Research News

No matter how exotic the innards of tomorrow’s quantum computers may be, users will still have to communicate with them using classical electronic circuits.

Suppose you needed to find the location of an electrical fault in a microchip running at a couple billion cycles per second. How would you do it? Answer: You could drill very small holes into the chip so that tiny voltage sensitive probes could reach in and measure what was happening at different places -- a slow and destructive process.

Twenty years after the discovery of high temperature superconductors, the mechanisms that cause those materials to lose electrical resistance remain unknown. To understand the phenomenon, researchers will have to determine precisely which aspects of a material’s atomic configuration contribute to superconductivity, and to measure telltale differences at the atomic scale between very slightly different arrangements in a material’s crystal lattice.

JQI researchers have demonstrated a specially interconnected pair of “squeezed light” beams, reduced-noise optical waves whose properties are related to each other to a degree greater than allowed by classical physics.