NEWSROOM

Researchers from Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands have been able to see the magnetic nucleus of an atom switch back and forth in real time. They read out the nuclear ‘spin’ via the electrons in the same atom through the needle of a scanning tunneling microscope. To their surprise, the spin remained stable for several seconds, offering prospects for enhanced control of the magnetic nucleus. The research, published in Nature Communications, is a step forward fo

Nearly a decade after they first demonstrated that soft materials could guide the formation of superconductors, Cornell researchers have achieved a one-step, 3D printing method that produces superconductors with record properties. The advance, detailed Aug. 19 in Nature Communications, builds on years of interdisciplinary work led by Ulrich Wiesner, the Spencer T. Olin Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and could improve technologies such as

Three nano glass spheres cling to one another. They form a tower-like cluster, similar to when you pile three scoops of ice cream on top of one another – only much smaller. The diameter of the nano cluster is ten times smaller than that of a human hair. With the help of an optical device and laser beams, researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded in keeping such objects almost completely motionless in levitation. This is significant when it comes to the future development of qu

The research team studied how phonons interfere with each other by looking at the shape of their signal in Raman spectroscopy, a technique that measures the vibrational modes of a material. The spectrum revealed a sharply asymmetric line shape and in some cases showed a complete dip, forming an antiresonance pattern characteristic of intense interference. The effect proved highly sensitive to the specificities of the silicon carbide surface. The comparison between three diffe

What are the limits of quantum physics? This is a question that has been researched around the world for decades. If we want to make the properties of the quantum world technically usable, we need to understand whether objects that are significantly larger than atoms and molecules can also exhibit quantum phenomena.For example, small glass spheres with a diameter of one hundred nanometres can be examined – still over a thousand times smaller than a grain of sand, but huge by

These results hint at the possibility of paradigm-shifting optical quantum devices based not on conventional, difficult-to-scale components like waveguides and beam splitters, or even extended optical microchips, but instead on error-resistant metasurfaces that offer a host of advantages: designs that don’t require intricate alignments, robustness to perturbations, cost-effectiveness, simplicity of fabrication, and low optical loss. Broadly speaking, the work embodies metasur