Yale researchers, in collaboration with scientists from City University of New York, California Institute of Technology, Kansas State University and ETH Zurich, leveraged the unusual properties of phonon-polaritons, a type of quasiparticle, to discover a new way to dissipate the energy of high-speed electrons through the generation of long wavelength infrared light.

An international research team led by QuTech has realised a three-site Kitaev chain using semiconducting quantum dots coupled by superconducting segments in a hybrid InSb/Al nanowire. When comparing two-and three-site chains within the same device, they observed that extending the chain to three sites increased the stability of the zero-energy modes. This work demonstrates the scalability of quantum-dot-based Kitaev chains and their potential to host stable Majorana zero modes. The researchers published their results in Nature Nanotechnology.

Scientists have long sought to unravel the mysteries of strange metals — materials that defy conventional rules of electricity and magnetism. Now, a team of physicists at Rice University has made a breakthrough in this area using a tool from quantum information science. Their study, published recently in Nature Communications, reveals that electrons in strange metals become more entangled at a crucial tipping point, shedding new light on the behavior of these enigmatic materials. The discovery could pave the way for advances in superconductors with the potential to transform energy use in the future.

There is a big problem with quantum technology — it’s tiny. The distinctive properties that exist at the subatomic scale usually disappear at macroscopic scales, making it difficult to harness their superior sensing and communication capabilities for real-world applications, like optical systems and advanced computing. Now, however, an international team led by physicists at Penn State and Columbia University has developed a novel approach to maintain special quantum characteristics, even in three-dimensional (3D) materials.

Excitons, encountered in technologies like solar cells and TVs, are quasiparticles formed by an electron and a positively charged “hole,” moving together in a semiconductor. Created when an electron is excited to a higher energy state, excitons transfer energy without carrying a net charge. While their behavior in traditional semiconductors is well understood, excitons act differently in organic semiconductors. Research by condensed matter physicist Ivan Biaggio focuses on understanding the mechanisms behind exciton dynamics, quantum entanglement, and dissociation in organic molecular crystals.

In a recent study published in Science Advances, a team of researchers led by Shengxi Huang, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and materials science and nanoengineering at Rice, describes how one such type of quasiparticle - polarons - behaves in tellurene, a nanomaterial first synthesized in 2017 that is made up of tiny chains of tellurium atoms and has properties useful in sensing, electronic, optical and energy devices.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and Rice University have investigated the intricacies of particle exchange statistics and shown that a third category — paraparticles — can exist under specific physical conditions, obeying exotic "parastatistics" markedly different from those of fermions and bosons. Using a second quantization framework, they mathematically demonstrated that paraparticles emerge as quasiparticle excitations in quantum spin models, challenging long-standing assumptions in condensed matter and particle physics. Their discovery was published last week in Nature.

In a paper recently published in Nature Physics, an international group of researchers comprised of an experimental team from Switzerland and France and theoretical physicists in Canada and the U.S., including Rice University, have found evidence of this enigmatic quantum spin liquid in a material known as pyrochlore cerium stannate. They achieved this by combining state-of-the-art experimental techniques, including neutron scattering at extremely low temperatures, with theoretical analysis. By measuring the way in which neutrons interact magnetically with the electron spin in pyrochlore, the researchers observed the collective excitations of spins interacting strongly with lightlike waves.

For the first time, scientists have observed a collection of particles, also known as a quasiparticle, that's massless when moving one direction but has mass in the other direction. The quasiparticle, called a semi-Dirac fermion, was first theorized 16 years ago, but was only recently spotted inside a crystal of semi-metal material called ZrSiS. The observation of the quasiparticle opens the door to future advances in a range of emerging technologies from batteries to sensors, according to the researchers. The team, led by scientists at Penn State and Columbia University, recently published their discovery in the journal Physical Review X.

Researchers Deepak Singh and Carsten Ullrich from the University of Missouri’s College of Arts and Science, along with their teams of students and postdoctoral fellows, recently made a groundbreaking discovery on the nanoscale: a new type of quasiparticle found in all magnetic materials, no matter their strength or temperature.