When describing collective properties of macroscopic physical systems, microscopic fluctuations are typically averaged out, leaving a description of the typical behavior of the systems. While this simplification has its advantages, it fails to capture the important role of fluctuations that can often influence the dynamics in dramatic manners, as the extreme examples of catastrophic events […]

Acoustic frequency filters, which convert electrical signals into miniaturized sound waves, separate the different frequency bands for mobile communications, Wi-Fi, and GPS in smartphones. Physicists at RPTU have now shown that such miniaturized sound waves can couple strongly with spin waves in yttrium iron garnet. This results in novel hybrid spin-sound waves in the gigahertz […]

Researchers at the University of Sydney have cracked a long-standing problem in microchip-scale lasers by carving tiny “speed bumps” into the devices’ optical cavity in their quest to produce exceptionally “clean” light. This exquisitely narrow spectrum light could be used in future quantum computers, advanced navigation systems, ultra-fast communications networks and precision sensors.

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Quantum thermal machines are devices that leverage quantum mechanical effects to convert energy into useful work or cooling, similarly to traditional heat engines or refrigerators. Thermodynamics theory suggests that increasing the reliability with which all thermal machines produce the same thermodynamic processes in time comes at a cost, such as the wasted heat or the […]

Exceptional points (EPs) are non-Hermitian singularities where two or more eigenstates coalesce, resulting in the eigenspace collapsing in dimensionality. Over the past decade, researchers have uncovered a wealth of exotic phenomena near EPs.

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In spaces smaller than a wavelength of light, electric currents jump from point to point and magnetic fields corkscrew through atomic lattices in ways that defy intuition. Scientists have only ever dreamed of observing these marvels directly.

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University of Houston researchers developed a new X-ray imaging method capable of revealing hidden features in a single shot, a breakthrough that could advance cancer detection, disease monitoring, security screening and material analysis.

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The quantum world is famously weird—a single particle can be in two places at once, its properties are undefined until they are measured, and the very act of measuring a quantum system changes everything. But according to new research published in Physical Review Letters, the quantum world is even stranger than previously thought.

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