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Creating a quantum device often begins by intentionally damaging a crystal. Scientists fire an ultrafast laser pulse into a material, knocking atoms out of place and leaving behind tiny imperfections called vacancies. Far from being flaws, these vacancies can behave as qubits-the fundamental building blocks of quantum...
The world would look radically different without rulers and measuring tapes that fit into a pocket. Carpenters, fashion designers and engineers rely on these trusty tools to check the size of everything from a wooden board to a fabric swatch. But physicists who work with light lack that same convenience for one of the...
A research team led by the University of Osaka has directly observed, for the first time, an unusual heavy-fermion state forming at the boundary between a one-atom-thick material and a metal. Such states are closely linked to exotic quantum phenomena, including unconventional superconductivity, and the finding opens...
Black holes, despite their extreme nature, are described by surprisingly few basic parameters: their mass, charge and spin. Two black holes may have formed for completely different reasons and passed through very different histories, yet still end up in the same final state. John Wheeler summarized this idea with the...
Francis Halzen won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for his efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos, tiny cosmic particles that scientists believe offer clues to how the universe evolved.
The bulk photovoltaic effect (BPVE), a photoelectric effect that generates photocurrent without a p-n junction, can persist even when a material's average crystal structure remains centrosymmetric, a study from Institute of Science Tokyo has found. Researchers demonstrated this in CuCrP2S6, a van der Waals material...
Even the most chaotic quantum systems keep a permanent mark of their own past-a "quantum birthmark"-that never fades. Researchers from Tampere University, Harvard University and TU Dresden discovered the feature in their recent study. Their findings shed new light on the elusive relationship between classical and...
For more than 70 years, fusion energy researchers have used a particular equation to judge whether a plasma would stay hot and dense enough-for long enough-to reach a point where it could sustain itself without any more external power added. While that equation marks the finish line, also known as ignition, it says...
Researchers have demonstrated a technique that uses a laser to produce a plasma beam antenna capable of transmitting radio waves. The article, "Laser-Induced-Plasma-Filament Antenna Transmitting 30 MHz VHF," is published in the IEEE Journal of Microwaves.
Many complex quantum systems rapidly lose the recognizable patterns of their initial states as their components interact. To describe patterns of regular and chaotic motion in specific systems, physicists can construct a mathematical map called an effective phase space.
When light travels through a strongly scattering material, such as biological tissue or other disordered opaque media, it follows many different paths and produces a seemingly random speckle pattern. Wavefront shaping makes it possible to control this complex interference and focus light through such materials.
When I explain topology to students, I start with a knot in a rope. You can stretch it, twist it or shake it, but the knot stays until you cut the rope. Physicists have found that some materials and devices carry similar "knots" in how waves move through them. These are topological properties, labeled by whole numbers...
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