Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) physicists are on track to bring the institution’s new atomic fountain online – the largest of its kind in the world – for applications to quantum sensing experiments in precise navigation and timekeeping.

Yale researchers have figured out a better way to control the path of light on small chips, a breakthrough that could lead to better and cheaper sensors, smart phones, and other devices. Led by Prof. Peter Rakich, the results are published in Nature Photonics.

Now, applied physicists at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have invented a new type of interferometer that allows precise control of light’s frequency, intensity and mode in one compact package.

From 2035, the Einstein Telescope will be able to study gravitational waves with unprecedented accuracy. For the telescope, researchers from Jena have manufactured highly sensitive sensors made entirely of glass for the first time.

Today, physicists are still asking themselves whether quantum mechanics needs hypercomplex numbers. FAU researchers Ece Ipek Saruhan, Prof. Dr. Joachim von Zanthier and Dr. Marc Oliver Pleinert have been investigating this question in their research.

A research team led by Prof.GUO Guangcan from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC),collaborated with Prof.Jiannis K.Pachos from University of Leeds,has experimentally calculated the Jones polynomial based on the quantum simulation of braided Majorana zero modes.The research team determined the Jones polynomials of different links through simulate the braiding operations of Majorana fermions.This study was published in Physical Review Letters.

Physicists like to measure things, and they like those measurements to be as precise as possible. That means working at unfathomably small scales, where distances are much smaller than even the diameters of subatomic particles. Researchers also want to measure time down to a precision of less than one second per tens of billions of years. The quest for these ultraprecise measurements in physics is part of a growing field called quantum metrology.

The new design developed by Dash and the lab of U-M physicist Georg Raithel uses a special kind of laser beam that traps atoms in a pinwheel-shaped geometry, which can be scaled from a 30 micron radius, smaller than the diameter of a human hair, and up to about 10 times larger, about 300 microns. The researchers’ design is published in the journal AVS Quantum Science.

Prof. Michał Parniak and Michał Lipka from the University of Warsaw (UW) is Faculty of Physics developed a quantum-inspired super-resolving spectrometer for short pulses of light. In the future the device can be miniaturized on a photonic chip and applied in optical and quantum networks as well as in spectroscopic studies of matter. The invention was presented by the researchers in “Optica”.

Quantum researchers at The University of New Mexico and New Mexico State University received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to research the development of a photonic quantum computer that can operate at room temperature in a pilot program titled “Quantum Computing Applications of Photonics.”