Category archives: Quantum physics

Last year’s Nobel Prize in Physics celebrated the fundamental interest of quantum entanglement, and also envisioned the potential applications in “the second quantum revolution” — a new age when we are able to manipulate the weirdness of quantum mechanics, including quantum superposition and entanglement. A large-scale and fully functional quantum network is the holy grail […]

A model of a physical system that can be solved exactly and the dynamics of which are characterized by regular rather than chaotic motion is called an integrable model. Integrable models can occur in Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics, with the harmonic oscillator being an example of such a model in both cases. Integrability has […]

For the first time, scientists have entangled atoms for use as networked quantum sensors, specifically, atomic clocks and accelerometers. The research team’s experimental setup yielded ultraprecise measurements of time and acceleration. Compared to a similar setup that does not draw on quantum entanglement, their time measurements were 3.5 times more precise, and acceleration measurements exhibited […]

Entanglement is the purest and most important quantum property. Unlike classical systems, quantum objects can be connected independently of their distance and if we perform a measurement in one part the other one is affected instantaneously. Intuitively, this can be considered a violation of relativity because this theory states that no information can travel faster […]

Nearly a century after dark matter was first proposed to explain the motion of galaxy clusters, physicists still have no idea what it’s made of. Researchers around the world have built dozens of detectors in hopes of discovering dark matter. As a graduate student, I helped design and operate one of these detectors, aptly named […]

Density functional theory (DFT) is a theoretical treatment of molecules in which the electron density is considered rather than the wave functions of individual electrons. In other words, it is a way of describing many-electron, in general, many-fermion, systems in which the energy is a funtional of the density of electrons (fermions). DFT is without […]

Topological materials have special universal properties, which are protected against perturbations. Such properties are theoretically described by topology, a branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of geometrical objects that are unchanged by continuous deformations. Topological materials behave like an ordinary insulator in the bulk but have conducting states on their boundaries, i.e., edges or […]

Symmetries play a fundamental role in Physics, and more specifically in Quantum Physics. It is well known that symmetries lead to degeneracy and to conserved currents in closed quantum systems (meaning that they do not interact with an environment). In the more realistic scenario of Open Quantum Systems (meaning that the quantum system does interact […]

The most famous conjecture in condensed-matter physics was proposed in 1935, when Hillard Huntington and Eugene Wigner calculated the properties of hydrogen squeezed to high density and pressure. They predicted that under pressures above 25 gigapascals (GPa), hydrogen would undergo a density-driven transition from an insulating, molecular solid to a conducting, atomic solid . In […]

Light emission from emitters is a valuable piece of information in a variety of sensing and detection techniques, capable of labeling physical and biological processes which occur in the proximity of the emitter. Furthermore, quantum technologies are currently exploiting the statistics of single-emitters light emission aiming at turning particular emitters into fundamental units to sustain […]