Physics Awards

Saturday, April 12, 2025

Quantum Rain Falls: Ultracold Atoms Unleash Liquid Secrets

In a groundbreaking experiment, physicists observed a classic liquid phenomenon capillary instability in a quantum gas for the first time.

By cooling a mix of potassium and rubidium atoms near absolute zero, researchers created tiny self-bound droplets that behave like liquid despite remaining in a gas phase. When stretched, these quantum droplets split into smaller ones, mimicking how a stream of water breaks into droplets.

Quantum Droplets and Capillary Instability Observed

In the Quantum Mixtures Lab at the National Institute of Optics (CNR-INO), researchers from CNR, the University of Florence, and the European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy (LENS) observed a well-known fluid phenomenon, capillary instability, within an unusual medium: an ultradilute quantum gas.

This discovery offers new insight into how matter behaves in extreme conditions and could lead to novel ways of manipulating quantum fluids. The study, published in Physical Review Letters, also included contributions from scientists at the Universities of Bologna, Padua, and the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).

The Physics Behind Capillary Instability

In classical physics, surface tension arises from cohesive forces between molecules in a liquid, causing the liquid to minimize its surface area. This effect is responsible for everyday occurrences like the formation of raindrops and soap bubbles. Surface tension also drives capillary instability (also known as Plateau-Rayleigh instability), in which a thin stream of liquid breaks up into droplets. Understanding this process is important in fields ranging from industrial design to biomedicine and nanotechnology.

Ultracold Gases and Liquid-Like Behavior

When atomic gases are cooled to temperatures near absolute zero, they begin to behave according to the rules of quantum mechanics. Under certain conditions, these ultracold gases can act like liquids, even though they technically remain in the gaseous phase. In recent years, scientists have learned how to precisely tune the interactions between atoms to create self-bound, liquid-like droplets. These droplets, stabilized by quantum effects, share several properties with classical liquid drops.

Breakup Dynamics in a Quantum Filament

By means of imaging and optical manipulation techniques, the experimental team, led by Alessia Burchianti (Cnr-Ino researcher), studied the dynamical evolution of a single quantum droplet created from an ultracold mixture of potassium and rubidium atoms. The droplet released in an optical waveguide elongates forming a filament, which, above a critical length, breaks up into smaller droplets. The number of sub-droplets is proportional to the length of the filament at the breaking time.

Website: International Research Awards on High Energy Physics and Computational Science.

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Friday, April 11, 2025

Cracking the Quantum Code: 40-Year Entanglement Mystery Solved

A long-standing puzzle in quantum physics has just been cracked: scientists have finally pinned down the exact scope of quantum entanglement in one of its most iconic experiments.

This breakthrough not only deepens our understanding of quantum mechanics but could also supercharge the validation of quantum devices, shaping the future of quantum technologies from computing to sensing.

Cracking a 40-Year Quantum Mystery

In a new paper published in Nature Physics, Victor Barizien and Jean-Daniel Bancal of the Institute of Theoretical Physics (IPhT) have solved a 40-year-old open question about the reach of quantum entanglement.

Quantum entanglement is a central feature of the so-called second quantum revolution, enabling technologies like quantum sensors and quantum computers. Yet, even in well-known experimental setups like Bell tests, highlighted by the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, the exact role and limits of entanglement have remained unclear. This new theoretical work is the first to clearly define the full scope of entanglement in such experiments.

Decoding the Hidden Patterns

Entangled systems involve two components that are deeply interconnected. When measurements are made on these components, their connection shows up in the patterns, or frequencies, of the results. These patterns are a hallmark of quantum mechanics and form the backbone of quantum information science. Until now, however, the statistical data from entangled measurements defied complete analysis. By identifying all the frequencies needed to fully describe the measured quantum system, the researchers provide the first explicit and comprehensive characterization of a set of quantum statistics.

