Research News

If the looming holiday lull leaves you yearning for news from the quantum world, JQI has you covered. Below we present an overivew of our major research and outreach activities from the past year, which marked JQI’s tenth anniversary.

From credit card numbers to bank account information, we transmit sensitive digital information over the internet every day. Since the 1990s, though, researchers have known that quantum computers threaten to disrupt the security of these transactions.

That’s because quantum physics predicts that these computers could do some calculations far faster than their conventional counterparts. This would let a quantum computer crack a common internet security system called public key cryptography.

This is part two of a two-part series on Weyl semimetals and Weyl fermions, newly discovered materials and particles that have drawn great interest from physicists at JQI and the Condensed Matter Theory Center at the University of Maryland. The second part focuses on the theoretical questions about Weyl materials that Maryland researchers are exploring. Part one, which was published last week, introduced their history and basic physics.

A trio of researchers who laid the foundation for understanding numerous exotic phases of matter have split the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize "for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter" to three laureates: David Thouless of the University of Washington, Duncan Haldane of Princeton University and Michael Kosterlitz of Brown University.