interferometer tagged posts

First steps taken toward developing Interstellar lightsails

An artist's rendering showing a gray or silver square sail being pushed through space by a red laser beam. Earth is in the background.
The ultimate goal of the lightsail project is to drive a freely accelerating lightsail that is 10 square meters in area and 100 nm or less in thickness.Credit: Breakthrough Starshot / Breakthrough Initiatives

The idea of traveling through interstellar space using spacecraft propelled by ultrathin sails may sound like the stuff of sci-fi novels. But in fact, a program started in 2016 by Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner, known as the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, has been exploring the idea. The concept is to use lasers to propel miniature space probes attached to “lightsails” to reach ultrafast speeds and eventually our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.

Caltech is leading the worldwide community working toward achieving this audacious goal.

“The lightsail will travel faste...

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Experiment verifies a Connection between Quantum Theory and Information Theory

A connection between quantum theory and information theory proved
With the help of a new experiment, researchers at Linköping University, among others, have succeeded in confirming a 10-year-old theoretical study that connects one of the most fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics—the complementarity principle—with information theory. Credit: Magnus Johansson

Researchers from Linköping University together with colleagues from Poland and Chile have confirmed a theory that proposes a connection between the complementarity principle and entropic uncertainty. Their study is published in the journal Science Advances.

“Our results have no clear or direct application right now. It’s basic research that lays the foundation for future technologies in quantum information and quantum computers...

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Astrophysics: A direct view of Star/Disk Interactions

Artist’s impression of the streams of hot gas that build up stars. Matter from the surrounding protoplanetary disk, the birthplace of planets, is channeled onto the stellar surface by magnetic fields shocking the surface at supersonic velocity (Copyright: Mark A. Garlick).

A team including researchers from the Institute for Astrophysics of the University of Cologne has for the first time directly observed the columns of matter that build up newborn stars. This was observed in the young star TW Hydrae system located approximately 163 light years from Earth. This result was obtained with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) and its GRAVITY instrument of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile...

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First Frequency Comb of Time-Bin Entangled Qubits created

New device creates entangled photons that span the traditional telecommunications spectrum, making it appealing for multi-channel quantum communication and more powerful quantum computers. Credit: Michael Kues, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), University of Quebec, Canada

New device creates entangled photons that span the traditional telecommunications spectrum, making it appealing for multi-channel quantum communication and more powerful quantum computers. Credit: Michael Kues, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), University of Quebec, Canada

Discovery is a significant step toward multi-channel quantum communication and higher capacity quantum computers. An international team has built a chip that generates multiple frequencies from a robust quantum system that produces time-bin entangled photons. In contrast to other quantum state realizations, entangled photons don’t need bulky equipment to keep them in their quantum state, and they can transmit quantum information across long distances...

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