Pushing Quantum Boundaries

This result has both fundamental and applied significance. Indeed, the type of reconstruction obtained forms the basis of the most advanced validation methods for quantum devices. This work paves the way for new, more comprehensive test procedures for quantum devices. At the same time, by determining the extent of quantum statistics, this result identifies the limits of quantum physics itself. It thus informs us about the scope of quantum theory and offers new perspectives for better understanding it.

Website: International Research Awards on High Energy Physics and Computational Science.

Tuesday, April 8, 2025

How Scientists Froze a Trillion-Watt Laser Pulse in a Single Shot

Researchers have developed a powerful new way to measure ultrashort, high-energy laser pulses in a single shot, solving long-standing challenges in capturing their complex profiles.

This innovation is crucial as laser technology moves toward unprecedented energy levels and plasma-based optics.

Breakthrough in Measuring Laser Pulses

Researchers at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, have developed a new method to accurately measure ultrashort, ultrahigh-power laser pulses. Their findings were published in Optica, a leading open-access journal in the field of optics.

What’s the breakthrough?

Lasers are one of the most remarkable technologies of the modern age. They can produce pulses of light that last for incredibly short durations, among the shortest ever created by humans. Even more impressively, these brief flashes can carry immense amounts of energy, resulting in peak power levels that far exceed the total electrical power consumption of the entire world, by orders of magnitude.

In this realm, optics has become a game of extreme power.

The Challenge of Pulse Distortions

However, measuring the precise time structure, or temporal shape, of these laser pulses is a major challenge. Although scientists have developed a range of techniques over the past few decades, several critical problems remain.

One key issue is that when these intense pulses pass through any material, their timing can become distorted. And the more powerful the pulse, the greater the distortion.

Yet another major complication has to do with the pulse time profile being different at different points within the laser beam itself. Most often, scientists may not bother about these variations across the beam spatial extent and assume a single temporal profile. However, the larger the beam and/or the more the length it traverses in a medium, the more critical these distortions become, dramatically changing the pulse. And at ultrahigh peak powers it is imperative to know what the time duration is at different points across the spatial extent of the beam.

A Precision Tool from TIFR

The TIFR team used a specially designed instrument to measure the time profiles across spatial points in the ultrashort laser beam. They used an optical technique named ‘spectral interferometry’ at different spatial locations across the beam simultaneously, to achieve this. The team collaborated with Umea University, Sweden on this study.

With the scientific world marching towards peak laser powers never imagined before (tens of thousand trillion watts!) in laser beams spread over diameters of several tens of centimeters, this method will not only be extremely useful but essential.

Measuring a Single Pulse at a Time

Here is yet another boost for this method. These ultrahigh power lasers emit pulses every once in a while once over many seconds/ minutes/ hours. The earlier techniques of measurement needed to sample multiple pulses before estimating the pulse profile will be extremely cumbersome.

The TIFR advance solves this too. It works for a single pulse!

Handling Plasmas and Extreme Conditions

Now, the icing on the cake. As laser peak powers shoot through the roof, the normal solid optical components cannot handle them as they break down by ionization. The technology is therefore moving towards using ionized matter or ‘plasma’ itself, to design these optical components. And these plasmas can be highly unstable and cause further distortions in the spatiotemporal profiles of the pulse incident on them. The TIFR method is perfectly suited to measure these distortions.

Website: International Research Awards on High Energy Physics and Computational Science.

Monday, April 7, 2025

Half Ice, Half Fire: A Bizarre New State of Matter That Could Reshape Physics

In a groundbreaking study, scientists at Brookhaven National Lab uncovered a new phase of matter dubbed “half ice, half fire” a bizarre mix of cold, orderly electron spins and hot, chaotic ones.

This discovery flips the script on previously accepted limits in physics and could spark advances in quantum computing, magnetic refrigeration, and more. It stems from a decade-long journey through strange magnetic materials and offers a brand-new way to manipulate matter with ultrasharp precision.

