Not only do optical fibers transmit information every day around the world at the speed of light, but they can also be harnessed for the transport of quantum information. In the current issue of Nature Photonics, a research team of Innsbruck physicists led by Rainer Blatt and Tracy Northup report how they have directly transferred the quantum information stored in an atom onto a particle of light. Such information could then be sent over optical fiber to a distant atom.
An old material gets a new name, and with it, topological insulators have another chance to shine. Samarium hexaboride (SmB6) has been around since the late 1960s--but understanding its low temperature behavior has remained a mystery until recently. Experimentalists* have recently confirmed that this material is the first true 3D topological insulator—as originally predicted by JQI/CMTC☨ theorists in 2010.
Scientists from the University of Cambridge have created, for the first time, a new type of microchip which allows information to travel in three dimensions. Currently, microchips can only pass digital information in a very limited way – from either left to right or front to back. The research was published today, 31 January, in Nature.
Two CQT researchers have today been named recipients of Singapore's prestigious NRF Fellowship.
An international team of researchers has found a new method of producing molecular magnets. Their thin layer systems made of cobalt and an organic material could pave the way for more powerful storage media as well as faster and more energy-efficient processors for information processing. The results of this research have been published in the current issue of the renowned journal Nature (DOI: 10.1038/nature11719).
Silica microwires are the tiny and as-yet underutilized cousins of optical fibers. If precisely manufactured, however, these hair-like slivers of silica could enable applications and technology not currently possible with comparatively bulky optical fiber. By carefully controlling the shape of water droplets with an ultraviolet laser, a team of researchers from Australia and France has found a way to coax silica nanoparticles to self-assemble into much more highly uniform silica wires.
With his research on quantum states in the realm between order and disorder, Professor Jörg Schmiedmayer's work has raised quite a stir; ultra cold atom clouds with a high degree of order approach a disordered thermal equilibrium.
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Basic Sciences category has been granted jointly to mathematicians Ingrid Daubechies and David Mumford "for their works in pure mathematics, which have strongly influenced diverse fields of application ranging from data compression to pattern recognition," in the words of the jury's citation.
Three University of California, Riverside scientists and engineers are members of a new national research center — the Center for Spintronic Materials, Interfaces, and Novel Architectures (C-SPIN) — focused on developing the next generation of microelectronics. Led by the University of Minnesota, C-SPIN is being supported by a five-year $28 million grant, about $3 million of which is allocated to UC Riverside.
In early 2011, a pair of theoretical computer scientists at MIT proposed an optical experiment that would harness the weird laws of quantum mechanics to perform a computation impossible on conventional computers. Commenting at the time, a quantum-computing researcher at Imperial College London said that the experiment “has the potential to take us past what I would like to call the ‘quantum singularity,’ where we do the first thing quantumly that we can’t do on a classical computer.”