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Researchers at EPFL have created a metallic microdevice in which they can define and tune patterns of superconductivity. Their discovery, which holds great promise for quantum technologies of the future, has just been published in Science.

In superconductors, electrons travel with no resistance. This phenomenon currently only occurs at very low temperatures. There are many practical applications, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Future technologies, however, will harness the total synchrony of electronic behavior in superconductors—a property called the phase. There is currently a race to build the world’s first quantum computer, which will use phases to perform calculations. Conventional superconductors are very robust and hard to influence, and the challenge is to find new materials in which the superconducting state can be easily manipulated in a device.

EPFL’s Laboratory of Quantum Materials (QMAT), headed by Philip Moll, has been working on a specific group of unconventional superconductors known as heavy fermion materials. The QMAT scientists, as part of a broad international collaboration between EPFL, the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Cornell University, made a surprising discovery about one of these materials, CeIrIn₅.

A team of Northwestern University researchers is the first to document the role chemistry will play in next generation computing and communication. By applying their expertise to the field of Quantum Information Science (QIS), they discovered how to move quantum information on the nanoscale through quantum teleportation—an emerging topic within the field of QIS. Their findings were published in the journal, Nature Chemistry, on September 23, 2019, and have untold potential to influence future research and application.

Quantum teleportation allows for the transfer of quantum information from one location to another, in addition to a more secure delivery of that information through significantly improved encryption.

The QIS field of research has long been the domain of physicists, and only in the past decade has drawn the attention and involvement of chemists who have applied their expertise to exploit the quantum nature of molecules for QIS applications.

This newly discovered superconducting material could be the building blocks for Quantum Computers.

Quantum computers with the ability to perform complex calculations, encrypt data more securely and more quickly predict the spread of viruses, may be within closer reach thanks to a new discovery by Johns Hopkins researchers.

“We’ve found that a certain superconducting material contains special properties that could be the building blocks for technology of the future,” says Yufan Li, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University and the paper’s first author.

The findings will be published October 11 in Science.

Researchers led by Delft University of Technology personnel have made two steps in the conversion of quantum states between signals in the microwave and optical domains. This is of great interest for connecting future superconducting quantum computers into a global quantum network. This week they report on their findings in Nature Physics and in Physical Review Letters.

Conversion between signals in the microwave and optical domains is of great interest, particularly for connecting future superconducting quantum computers into a global quantum network. Many leading efforts in quantum technologies, including superconducting qubits and quantum dots, share quantum information through photons in the microwave regime. While this allows for an impressive degree of quantum control, it also limits the distance the information can realistically travel before being lost to a mere few centimeters.

At the same time, the field of optical quantum communication has already seen demonstrations over distance scales capable of providing real-world applications. By transmitting information in the optical telecom band, fiber-based quantum networks over tens or even hundreds of kilometers can be envisaged. “In order to connect several quantum computing nodes over large distances into a quantum internet, it is therefore vital to be able to convert quantum information from the microwave to the optical domain, and back,” says Prof. Simon Groeblacher of Delft University of Technology. “This will not only be extremely interesting for quantum applications, but also for highly efficient, low-noise conversion between classical optical and electrical signals.”

Scientists have observed a quantum vibration at normal room temperature for the first time, a phenomenon that usually requires ultra-cold, carefully calibrated conditions – bringing us another step closer to understanding the behaviour of quantum mechanics in common materials.

The team was able to spot a phonon, a quantum particle of vibration generated from high-frequency laser pulses, in a piece of diamond. These phonons are notoriously hard to detect, partly because of their sensitivity to heat.

What makes observing a phonon so important is that it shows a vibration acting as a single unit of energy (as described by quantum mechanics), as well as a wave (as described by classical physics). At room temperature in open air conditions, it brings quantum behaviour “closer to our daily life” in the words of the researchers.

In a certain sense, physics is the study of the universe’s symmetries. Physicists strive to understand how systems and symmetries change under various transformations.

New research from Washington University in St. Louis realizes one of the first parity-time (PT) symmetric quantum systems, allowing scientists to observe how that kind of symmetry—and the act of breaking of it—leads to previously unexplored phenomena. The work from the laboratory of Kater Murch, associate professor of physics in Arts & Sciences, is published Oct. 7 in the journal Nature Physics.

Other experiments have demonstrated PT symmetry in classical systems such as coupled pendulums or optical devices, but this new work in Murch’s lab, along with experiments in China by Yang Wu et al., reported in Science this May, provides the first experimental realization of a PT-symmetric quantum system.

Dive into the subatomic world, into the heart of protons or neutrons, and you’ll find elementary particles known as quarks. Measuring the mass of these quarks can be challenging, but new results from the CMS collaboration reveal for the first time how the mass of the top quark – the heaviest of six types of quarks – varies depending on the energy scale used to measure the particle.

The theory of quantum chromodynamics, a component of the Standard Model, predicts this energy-scale variation, known as running, for the masses of all quarks and for the strong force acting between them. Observing the running masses of quarks can therefore provide a way of testing quantum chromodynamics and the Standard Model.

Experiments at CERN and other laboratories have already measured the running masses of the bottom and charm quarks, the second and third heaviest quarks, and the results were in agreement with quantum chromodynamics. Now, the CMS collaboration has used data from high-energy proton–proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider to chase out the running mass of the top quark.

The new study demonstrates a bizarre quantum effect at never-before-seen scales.