News

Sat June 13, 2020

‘Photon crystals’ could be made using Rydberg atoms

Physicists in the US have come up with a way of making photons repel each other by sending them through an ultracold atomic gas. This astonishing feat could lead to the creation of “photon crystals” and exotic quantum states such as a Mott insulator.   Image caption: In vacuum optical system for photon-photon interactions.
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News type:
Research Highlights
Tue June 9, 2020

Black Lives Matter

CUA Equity Journal Club, every-other Wednesday at 1:30PM ET for students, postdocs, and faculty. Contact Alyssa Rudelis at rudelis@mit.edu for more details.
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Sun June 7, 2020

Entanglement-based Optical Atomic Clock beats the Standard Quantum Limit

Optical lattice clocks (OLC) are widely recognized as the next golden standard for timekeeping. Over the past decades, researchers around the world have made the second the best characterized among all seven of International System of Units (SI units), reaching an unprecedented fractional stability at few parts-of-ten-Quintillion (1019). Despite the tremendous effort of improving technology...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Mon May 18, 2020

Observing the path less traveled boosts quantum gain

When probing the subtle effects of quantum mechanics, all the parameters in the system and its measurements need to be finely tuned to observe the result you are hoping for. So what happens when you gear everything towards detecting what you least expect?
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Fri May 1, 2020

Committed to Caring Award, Paola Cappellaro

Quantum scientist Paola Cappellaro works to ensure students are at their “best state, and moving towards one better,” according to student nominators. Cappellaro effectively navigates the balance between attending closely to students’ needs while also giving them space to explore. Paola Cappellaro is a Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering. She leads the Quantum Engineering...
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News type:
Awards
Fri April 10, 2020

Bose polarons meet their fate at quantum criticality

An electron moving through the crystal lattice of a solid slightly attracts the ions on its path. The electron and the crystal deformations move together a “quasi-particle”, heavier than the bare electron – the so-called polaron. Such quasi-particles form the basis of descriptions of many solids. However, in modern materials, such as the high-temperature superconducting cuprates,...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Wed April 8, 2020

New “refrigerator” super-cools molecules to nanokelvin temperatures

For years, scientists have looked for ways to cool molecules down to ultracold temperatures, at which point the molecules should slow to a crawl, allowing scientists to precisely control their quantum behavior. This could enable researchers to use molecules as complex bits for quantum computing, tuning individual molecules like tiny knobs to carry out multiple...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Mon March 30, 2020

Searching for new boson with isotope shift spectroscopy

Dark matter is one of the main unknowns in our understanding of the universe. There are numerous types and classes of candidates for dark matter. Light-force carriers may be exciting candidates given their potential for displaying intra-atomic forces that may be probed with precision atomic spectroscopy. They are so-far-unknown elementary bosons that may carry mass...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Mon March 30, 2020

Squeezing space in a rotating quantum gas

In its most famous form, the Heisenberg uncertainty relation tells us that we cannot know both the position and momentum of a particle. The best we can do is to redistribute the intrinsic quantum uncertainty, for example by making position more precise at the expense of momentum, via a procedure known as squeezing. However, the...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Mon March 30, 2020

Repulsive photons in a quantum nonlinear medium

Photons, the smallest energy carriers of light, interact extremely weakly in vacuum. However, realizing strongly interacting photons at the individual photon level is fascinating, as it allows people to use light to control light. This opens the possibility to implement quantum information science, to design all-optical quantum devices, and to form novel quantum many-body states...
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News type:
Research Highlights