Now, a team of researchers of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) in Germany and Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States has demonstrated a new way to study disorder in superconductors using terahertz pulses of light. Adapting methods used in nuclear magnetic resonance to terahertz spectroscopy, the team was able to follow the evolution of disorder in the transport properties up to the superconducting transition temperature for the first time.

Researchers from the Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat have developed a method to model a central theory of quantum gravity in the laboratory. Their goal: to decipher previously unexplained phenomena in the quantum world.

Most atoms are made from positively charged protons, neutral neutrons and negatively charged electrons. Positronium is an exotic atom composed of a single negative electron and a positively charged antimatter positron. It is naturally very short-lived, but researchers including those from the University of Tokyo successfully cooled and slowed down samples of positronium using carefully tuned lasers. They hope this research will help others explore exotic forms of matter, and that such research might unlock the secrets of antimatter.

A team of researchers led by Professor Christoph Kerzig of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has now discovered a novel approach for the straightforward preparation of highly efficient dyad photocatalysts. Two commercially available salts are mixed and because of attractive electrostatic interactions, i.e., Coulomb interactions, the photoactive units form an ion pair that allows them to interact synergistically.

Now, in a recently published Nature paper, JILA and NIST Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder Physics Professor Jun Ye and his team, along with collaborators in Mikhail Lukin’s group at Harvard University, used periodic microwave pulses in a process known as Floquet engineering, to tune interactions between ultracold potassium-rubidium molecules in a system appropriate for studying fundamental magnetic systems. Moreover, the researchers observed two-axis twisting dynamics within their system, which can generate entangled states for enhanced quantum sensing in the future.

Quantum effects do not seem to extend to very large objects–like cats, people or houses–and physicists do not agree on exactly why not. Now, an international team of scientists has proposed a new and refined way to test the validity of some proposed alternative models to standard quantum theory, which offer a possible explanation. Their work was published in the journal Physical Review Letters in June 2024.

A research team led by Professor Monika Aidelsburger and Professor Immanuel Bloch from the LMU Faculty of Physics has investigated this question concerning quantum many-body systems and found indications that they can be described macroscopically through simple diffusion equations with random noise. The study was recently published in the journal Nature Physics.

Physicists from Würzburg present a nanometre-sized light antenna with electrically modulated surface properties – a breakthrough that could pave the way for faster computer chips.

Chunyu Guo, group leader in the Department for Microstructured Quantum Matter at the MPSD, has been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) for his Free-Kagome project. He will investigate the novel effects of electronic correlations in the recently discovered AV3Sb5 family of Kagome superconductors using a sophisticated framework that isolates the samples from external influences and makes it possible to control them with extremely high precision.

A new study led by Rice University’s Qimiao Si has unveiled a new class of quantum critical metal, shedding light on the intricate interactions of electrons within quantum materials. Published in Physical Review Letters on Sept. 6, the research explores the effects of Kondo coupling and chiral spin liquids within specific lattice structures.