A New State of Matter Emerges

Two physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered a new phase of matter while exploring a model of a magnetic material.

This newly identified phase is a unique arrangement of electron spins, the tiny magnetic moments of electrons that point either “up” or “down.” The phase features a mix of highly ordered (“cold”) and highly disordered (“hot”) spins. Because of this unusual combination, the researchers named it “half ice, half fire.” The discovery emerged from studying a one-dimensional model of a magnetic material known as a ferrimagnet.

Practical Potential for Energy and Information Tech

What makes “half ice, half fire” especially significant is its ability to cause extremely sharp transitions between different states of matter at a practical, finite temperature something that could have future applications in energy systems and information technology.

The findings, by physicists Weiguo Yin and Alexei Tsvelik, are detailed in the December 31, 2024 issue of Physical Review Letters.

“Finding new states with exotic physical properties and being able to understand and control the transitions between those states are central problems in the fields of condensed matter physics and materials science,” said Yin. “Solving those problems could lead to great advances in technologies like quantum computing and spintronics.”

Added Tsvelik, “We suggest that our findings may open a new door to understanding and controlling phases and phase transitions in certain materials.”

A Twin Phase and a Decade of Discovery

The “half-ice, half-fire” phase is the twin state of the “half-fire, half-ice” phase discovered by Yin, Tsvelik, and Christopher Roth, their 2015 undergraduate summer intern who is now a postdoc at the Flatiron Institute. They describe the discovery in a paper published in early 2024.

But the full story goes back to 2012, when Yin and Tsvelik were part of a multi-institutional collaboration, led by Brookhaven physicist John Hill, that was studying Sr3CuIrO6, a magnetic compound of strontium, copper, iridium, and oxygen. This research led to two papers, an experiment-driven study in 2012 and a theory-driven study in 2013, both published in PRL.

Yin and Tsvelik continued to look into the phase behaviors of Sr3CuIrO6 and, in 2016, found the “half-fire, half-ice” phase. In this state, which is induced by a critical external magnetic field, the “hot” spins on the copper sites are fully disordered on the atomic lattice and have smaller magnetic moments, while the “cold” spins on the iridium sites are fully ordered and have larger magnetic moments.

“But despite our extensive research, we still didn’t know how this state could be utilized, especially because it has been well known for one century that the one-dimensional Ising model, an established mathematical model of ferromagnetism that produces the half-fire, half-ice state, does not host a finite-temperature phase transition,” said Tsvelik. “We were missing pieces of the puzzle.”

Cracking the Code: Forbidden Transitions

A hint to the missing pieces was recently identified by Yin. In two publications for systems with and without an external magnetic field, respectively, he demonstrated that the aforementioned forbidden phase transition can be approached by ultranarrow phase crossover at fixed finite temperature.

In this current work, Yin and Tsvelik have discovered that “half fire, half ice” has an opposite, hidden state in which the hot and cold spins switch positions. That is, the hot spins become cold, and the cold spins become hot, which led them to name the phase “half ice, half fire.”

Website: International Research Awards on High Energy Physics and Computational Science.

Saturday, April 5, 2025

Alive, Dead, and Hot: Schrödinger’s Cat Defies the Rules of Quantum Physics

Researchers have pulled off a quantum feat that defies traditional expectations they’ve created Schrödinger cat states not from ultra-cold ground states, but from warm, thermally excited ones.

Using a superconducting qubit setup, the team demonstrated that quantum superpositions can exist even at higher temperatures, overturning the long-held belief that heat destroys quantum effects. This breakthrough not only validates Schrödinger’s original “hot cat” concept but also paves the way for more practical and accessible quantum technologies.

Schrödinger’s Cat and Hot Quantum States

Schrödinger cat states are a remarkable feature of quantum physics, where a quantum system can exist in two opposing states at once. The concept comes from Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, in which a cat is imagined to be both alive and dead simultaneously. In real-world experiments, similar quantum superpositions have been observed not with actual cats, but in things like the positions of atoms and molecules, or the vibrations of electromagnetic resonators.

