Professor Stephen Blundell from the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford has been awarded the 2024 Institute of Physics Lawrence Bragg Medal and Prize. The IOP gold medal recognises Professor Blundell’s contributions to physics scholarship and education through the publication of widely-used and influential physics textbooks.

A research team led by Academician Guo Guangcan, Prof. GUO Guoping and Prof. LI Haiou from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), collaborating with Researcher ZHANG Jianjun from the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) achieved coherent population trapping (CPT) in a semiconductor double quantum dot (DQD) system. Their work was published in Nano Letters.

Researchers from IBEC and ICFO demonstrate the ability of atomic sensors to non-destructively monitor, measure and optimize nuclear spin hyperpolarization of some clinically relevant molecules in real-time. These features, reported in PNAS, could enhance and reduce costs of quality controls used in clinical magnetic resonance imaging.

Dr. Habib Rostami, from the Department of Physics at the University of Bath, has co-authored pioneering research published in Advanced Science. This study involved an international collaboration between an experimental team at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany and theoretical teams at the University of Pisa in Italy and the University of Bath in the UK. The research aimed to investigate the ultrafast opto-electronic and thermal tuning of nonlinear optics in graphene.

Led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) with Sandia National Laboratories as the lead partner, QSA brings together an ecosystem of 15 institutions in North America. With over 60 principal investigators, 130 staff, 91 postdocs, and 139 students, QSA advances national particle physics research by co-designing across institutions.

In a Nature Reviews Physics perspective article, researchers overview the latest advances regarding quantum phenomena within attosecond science, which are often overlooked despite their potential to influence experimental and theoretical outcomes.

A recent collaboration between the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago addresses this problem by using the using the environment as a help, instead of a hindrance. In using the environment of superconducting qubits, sometimes referred to as a reservoir, the researchers show that more stable entanglement can be created.

And now, we can say that this strange effect is much more ubiquitous than we previously expected as the Trinity QuSys team, led by Prof. John Goold from the School of Physics, has just published a fascinating research paper in the journal Physical Review Letters. The paper outlines their breakthrough in understanding the effect in the very different – and extremely complex – world of quantum physics.

Building on six successful years of quantum collaboration, the Max Planck–New York Center on Non-Equilibrium Quantum Phenomena will officially continue its work for an additional five years. The renewed funding comes from Columbia University, the Flatiron Institute, the MPSD and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany. The Center will also expand to include a new partner institution, Cornell University.

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.