Category Physics

Single atom resolved fluorescence image of a band insulator of fermionic lithium in an optical lattice. Credit: MPQ, Quantum Many Body Systems Division

Today, quantum optical experiments provide methods to prove the rules math equations. In this regard, scientists in the Quantum Many-Body Division at Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics have made a big step forward.

The “exclusion principle” was formulated by the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1925 in order to explain the structure and the stability of atoms. Dr. Christian Groß’s team demonstrated the first direct observation of “Pauli blocking”, a consequence of the exclusion principle. To this end, they cooled a cloud of fermionic lithium-6 atoms down to extremely low temperatures and loaded the particles into an optical lattice...

Human computation (HC), which encompasses methods such as crowdsourcing, citizen science, and distributed knowledge collection offers new promise for addressing wicked problems, by enabling participatory sensing, group intelligence, and collective action at unprecedented scales.

The combination of human and computer intelligence might be just what we need to solve the “wicked” problems of the world, such as climate change and geopolitical conflict, say researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University. They present a new vision of human computation (the science of crowd-powered systems), which pushes beyond traditional limits, and takes on hard problems that until recently have remained out of reach.

Humans surpass machines at many things, ranging from simple pa...

HyQ2 is a quadruped that has been in high focus at the Italian Institute of Technology’s Dynamic Legged Systems lab. They have been getting it disaster-ready for search and rescue missions and for environment disasters.

This DLS lab makes high-performance, versatile legged robots. Their torque-controlled hydraulic quadruped robot HyQ is their flagship platform. They need to know if the robot can get back on its feet even if it is completely knocked over. The HyQ robot was developed at the IIT in Genoa. The lab works on achieving accurate hydraulic force/ torque control at the joint level. They explore a variety of different locomotion gaits, strong enough to withstand external disturbances and changing environmental conditions.

A significant part of our groups’ effort is devoted to percept...

Fountain interferometer. Credit: Nature (2015). DOI: 10.1038/nature16155

Scientists entangling quantum particles and even whole atoms has been in the news a lot over the past couple of years as experiments have been conducted with the goal of attempting to better understand the strange phenomenon—and much has been learned. But, as scientists figure out how to entangle two particles at ever greater distances apart there has come questions about the size of objects that can be entangled. Schrödinger’s cat has come up in several such discussions as theorists and those in the applied fields seek to figure out if it might be truly possible to cause a whole cat to actually be in two places at once...