Until now, these kinds of superpositions were typically created by first cooling the quantum system to its ground state, its lowest possible energy level. But in a new breakthrough, researchers led by Gerhard Kirchmair and Oriol Romero-Isart have shown it’s possible to create Schrödinger cat states even when the system starts out thermally excited, or “hot.”

“Schrödinger also assumed a living, i.e. ‘hot’ cat in his thought experiment,” remarks Gerhard Kirchmair from the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck and the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). “We wanted to know whether these quantum effects can also be generated if we don’t start from the ‘cold’ ground state,” says Kirchmair.

Creating Quantum Superpositions at Higher Temperatures

In their study, published today (April 4) in Science Advances, the team used a transmon qubit inside a microwave resonator to create the cat states. Remarkably, they succeeded at temperatures up to 1.8 Kelvin, around 60 times hotter than the resonator’s usual environment.

“Our results show that it is possible to generate highly mixed quantum states with distinct quantum properties,” explains Ian Yang, who performed the experiments reported in the study.

Adapting Protocols to Generate Hot Cat States

The researchers used two special protocols to create the hot Schrödinger cat states. These protocols were previously used to produce cat states starting from the ground state of the system. “It turned out that adapted protocols also work at higher temperatures, generating distinct quantum interferences,” says Oriol Romero-Isart, until recently Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck and research group leader at IQOQI Innsbruck and since 2024 Director of ICFO – the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona.

“This opens up new opportunities for the creation and use of quantum superpositions, for example in nanomechanical oscillators, for which achieving the ground state can be technically challenging.”

Defying Expectations About Temperature and Quantum Interference

“Many of our colleagues were surprised when we first told them about our results, because we usually think of temperature as something that destroys quantum effects,” adds Thomas Agrenius, who helped develop the theoretical understanding of the experiment. “Our measurements confirm that quantum interference can persist even at high temperature.”

Implications for Future Quantum Technologies

These research findings could benefit the development of quantum technologies. “Our work reveals that it is possible to observe and use quantum phenomena even in less ideal, warmer environments,” emphasizes Gerhard Kirchmair. “If we can create the necessary interactions in a system, the temperature ultimately doesn’t matter.”

Website: International Research Awards on High Energy Physics and Computational Science.

Friday, April 4, 2025

99% Fidelity: USC Scientists Create First-Ever Quantum Filter To Preserve Entanglement

A new technique based on new physics offers strong, scalable control over quantum information, paving the way for more dependable quantum computing.

In a significant breakthrough that could accelerate the progress of quantum technologies, researchers from the USC Viterbi Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the School of Advanced Computing have developed the first optical filter capable of isolating and preserving quantum entanglement, a key phenomenon central to quantum computing, communication, and sensing. This work, published in Science, paves the way for compact, high-performance entanglement systems that can be integrated into quantum photonic circuits, enhancing the reliability of quantum computing architectures and communication networks.

The study was led by Professors Mercedeh Khajavikhan and Demetri Christodoulides, with Mahmoud A. Selim, a USC graduate student, as the first author.

Quantum Entanglement Explained

Quantum entanglement is a process in which two or more particles become connected, such that the behavior of one instantly influences the behavior of the other even when they are far apart. This invisible thread is what allows quantum computers to perform massive parallel calculations, quantum networks to transmit information securely, and sensors to achieve levels of sensitivity far beyond classical systems. Entanglement lies at the heart of quantum physics a mysterious tether that binds particles together, creating an uncanny connection that defies classical intuition. Once dismissed as a “spooky action at a distance,” entanglement is now recognized as a vital resource powering quantum technologies.

But entanglement is fragile. Even tiny amounts of noise or errors can destroy these delicate quantum links, making it difficult to harness entanglement in real-world systems.

