Physics News

It was a head-spinning discovery. In 2018, researchers in Japan claimed to find concrete evidence of an elusive particle, a Majorana fermion, in a quantum spin liquid called ruthenium trichloride. Majoranas are highly sought-after by quantum materials scientists because when a pair are localized, or trapped, they can securely encode information and form a stable qubit—the building block of quantum computing.

A new method developed at LMU overcomes fundamental resolution limits and may provide insights into high-temperature superconductivity. Physicist Dr. Sebastian Paeckel has developed a method that can be used to calculate spectral functions of complex quantum systems much more precisely than was possible previously. His approach reconstructs precise energy spectra without requiring lengthy calculations.

When you throw a ball in the air, the equations of classical physics will tell you exactly what path the ball will take as it falls, and when and where it will land. But if you were to squeeze that same ball down to the size of an atom or smaller, it would behave in ways beyond anything that classical physics can predict.

One of the biggest open questions in particle physics today is how the Higgs boson interacts with itself. This “self-coupling” could help explain the evolution of the early universe and the mechanism that gives mass to elementary particles. To try to shed light on this fundamental interaction, the ATLAS Collaboration has recently studied one of the “golden” decay channels of a pair of Higgs bosons, where one Higgs boson decays into two photons and the other into a pair of bottom quarks.

An international team of physicists has achieved a significant advance in laser science, demonstrating for the first time a practical route to dramatically boosting the intensity of high-power laser light.