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.

Xiaoqian Chen, a physicist and beamline scientist at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been selected as one of the 91 early career scientists from across the country to receive research funding through the DOE Office of Science’s Early Career Research Program. This funding will aid Chen in researching the unique ways that particles interact to share information due to quantum mechanics.

In a first for Germany, researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have shown how so-called tin vacancies in diamonds can be precisely controlled using microwaves. These vacancies have special optical and magnetic properties and can be used as qubits, the smallest computational units for quantum computing and quantum communication. The results are an important step for the development of high-performance quantum computers and secure quantum communications networks. T

Physicists at Purdue University have developed an innovative method to detect the motion of individual particles in quantum materials. This work, led by Alex Ruichao Ma, assistant professor of Physics and Astronomy, offers new insights into the quantum world and paves the way for future discoveries in quantum science and technologies.

Spintronics uses the spins of electrons to perform logic operations or store information. Ideally, spintronic devices could operate faster and more energy-efficiently than conventional semiconductor devices. However, it is still difficult to create and manipulate spin textures in materials.

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.

Researchers worldwide are on the hunt to capture coherence, a unique and powerful feature of quantum mechanics in which individual particles like electrons or packets of light called photons sync up and behave as a larger whole. But observing such particles as they pair has been no easy feat with conventional microscopes based on classical physics principles. A quantum nano-scope is needed, and Columbia is preparing to build it.

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 study co-led by Nanyang Asst Prof Chang Guoqing of NTU’s School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences identified two types of van Hove singularities in the topological materials rhodium monosilicide (RhSi) and cobalt monosilicide (CoSi). They found that the van Hove singularities are near the Fermi level – the highest energy level that an electron can occupy at absolute zero temperature. In this situation, it is highly likely that the materials will exhibit desirable quantum properties, such as superconductivity and ferromagnetism.