To overcome this, the USC-led team created a novel kind of optical filter an arrangement of laser-written glass light channels called waveguides that act like sculptors chiseling away everything unnecessary to reveal a pure, entangled state beneath. Regardless of how degraded or mixed the incoming light is, the device strips away the unwanted components and leaves behind only the essential quantum correlations.

“This filter doesn’t just preserve entanglement it distills it from a noisy mixed quantum state,” said Selim. “It leaves the quantum core intact while shedding everything else.”

Anti–Parity-Time Symmetry and Its Role

The breakthrough at the heart of this work comes from a surprising idea in theoretical physics called anti–parity-time (APT) symmetry a concept that has only recently begun to attract attention in the world of optics. Most traditional optical systems are designed to avoid loss and maintain symmetry, meaning that light flows in predictable, balanced ways. But APT-symmetric systems take a very different approach: they embrace loss not randomly, but in a precise and carefully controlled manner. By combining this engineered dissipation with the power of interference, these systems offer a unique and counterintuitive way to steer how light behaves. This unconventional control opens up exciting possibilities for manipulating light in ways that were previously thought to be impossible.

By embedding this symmetry into a specially designed network of optical waveguides, the team created a structure that naturally filters out noise and guides the system toward a stable entangled state much like a ball rolling into the lowest point of a valley.

“This work shows that non-Hermitian physics and open quantum systems once considered a mathematical curiosity can offer powerful tools in the quantum regime,” said senior author Mercedeh Khajavikhan, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics at USC. “Our filter is scalable, chip-compatible, and doesn’t require exotic materials or active components.”

The filter was tested experimentally using single photons and pairs of entangled photons generated in USC’s labs. After passing through the APT-symmetric entanglement filter, the output states were reconstructed using quantum tomography techniques, confirming the filter’s ability to recover the desired entangled states with greater than 99% fidelity.

Website: International Research Awards on High Energy Physics and Computational Science.

Thursday, April 3, 2025

Stellar Time Machine: Rare Particle Decay Sheds Light on the Sun’s Mysterious Origins

New experiments on thallium decay have helped determine the Sun formed over 10–20 million years, improving stellar nucleosynthesis models.

Have you ever wondered how long it took our Sun to form in the stellar nursery where it was born? An international team of scientists has just brought us closer to the answer. They successfully measured a rare nuclear process, bound-state beta decay, in fully ionized thallium-205 (²⁰⁵Tl⁸¹⁺) ions at the Experimental Storage Ring (ESR) of GSI/FAIR in Germany. This breakthrough sheds new light on how the radioactive isotope lead-205 (²⁰⁵Pb) is formed in asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars and helps refine estimates of the Sun’s formation timeline. Their findings were published in Nature.

Current estimates suggest the Sun took tens of millions of years to form from its parent molecular cloud. This timeline is inferred from the presence of long-lived radionuclides that were produced shortly before the Sun’s birth. These isotopes were created in AGB stars, dying stars of intermediate-mass, and spread through the solar neighborhood via stellar winds.

Although these radionuclides have long since decayed, they left behind traceable amounts of their decay products in primitive meteorites, allowing scientists to reconstruct their origin. To accurately time the Sun’s formation, scientists look for radionuclides that are produced exclusively by the slow neutron capture process (s-process), with no contamination from other nucleosynthesis pathways. The best candidate is ²⁰⁵Pb an “s-only” nucleus that fits these criteria.

Reversing Roles in Atomic Decay

On Earth, the isotope ²⁰⁵Pb decays into ²⁰⁵Tl through a process where one of its protons combines with an atomic electron, transforming into a neutron and emitting an electron neutrino. This decay known as electron capture relies on the very small energy difference between ²⁰⁵Pb and ²⁰⁵Tl. However, the higher electron binding energies in ²⁰⁵Pb (due to its greater nuclear charge, Z = 82) make this transformation energetically favorable. Interestingly, if all electrons are stripped from the atoms such as in extremely high-temperature environments the situation reverses.

