and accelerated to nearly the speed of light.