News

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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News type:
CUA in the News
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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News type:
Awards
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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News type:
Research Highlights
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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News type:
Research Highlights
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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News type:
CUA in the News
Research Highlights
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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News type:
Research Highlights
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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News type:
Research Highlights
Mon November 18, 2024

Emergent ferromagnetic states revealed in a geometrically frustrated triangular lattice

In a material, the way electrons align their spins to form a magnetic phase strongly depends on the geometry of the crystal they inhabit. In particular, triangular lattice geometries display an effect called geometrical frustration, where up and down spins cannot all be antialigned classically. This effect is thought to give rise to complex and...
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News type:
Research Highlights
Mon November 18, 2024

CUA scientists observe microemulsion phases in the quantum melting of an electron Wigner crystal

Electrons, as quantum particles, display wave-like behavior. Forming a crystalline phase of electrons requires not only cooling but also strong Coulomb (repulsive) forces to counteract their wave-like nature. When this balance is achieved, electrons can arrange into a Wigner crystal. By adjusting electron density, a phase transition between a crystalline and liquid state can occur....
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News type:
Research Highlights
Mon November 18, 2024

A Conveyor Belt MOT of Diatomic Molecules

Ultracold molecules provide a powerful and versatile platform for quantum computing,simulation, and metrology applications. The cornerstone technique for generating these cold, dense samples of molecular gasses is the magneto-optical trap (MOT). Conventional molecular MOTs use red-detuned light, limiting them to relatively high temperatures and low densities, leading to small spatial overlap and low loading efficiency...
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News type:
Research Highlights