NEWSROOM

A group of DESY scientists together with colleagues from Finland and France has observed signatures of polariton-formation at extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) wavelengths for the first time. In general, polaritons are hybrid-states that emerge from the interplay of light and matter excitations - mostly observed under strong-coupling conditions.

MIT physicists have demonstrated a new form of magnetism that could one day be harnessed to build faster, denser, and less power-hungry “spintronic” memory chips. The new magnetic state is a mash-up of two main forms of magnetism: the ferromagnetism of everyday fridge magnets and compass needles, and antiferromagnetism, in which materials have magnetic properties at the microscale yet are not macroscopically magnetized.

Using advanced computational modelling, a research team led by the University of Oxford has achieved the first-ever real-time, three-dimensional simulations of how intense laser beams alter the ‘quantum vacuum’—a state once assumed to be empty, but which quantum physics predicts is full of virtual electron-positron pairs.

Self-driving cars which eliminate traffic jams, getting a healthcare diagnosis instantly without leaving your home, or feeling the touch of loved ones based across the continent may sound like the stuff of science fiction. But new research, led by the University of Bristol and published in the journal Nature Electronics, could make all this and more a step closer to reality thanks to a radical breakthrough in semiconductor technology.

The work is set to open new avenues for the study of the exotic physics arising from the interplay of interactions and a magnetic field. This includes, for example, microscopic studies of the fractional quantum Hall effect and its properties such as anyonic excitations, long-range entanglement and topological order. These phenomena offer the potential to deepen our understanding of fundamental quantum physics while also paving the way for practical applications, for example i

Now, writing in the journal Nature Communications, a team led by researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory report how they used ultrafast X-rays from the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), combined with recent theoretical advancements, to reveal those atomic motions on a timescale of femtoseconds, millionths of a billionth of a second. The technique could be used to observe speedy atomic motions in more complex catalysts.