Research News

When your heart beats, blood courses through your veins in waves of pressure. These pressure waves manifest as your pulse, a regular rhythm unperturbed by the complex internal structure of the body. Scientists call such robust waves solitons, and in many ways they behave more like discrete particles than waves. Soliton theory may aid in the understanding of tsunamis, which—unlike other water waves—can sustain themselves over vast oceanic distances.

FROM NIST NEWS -- Next year, scientists expect to change the way we define the basic units with which we measure our universe. An article by scientists at JQI and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) written for teachers will help ensure high school physics students are hip to the 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.