Latest Joint Quantum Institute Stories

Tokyo, Jan 21, 2011 - (JCN Newswire) - Professor Kohei Itoh, who is developing quantum computers based on silicon semiconductors at Keio University's Faculty of Science and Technology, together with Dr. John Morton at Oxford University and others, has successfully generated and detected quantum entanglement between electron spin and nuclear spin in phosphorus impurities added to silicon. This is the world's first successful generation and detection of...

For most people, frustration is a condition to be avoided. But for scientists studying certain "frustrated" ensembles of interacting components "“ that is, those which cannot settle into a state that minimizes each interaction "“ it may be the key to understanding a host of puzzling phenomena that affect systems from neural networks and social structures to protein folding and magnetism.Frustration has typically been extremely difficult to study because even systems with...

Researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a collaboration of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland at College Park, can speed up photons (particles of light) to seemingly faster-than-light speeds through a stack of materials by adding a single, strategically placed layer. This experimental demonstration confirms intriguing quantum-physics predictions that light's transit time through complex multilayered materials need not depend on...

Achieving an important new capability in ultracold atomic gases, researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute, a collaboration of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland, have created "synthetic" magnetic fields for ultracold gas atoms, in effect "tricking" neutral atoms into acting as if they are electrically charged particles subjected to a real magnetic field. The demonstration, described in the latest issue of the journal...

Diamonds, it has long been said, are a girl's best friend. But a research team including a physicist from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has recently found* that the gems might turn out to be a patient's best friend as well.The team's work has the long-term goal of developing quantum computers, but it has borne fruit that may have more immediate application in medical science. Their finding that a candidate "quantum bit" has great sensitivity to magnetic...

Scientists have devised a new technique for real-time detection of freely moving individual neutral atoms that is more than 99.7% accurate and sensitive enough to discern the arrival of a single atom in less than one-millionth of a second, about 20 times faster than the best previous methods. The system, described in Advance Online Publication at the Nature Physics web site by researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) in College Park, MD, and the Universidad de Concepción in...

If physicists lived in Flatland"”the fictional two-dimensional world invented by Edwin Abbott in his 1884 novel"”some of their quantum physics experiments would turn out differently (not just thinner) than those in our world. The distinction has taken another step from speculative fiction to real-world puzzle with a paper* from the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) reporting on a Flatland arrangement of ultracold gas atoms. The new results, which don't quite jibe with earlier Flatland...

For the first time, scientists have successfully teleported information between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures a meter apart "“ a significant milestone in the global quest for practical quantum information processing.Teleportation may be nature's most mysterious form of transport: Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, without traveling through any physical medium. It has previously been...

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Joint Quantum Institute (NIST/University of Maryland) have developed a new method for creating pairs of entangled photons, particles of light whose properties are interlinked in a very unusual way dictated by the rules of quantum physics. The researchers used the photons to test fundamental concepts in quantum theory.In the experiment, the researchers send a pulse of light into both ends of a twisted loop of...

Ultracold atoms moving through a carefully designed arrangement of laser beams will jiggle slightly as they go, two NIST scientists have predicted.* If observed, this never-before-seen "jitterbug" motion would shed light on a little-known oddity of quantum mechanics arising from Paul Dirac's 80-year-old theory of the electron. Dirac's theory, which successfully married the principles of Einstein's relativity to the quantum property of electrons known as spin, famously predicted that the...