All articles tagged with #rydberg atoms
A team led by Hendrik Hegels at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany has created the largest optical 'Schrödinger's cat' state to date. By utilizing Rydberg atoms, which have electrons loosely bound to their nuclei, the researchers achieved a superposition size of alpha squared 2.4, surpassing the previous record of 1.4. This experiment helps probe the boundary between quantum and classical physics.
Researchers directly measure the finite-size energy spectra of emergent conformal field theories at quantum critical points using a programmable Rydberg-atom chain, resolving Ising and tricritical Ising CFT spectra via modulation spectroscopy and boundary-condition control, and demonstrating a method to diagnose universality classes and study dynamical structure factors in quantum simulators.
Physicists in China simulated false vacuum decay in a tabletop setup using a ring of Rydberg atoms and site-selective lasers to engineer a landscape with false and true vacuum states; stronger symmetry-breaking lasers drive faster decay and a bubble of true vacuum forms, marking a lab-based stepping stone toward studying quantum tunneling processes that could, in theory, trigger a universe-scale phase transition.
Physicists in China simulated a false vacuum decay using a lab-based ring of Rydberg atoms; by applying a stronger symmetry-breaking laser, they observed faster decay of the false vacuum and formation of a bubble containing a true vacuum, marking a step toward understanding the dynamics of such events and informing discussions about a hypothetical universe-ending scenario, though such a doomsday outcome remains exceedingly unlikely.
Physicists at Tsinghua University used a ring of highly excited Rydberg atoms to simulate false vacuum decay, engineering two competing vacuum states that act like false and true vacua. By breaking symmetry with lasers, the ring transitions toward the true vacuum, producing a quantum bubble that mirrors how a lower-energy state could nucleate and, in theory, sweep across the cosmos. The experiment provides a controllable platform to study the quantum–relativistic crossover and test predictions about how such a transition might unfold in principle, without posing any danger to reality.
A Warsaw research team developed a quantum antenna using Rydberg atoms to detect and calibrate terahertz signals with high precision at room temperature, opening new possibilities in terahertz spectroscopy and measurement standards.
Scientists have developed a novel method to measure time at the quantum level using the interference patterns of Rydberg wave packets, which do not require a fixed starting point, enabling extremely precise timing of events as short as 1.7 trillionths of a second.
Researchers at EPFL developed a new numerical approach using Rydberg atom lattices to simulate and predict the properties of quantum spin liquids, including topological entanglement entropy, enabling better understanding of these complex quantum states without relying on approximations.