Researchers at the University of Basel controlled normally forbidden vibrations in single nitrogen molecules using repeatable laser measurements that leave them intact.
This could support extremely accurate clocks and quantum bits.
Physics Guy@physicsguyResearchers at the University of Warsaw built a sensitive microwave detector from chilled Rydberg atoms.
Engineered interactions between the atoms made their state less prone to loss, letting the sensor capture three times as much information.
Physics Guy@physicsguyA team at Shanxi University in China says it has found a way around the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which limits how precisely paired properties like position and momentum can be known.
Rather than predicting the future, they combined data from before and after each measured moment. Using 52 billion rubidium atoms in a small glass chamber, they got results about 20 percent more precise than the limit allows.
The work is a preprint and has not yet been peer-reviewed. Heisenberg's limit still holds, but the approach gets around it to some extent.
Physics Guy@physicsguyA one-positron cyclotron could put a core Standard Model prediction to the test.
Positrons, antimatter versions of electrons, act like tiny magnets, and the model expects their magnetism to match the electron's in strength but reverse in sign.
Physics Guy@physicsguyResearchers have proposed a lab-scale quantum sensor to measure frame dragging from Earth's rotation. If built, it could match the 0.2% precision of the best satellite measurements in about 35 minutes.
The device would use a loop of superfluid helium-4 with a thin, perforated barrier. Earth's rotation would shift the rate at which the helium sloshes, and that shift is what gets measured.
The barrier is the hurdle, since its holes must be about 1 nanometer wide. Such materials are still in development, so no working sensor exists yet.
Physics Guy@physicsguyAn OpenAI-appointed committee led by physicist David Gross has verified the company's AI-generated proof that quantum Yang-Mills theory exists. That theory is a foundation for the Standard Model, which describes the subatomic particles we know about.
The panel posted its findings on November 10, confirming the proof passes formal checking in Lean, a programming language for verifying mathematics. Its members admit they don't yet fully understand the proof, and some mathematicians criticize the tightly controlled release.
