Fri, August 15, 2025

Professor Emeritus Daniel Kleppner, highly influential atomic physicist, dies at 92

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Thu, August 7, 2025

Famous double-slit experiment holds up when stripped to its quantum essentials

MIT physicists have performed an idealized version of one of the most famous experiments in quantum physics. Their findings demonstrate, with atomic-level precision, the dual yet evasive nature of light. They also happen to confirm that Albert Einstein was wrong about this particular quantum scenario. The experiment in question is the double-slit experiment, which was first...

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Tue, April 15, 2025

Prof. Vladan Vuletic Wins 2025 Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science

Prof Vuletic won the 2025 prize “for pioneering work on spin squeezing for optical atomic clocks, quantum nonlinear optics, and laser cooling to quantum degeneracy.”

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Wed, April 2, 2025

CUA Alumn Revolutionizes Baseball

When Aaron Leanhardt was a graduate student in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was part of a research team that cooled sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded in human history. What his colleagues didn’t realize was that in the rare moments when Leanhardt wasn’t toiling away at the lab, he was moonlighting...

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Tue, April 1, 2025

Norman Yao Wins 2025 I.I. Rabi Prize

Congratulations to CUA researcher Professor Norman Yao for winning the 2025 I.I. Rabi Prize “for pioneering contributions to broad areas of atomic, molecular, and optical physics, including quantum information, metrology, and many-body physics.”

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Mon, March 31, 2025

Intrinsic high-fidelity spin polarization of charged vacancies in hexagonal boron nitride

Spin defects in two-dimensional van der Waals materials have recently garnered significant interest, particularly for their potential as quantum sensing platforms due to their sub-nanometer proximity to the sample being probed. Among these, the negatively charged boron vacancy (VB-) centers in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) have been actively studied for their room-temperature optical polarizability and...

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Mon, January 27, 2025

Researchers make leap in quantum computing

Molecules haven’t been used in quantum computing, even though they have the potential to make the ultra-high-speed experimental technology even faster. Their rich internal structures were seen as too complicated, too delicate, too unpredictable to manage, so smaller particles have been used. But a team of Harvard scientists has succeeded for the first time in...

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Fri, December 20, 2024

Lukin Group wins Physics World Breakthrough of the Year 2024

The Physics World 2024 Breakthrough of the Year goes to Mikhail Lukin, Dolev Bluvstein and colleagues at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and QuEra Computing, and independently to Hartmut Neven and colleagues at Google Quantum AI and their collaborators, for demonstrating quantum error correction on an atomic processor with 48 logical qubits, and for implementing quantum error correction below the surface code threshold in a superconducting chip,...

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Tue, November 26, 2024

Maximum Entropy Principle in Deep Thermalization and in Hilbert-Space Ergodicity

The dynamics of systems consisting of many particles are very complicated and practically impossible to predict. For such systems, statistical physics has proven extremely useful, making highly accurate predictions for both quantum and classical systems. The central assumption behind statistical physics is the maximum entropy principle: A generic system reaches a state with maximum entropy,...

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Wed, November 20, 2024

Hilbert-Space Ergodicity in Driven Quantum Systems: Obstructions and Designs

Many-body quantum systems reach thermal equilibrium due to a property called quantum ergodicity. Despite its conceptual significance, there is no general definition of quantum ergodicity that is universally applicable to all scenarios. In quantum systems whose description remains unchanged with time, quantum ergodicity is defined through the system’s stationary configurations — certain states that do not...

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