Category: Highlights

Interconnecting different quantum systems is important for future quantum computing architectures, but has proven difficult to achieve. Researchers from the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), FOM and the University of Vienna have now realized a first step towards a universal quantum link based on quantum-mechanical vibrations of a nanomechanical device. The researchers’ findings were…

The Kondo effect – an intricate quantum phenomenon involving the spins of many electrons surrounding a magnetic atom – is already quite intriguing by itself. But an even higher level of complexity is reached when two coupled atoms are together Kondo-screened. Depending on the competition between the exchange interaction and the screening strength, combined with…

In optomechanics, light is used to control and detect mechanical motion. In order to achieve quantum superposition states of motion, researchers are in search of a platform which promises strong coupling between light and motion at single-photon level. Recently, Yuan et al. from the SteeleLab have introduced a new optomechanical platform based on 3D superconducting…

When electrons tunnel through an atom, they may lose energy in the process. Such inelastic cotunneling events render the atom in an excited state, either with a flipped spin or with an entirely different orbital filling. In a recent paper in Nano Letters of the Otte Lab, we report the observation of both types of cotunneling…

Simon Gröblacher co-authors a Hanbury Brown and Twiss type experiment with phonons performed at Caltech, which was recently published in the renowned journal Nature. Pioneering photon counting experiments, such as the intensity interferometry performed by Hanbury Brown and Twiss to measure the angular width of visible stars, have played a critical role in our understanding…

Coherence is a widely used concept in quantum mechanics. When a quantum system interacts with its environment, the loss of information about the phase of quantum states is defined as decoherence. Decoherence plays a crucial role in quantum information processing: in contrast to classical bits that suffer only from relaxation in the form of bit…

In physics, we are used to thinking about the motion of electrons driven by electric fields: electrons are attracted to regions of lower electrostatic potential, like a ball rolling down a hill. When we put a voltage across a resistor, electrons feel a force from the electric field and flow like a river to the…

Graphene is famous for the relativistic way that electrons in the material move, but more recently, researchers have started studying how the graphene sheet itself moves when you make it into a mechanical resonator like a drumhead. In our recent work in Nature Nanotechnology, we have used a superconducting microwave cavity coupled to a graphene…

Spin waves are the elementary excitations of any magnetic material and play an essential role in all magnetic dynamics, for example in the flipping of a bit on a hard disk. In Nature Materials, Spinelli et al. of the Otte Lab report the observation of individual spin waves in a self-built magnetic bit of only 6…

The cantilever is a prototype of a highly compliant mechanical system and has an instrumental role in nanotechnology, enabling surface microscopy, and ultrasensitive force and mass measurements. Here we report fluctuation-induced transitions between two stable states of a strongly driven microcantilever. Geometric nonlinearity gives rise to an amplitude-dependent resonance frequency and bifurcation occurs beyond a…