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Physicists at Columbia University have taken molecules to a new ultracold limit and created a state of matter where quantum mechanics reigns.

There’s a hot new BEC in town that has nothing to do with bacon, egg, and cheese. You won’t find it at your local bodega, but in the coldest place in New York: the lab of Columbia physicist Sebastian Will, whose experimental group specializes in pushing atoms and molecules to temperatures just fractions of a degree above absolute zero.

Writing in Nature, the Will lab, supported by theoretical collaborator Tijs Karman at Radboud University in the Netherlands, has successfully created a unique quantum state of matter called a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) out of molecules.

There is quanta of space time just as there is for particles and fields created by entanglement or liebnitz was right and spacetime are relational entities.

Scientists believe that spacetime may have emerged, in part, from a quantum property called “magic.”

Using an atomic array originally designed for quantum memory, researchers have demonstrated a magnetometer with unprecedented spatial resolution.

Quantum simulators are now addressing complex physics problems, such as the dynamics of 1D quantum magnets and their potential similarities to classical phenomena like snow accumulation. Recent research confirms some aspects of this theory, but also highlights challenges in fully validating the KPZ universality class in quantum systems. Credit: Google LLC

Quantum simulators are advancing quickly and can now tackle issues previously confined to theoretical physics and numerical simulation. Researchers at Google Quantum AI and their collaborators demonstrated this new potential by exploring dynamics in one-dimensional quantum magnets, specifically focusing on chains of spin-1/2 particles.

Continue reading “Google’s Quantum AI Challenges Long-Standing Physics Theories” »

ICTP lectures “Topology and dynamics of higher-order networks”

- Network topology: 1 https://youtube.com/watch?v=mbmsv9RS3Pc

Continue reading “CMSP series of lectures on ‘Topology and dynamics of higher-order networks’: lecture 3” »

The accelerated expansion of the present universe, believed to be driven by a mysterious dark energy, is one of the greatest puzzles in our understanding of the cosmos. The standard model of cosmology called Lambda-CDM, explains this expansion as a cosmological constant in Einstein’s field equations. However, the cosmological constant itself lacks a complete theoretical understanding, particularly regarding its very small positive value.

In solids, the quantum metric captures the quantum coherence of the electron wavefunctions. Recent experiments demonstrate the detection and manipulation of the quantum metric in a noncollinear topological antiferromagnet at room temperature.

The results are “fantastic”, says Yan. They will “really inspire and stimulate the rest of the cold-molecules community”

Exotic phases

Molecular Bose–Einstein condensates could be used in myriad ways. One possibility, says Valtolina, is to create exotic supersolid phases, in which a rigid material flows without resistance. So far this has been achieved only in atomic gases with magnetic interactions — it could now be done in polar molecules, whose interactions are “way stronger”, he says.

They say that one can miss the forest for the trees. But it’s often worth taking a closer look at the trees to make sense of the dense, brambly whole. That’s what a Stanford University group did to tackle a thorny quantum-information problem in diamond.