Topic
Devices that exploit quantum phenomena, including entanglement, to detect weak magnetic, gravitational and electromagnetic signals.
EPFL researchers built a chip laser that held its frequency lock from 154 to 300 milliamps of drive current with no active electronic control. It brings mass-producible semiconductor lasers closer to portable clocks and quantum sensors, though only a laboratory device has been shown so far.
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University of Glasgow physicists turned a laser's frequency into the rotation of a camera image, where a 1 MHz shift moves the pattern almost 6 degrees. Its sub-megahertz resolution still trails the kilohertz-level precision of the best existing frequency measurements.
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Quantum jumps were caught in trapped ions in 1986 and in photons in 2007. A resonator that rings for two milliseconds, read out by a superconducting qubit, now shows a single phonon going to zero as it happens.
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A USTC team moved an entangled state off the electron spins of silicon carbide color centers and onto two silicon nuclei, where it survived hundreds of microseconds without cooling, then brought it back to the electron to read out.
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A team led by Mingsheng Zhan compared the freefall of two rubidium isotopes aboard the China Space Station. The 2.8 x 10^-8 uncertainty they report is the best any quantum test has managed. It is also well short of what macroscopic experiments already do.
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Stanford physicists report in Science the first real-time observation of quantum jumps of sound, using a superconducting qubit to check a mechanical resonator hundreds of times during its two milliseconds of vibration.
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A German project measured cardiac magnetism using nitrogen-vacancy centers in a diamond of less than half a cubic millimetre, working at room temperature and off the skin.
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Transition-edge sensors cooled near absolute zero measured the X-ray lines that sit inside the gamma-ray band used to identify nuclear material. Anyone who wants one also has to buy the refrigerator that keeps it cold.
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Sandia's headline number describes the light delivered to the atoms inside a vacuum chamber, and the question for anyone sizing a deployed unit is what the lasers, electronics and pumps around it draw.
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A Stevens-led paper in JOSA B swaps one strong laser pulse for 12 weak ones, each with its own timing, intensity, frequency and phase, keeping the field at every step below where multiphoton pathways open. The work is theoretical.
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Honeywell's sensor read the Earth's crust well enough to navigate an Embraer 170 home over open water, and the notable part is how little of the aircraft had to change. A civil version has no date yet.
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Q-CTRL's trial moves gravity-based navigation from lab result toward shipboard fitting, which means the hard questions now sit with map coverage and with how much error piles up on a long unaided run.
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NIST says it ran a superconducting single-photon wire out to a tenth of a millimeter by fencing it with current-carrying rails. The 98% detection figure still belongs to the narrow devices.
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A 2027 Colorado field test will try to show that quantum gravity gradiometry can rank targets before the rigs arrive. The site, the date and the success bar are all still unnamed.
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A variational circuit searched a seven-qubit nuclear-spin sensor for the probe state that works in the noise it actually has, rather than the one theory prefers in a clean world.
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