Researchers at Rice University have found a new way to improve a key element of thermophotovoltaic (TPV) systems, which convert heat into electricity via light. Using an unconventional approach inspired by quantum physics, Rice engineer Gururaj Naik and his team designed a thermal emitter that can deliver high efficiencies within practical design parameters.

Scientists have devised an experiment for testing the domain of validity of quantum theory for objects much more massive than the usual microphysical objects (atoms, molecules etc), beyond which the classical theory has to be necessarily used. This study can also help in developing high precision quantum sensors which are important tools in the cutting- edge quantum technologies.

Appearing as ‘bumps’ in the data from high-energy experiments, these signals came to be known as short-lived ‘XYZ states.’ They defy the standard picture of particle behaviour and are a problem in contemporary physics, sparking several attempts to understand their mysterious nature. But theorists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia, with colleagues from the University of Cambridge, suggest the experimental data could be explained with fewer XYZ states, also called resonances, than currently claimed.

MIT physicists have taken a key step toward solving the puzzle of what leads electrons to split into fractions of themselves. Their solution sheds light on the conditions that give rise to exotic electronic states in graphene and other two-dimensional systems. The new work is an effort to make sense of a discovery that was reported earlier this year by a different group of physicists at MIT, led by Assistant Professor Long Ju. Ju’s team found that electrons appear to exhibit “fractional charge” in pentalayer graphene — a configuration of five graphene layers that are stacked atop a similarly structured sheet of boron nitride.

A team led by Prof. LU Zhengtian and Researcher XIA Tian from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) realized Schrödinger-cat state with minute-scale lifetime using optically trapped cold atoms, significantly enhancing the sensitivity of quantum metrology measurement. The study was published in Nature Photonics.

In classical physics, complex systems eventually reach equilibrium (if you wait long enough, the ice always melts). However, certain quantum many-body systems defy this norm. For them, thermalization does not occur, and the system remains out of equilibrium. That is the case of a large class of strongly disordered systems —where features like particle interactions or individual energies exhibit a certain degree of randomness. This behavior is due to many-body localization (MBL), a mechanism that preserves the system’s initial conditions over time.

In organic molecules an exciton is a particle bound pair of an electron (negative charge) and its hole (positive charge). They are held together by Coulombic attraction and can move within molecular assemblies. Singlet fission (SF) is a process where an exciton is amplified, and two triplet excitons are generated from a singlet exciton. This is caused by the absorption of a single particle of light, or photon, in molecules called chromophores (molecules that absorb specific wavelengths of light). Controlling the molecular orientation and arrangement of chromophores is crucial for achieving high SF efficiency in materials with strong potential for optical device applications.

Researchers at Aalto University’s Department of Applied Physics found a new way to create tiny hurricanes of light — known to scientists as vortices — that can carry information. The method is based on manipulating metallic nanoparticles that interact with an electric field. The design method, belonging to a class of geometries known as quasicrystals, was thought up by Doctoral Researcher Kristian Arjas and experimentally realised by Doctoral Researcher Jani Taskinen, both from Professor Päivi Törmä’s Quantum Dynamics group. The discovery represents a fundamental step forward in physics and carries the potential for entirely new ways of transmitting information.

Supersolids are a new form of quantum matter that has only recently been demonstrated. The state of matter can be produced artificially in ultracold, dipolar quantum gases. A team led by Innsbruck physicist Francesca Ferlaino has now demonstrated a missing hallmark of superfluidity, namely the existence of quantized vortices as system’s response to rotation. They have observed tiny quantum vortices in the supersolid, which also behave differently than previously assumed.

The close relationship between AI and high-performance scientific computing can be seen in the fact that both the 2024 Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry were awarded to scientists for their AI-related research contributions in their respective fields of study. KAIST researchers succeeded in dramatically reducing the computation time for highly sophisticated quantum mechanical computer simulations by predicting atomic-level chemical bonding information distributed in 3D space using a novel AI approach.