Long polymer chains are everywhere: in synthetic materials, soft matter, biological systems such as chromosomes, and mathematical models of filaments and knots. When many such chains are densely packed, they form what physicists ...
When different materials transition from one phase to another, such as water coming to a boil or a magnet losing its ability to attract metals, something remarkable can happen: They begin to behave identically, following ...
Optical fibers are already the backbone of global communication systems. Recently, however, physicists have started to explore how their functionality could be boosted further by conveying information via entangled quantum ...
Quantum sensors, devices that collect measurements by exploiting quantum-mechanical phenomena, could potentially detect extremely weak magnetic, gravitational and electromagnetic signals with greater sensitivity than classical ...
A study has been published in Nature Communications that identifies an unusual regime of quantum oscillations in a three-dimensional topological insulator. The results show that, when subjected to temperatures near absolute ...
When one mentions "waves," we immediately think of a perturbation that propagates. This applies to waves on the shore, sound waves in the air or electromagnetic waves that we use to transmit information via optical fibers. ...
Latin squares are arrangements of symbols in a grid in which every symbol appears exactly once in each row and column. These symbol arrangements, which were first studied more than three centuries ago, are now widely used ...
Using light to process quantum information is one of the most promising approaches to building future quantum computers. Light particles, known as photons, are excellent carriers of quantum information, but their lack of ...
In Goethe's ballad "Erlkönig," immortalized in Schubert's fevered 1815 setting, a dying boy riding through the night sees a spectral king beckoning from the darkness. His father calms him: "Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif"—my ...
Three years after a team of Caltech scientists showed that pairs of entangled photons could double the resolution of a light microscope, the same lab has figured out a way to double down on that improvement. They have now ...
