For several decades, a central puzzle in quantum physics has remained unsolved: Could electrons behave like a perfect, frictionless fluid with electrical properties described by a universal quantum number? This unique property of electrons has been extremely difficult to detect in any material so far because of the presence ofContinue Reading
How can the behavior of elementary particles and the structure of the entire universe be described using the same mathematical concepts? This question is at the heart of recent work by the mathematicians Claudia Fevola from Inria Saclay and Anna-Laura Sattelberger from the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in theContinue Reading
It sounds like science fiction: a spacecraft, no heavier than a paperclip, propelled by a laser beam and hurtling through space at the speed of light toward a black hole, on a mission to probe the very fabric of space and time and test the laws of physics. But toContinue Reading
When a multimillion-dollar extraterrestrial vehicle gets stuck in soft sand or gravel — as did the Mars rover Spirit in 2009 — Earth-based engineers take over like a virtual tow truck, issuing a series of commands that move its wheels or reverse its course in a delicate, time-consuming effort toContinue Reading
Caltech scientists have found a fast and efficient way to add up large numbers of Feynman diagrams, the simple drawings physicists use to represent particle interactions. The new method has already enabled the researchers to solve a longstanding problem in the materials science and physics worlds known as the polaronContinue Reading
How gravity causes a perfectly spherical ball to roll down an inclined plane is part of elementary school physics canon. But the world is messier than a textbook. Scientists in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have sought to quantitatively describe the much moreContinue Reading
How can the strange properties of quantum particles be exploited to perform extremely accurate measurements? This question is at the heart of the research field of quantum metrology. One example is the atomic clock, which uses the quantum properties of atoms to measure time much more accurately than would beContinue Reading
To learn more about the nature of matter, energy, space, and time, physicists smash high-energy particles together in large accelerator machines, creating sprays of millions of particles per second of a variety of masses and speeds. The collisions may also produce entirely new particles not predicted by the standard model,Continue Reading
Konstantin Vodopyanov, a professor at the College of Sciences and CREOL, the College of Optics and Photonics, recently co-authored a study published in the journal Optica. This research examines electro-optic sampling (EOS), a technique that advances fields such as quantum physics, molecular spectroscopy and biomedical sensing. As a professor atContinue Reading
