Category Physics

An international team has successfully implemented an advanced form of quantum cryptography for the first time. Moreover, encryption is independent of the quantum device used and therefore even more secure against hacking attempts.

The Internet is teeming with highly sensitive information. Sophisticated encryption techniques generally ensure that such content cannot be intercepted and read. But in the future high-performance quantum computers could crack these keys in a matter of seconds. It is just as well, then, that quantum mechanical techniques not only enable new, much aster algorithms, but also exceedingly effective cryptography.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is secure against attacks on the communication channel, but not against attacks on or manipulations of the devices...

Cheap and quick to produce, these digitally manufactured plasma sensors could help scientists predict the weather or study climate change.

MIT scientists have created the first completely digitally manufactured plasma sensors for orbiting spacecraft...

Researchers at Oxford University’s Department of Materials, working in collaboration with colleagues from Exeter and Munster, have developed an on-chip optical processor capable of detecting similarities in datasets up to 1,000 times faster than conventional machine learning algorithms running on electronic processors.

The new research published in Optica took its inspiration from Nobel Prize laureate Ivan Pavlov’s discovery of classical conditioning. In his experiments, Pavlov found that by providing another stimulus during feeding, such as the sound of a bell or metronome, his dogs began to link the two experiences and would salivate at the sound alone...

A new study shows that nickel oxide superconductors, which conduct electricity with no loss at higher temperatures than conventional superconductors do, contain a type of quantum matter called charge density waves, or CDWs, that can accompany superconductivity.

The presence of CDWs shows that these recently discovered materials, also known as nickelates, are capable of forming correlated states — “electron soups” that can host a variety of quantum phases, including superconductivity, researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University reported in Nature Physics today.

“Unlike in any other superconductor we know about, CDWs appear even before we dope the material by replacing some atoms with others to change the number of elect...