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Most researchers would agree that it is much easier to write a paper about an observed effect than a paper proving the nonexistence of the effect when it is not observed. NIST JILA Fellow Ralph Jimenez found this to be the case in contributing to a recent paper published in Physical Review Applied. The authors of this paper were originally hoping to observe the increased efficiency in two-photon absorption, a special type of process used in microscopy of living tissue, that had been reported by other research labs. This increased efficiency would be determined by an additional absorption signal than the one being produced by classical light. This additional signal came from using entangled photons. Instead, Jimenez and his team of collaborators from NIST found no additional signal in their measurements, indicating a lack of absorption entirely from the entangled photons.

The word “quantum” can be mysterious and unfamiliar to the general public. Most of the public’s exposure to quantum technology has been Hollywoodized and framed as a “catch-all” for hard-to-define scientific processes. This misunderstanding causes problems, as quantum technology is quickly being developed and commercialized. With the  “boom” in quantum technology predicted by experts, it is important to realize the repercussions of this misunderstanding. Particularly, writers, scientists, and citizens need to be aware of how to communicate and invoke to the public, an appreciation of the true science of quantum physics.

The idea of quantum simulation has only become more widely researched in the past few decades. Quantum simulators allow for the study of a quantum system that would be difficult to study easily and quickly in a laboratory or model with a supercomputer. A new paper published in Physical Review Letters, by a collaboration between theorists in the Rey Group and experimentalists in the Thompson laborator,y proposes a way to engineer a quantum simulator of superconductivity that can measure phenomena so far inaccessible in real materials.

An international team of scientists, including a ��ñ���� researcher, has taken the most detailed look yet at the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy called Messier 87. The results suggest the celestial object is surrounded by strong magnetic fields—key ingredients that could help generate galaxy-length jets of particles that shoot out around it.

In a significant advance toward the future redefinition of the international unit of time, the second, a research team led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has compared three of the world’s leading atomic clocks with record accuracy over both air and optical fiber links.

In a new paper, JILA physicist Thomas Perkins collaborated with CU Biochemistry Prof. Marcello Sousa to dissect the mechanisms of how certain bacteria become more virulent. The research brings together the Perkins lab expertise in single-molecule studies and the Sousa lab expertise in the type III secretion system, a key component of Salmonella bacteria.

Entangled particles have always fascinated physicists, as measuring one entangled particle can result in a change in another entangled particle, famously dismissed as “spooky action at a distance” by Einstein. By now, physicists understand this strange effect and how to make use of it, for example to increase the sensitivity of measurements. However, entangled states are very fragile, as they can be easily disrupted by decoherence. Researchers have already created entangled states in atoms, photons, electrons and ions, but only recently have studies begun to explore entanglement in gases of polar molecules.

When looking within a quantum internet, the Sun Lab is looking at specifically photons. By entangling these photons, scientists tie little quantum knots between them, so they jointly represent the information to be delivered. The photons aren’t just paired off within these quantum knots. They’re connected to hundreds of other photons in a tree-shaped pattern. The robust redundancy of these photons means that scientists can still read the information, even if a few photons are lost.

For nearly a century, scientists have worked to unravel the mystery of dark matter—an elusive substance that spreads through the universe and likely makes up much of its mass, but has so far proven impossible to detect in experiments. Now, a team of researchers have used an innovative technique called “quantum squeezing” to dramatically speed up the search for one candidate for dark matter in the lab.

For the first time, researchers can turn on an electric field to manipulate molecular interactions, get them to cool down further, and start to explore collective physics where all molecules are coupled to each other.