Without electrons, ²⁰⁵Tl becomes unstable and undergoes beta-minus decay to form ⁵²⁰⁵Pb. This inversion occurs in asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars, where temperatures of several hundred million Kelvin fully ionize atoms. The production of ²⁰⁵Pb in AGB stars, therefore, depends critically on the rate at which ²⁰⁵Tl decays under these ionized conditions. However, this decay cannot be observed in typical laboratory settings because, under normal conditions, ²⁰⁵Tl is stable.

The decay of 205Tl is only energetically possible if the produced electron is captured into one of the bound atomic orbits in 205Pb. This is an exceptionally rare decay mode known as bound-state beta decay. Moreover, the nuclear decay leads to an excited state in 205Pb which is situated only by a minuscule 2.3 kiloelectronvolt above the ground state but is strongly favored over the decay to the ground state. The 205Tl-205Pb pair can be imagined as a stellar seesaw model, as both decay directions are possible, and the winner depends on the stellar environment conditions of temperature and (electron) density and on the nuclear transition strength which was the great unknown in this stellar competition.

Pioneering the Bound-State Beta Decay Experiment

This unknown has now been unveiled in an ingenious experiment conducted by an international team of scientists coming from 37 institutions representing twelve countries. Bound-state beta decay is only measurable if the decaying nucleus is stripped of all electrons and is kept under these extraordinary conditions for several hours. Worldwide, this is only possible at the GSI/FAIR heavy-ion Experimental Storage Ring (ESR) combined with the fragment separator (FRS).

“The measurement of 205Tl81+ had been proposed in the 1980s, but it has taken decades of accelerator development and the hard work of many colleagues to bring to fruition,” says Professor Yury Litvinov of GSI/FAIR, spokesperson of the experiment. “A plethora of groundbreaking techniques had to be developed to achieve the required conditions for a successful experiment, like production of bare 205Tl in a nuclear reaction, its separation in the FRS and accumulation, cooling, storage and monitoring in the ESR.”

“Knowing the transition strength, we can now accurately calculate the rates at which the seesaw pair 205Tl-205Pb operates at the conditions found in AGB stars,” says Dr. Riccardo Mancino, who performed the calculations as a post-doctoral researcher at the Technical University of Darmstadt and GSI/FAIR.

The 205Pb production yield in AGB stars has been derived by researchers from the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest (Hungary), the INAF Osservatorio d’Abruzzo (Italy), and the University of Hull (UK), implementing the new 205Tl/205Pb stellar decay rates in their state-of-the-art AGB astrophysical models. “The new decay rate allows us to predict with confidence how much 205Pb is produced in AGB stars and finds its way into the gas cloud which formed our Sun,” explains Dr. Maria Lugaro, researcher at Konkoly Observatory. “By comparing with the amount of 205Pb we currently infer from meteorites, the new result gives a time interval for the formation of the Sun from the progenitor molecular cloud of ten to twenty million years that is consistent with other radioactive species produced by the slow neutron capture process.”

Collaborative Science Illuminates Solar Origins

“Our result highlights how groundbreaking experimental facilities, collaboration across many research groups, and a lot of hard work can help us understand the processes in the cores of stars. With our new experimental result, we can uncover how long it took our Sun to form 4.6 billion years ago,” says Guy Leckenby, doctoral student from TRIUMF and first author of the publication.

The measured bound-state beta decay half-life is essential to analyze the accumulation of 205Pb in the interstellar medium. However, other nuclear reactions are also important including the neutron capture rate on 205Pb for which an experiment is planned utilizing the surrogate reaction method in the ESR. These results clearly illustrate the unique possibilities offered by the heavy-ion storage rings at GSI/FAIR allowing to bring the Universe to the lab.