News: Research Highlights

260 articles

Mon, April 22, 2019

Direct Laser Cooling Rubidium Atoms

A group at MIT led by Vladan Vuletic has recently created a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) of rubidium atoms with a new method, direct laser cooling. Many researchers have attempted this elusive goal in the past, but due to various complications resorted to reaching BEC through evaporation instead. Compared to cooling through evaporation, laser cooling is...

News type: Research Highlights

Fri, April 19, 2019

Probing entanglement in a many-body-localized system

An interacting quantum system that is subject to disorder may cease to thermalize due to localization of its constituents, thereby marking the breakdown of thermodynamics. The key to our understanding of this phenomenon lies in the system’s entanglement, which is experimentally challenging to measure. We realize such a many-body-localized system in a disordered Bose-Hubbard chain...

News type: Research Highlights

Wed, March 13, 2019

Quantum sensing method measures minuscule magnetic fields

MIT researchers find a new way to make nanoscale measurements of fields, including information about their direction.

News type: Research Highlights

Tue, January 29, 2019

Spin Transport in a Mott Insulator of Ultracold Fermions

Superconductivity is a phenomenon in materials whereby electron pairs can flow freely without resistance. As a consequence, no energy is lost while electrical current passes through the superconductor. The benefits, therefore, of superconducting materials which operate at room temperature are countless, and range from revolutionizing the electrical power transmission industry, to providing sweeping improvements in...

News type: Research Highlights

Wed, October 17, 2018

Improved Measurement of the Electron’s Electric Dipole Moment

Although the Standard Model of particle physics, one of the triumphs of modern physics, accurately describes all particle physics measurements made in laboratories so far, it is unable to answer many questions that arise from cosmological observations, such as the long-standing puzzle of why matter dominates over antimatter throughout the observable universe. To explain these...

News type: Research Highlights

Tue, September 25, 2018

Honing quantum sensing

PhD student David Layden in the Quantum Engineering Group has a new approach to spatial noise filtering that boosts development of ultra-sensitive quantum sensors. New research from MIT’s interdisciplinary Quantum Engineering Group (QEG) is addressing one of the fundamental challenges facing these quantum sensor systems: removing environmental noise from the signal being measured. “The usual...

News type: Research Highlights

Sat, September 1, 2018

Laser-cooling and Optical Trapping of Diatomic Molecules

Ultracold molecules have been proposed as a rich resource for many applications ranging from precision measurements and quantum metrology to quantum simulation and quantum information processing. The benefits of molecules in all these applications arise from the many internal degrees of freedom in a molecule. For example, even with the simplest two-atom diatomic molecules, one...

News type: Research Highlights

Thu, June 14, 2018

Quantum state engineering of a Hubbard system with ultracold fermions

Accessing new regimes in quantum simulation requires the development of new techniques for quantum state preparation. We demonstrate the quantum state engineering of a strongly correlated many-body state of the two-component repulsive Fermi-Hubbard model on a square lattice. Our scheme makes use of an ultralow entropy doublon band insulator created through entropy redistribution. After isolating...

News type: Research Highlights

Fri, May 25, 2018

Single Molecule Results from the Ni Labs

Molecules are intrinsic coherent quantum system that have long been recognized as promising building blocks for quantum simulations, ideal natural laboratory to search for new physics, and a playground to answer fundamental questions in chemical reactions. Achieving full quantum control of molecules in bulk gases have been a forefront goal of the field that generally...

News type: Research Highlights

Thu, March 8, 2018

Scientists gain new visibility into quantum information transfer

Advance holds promise for “wiring” of quantum computers and other systems, and opens new avenues for understanding basic workings of the quantum realm.

News type: Research Highlights