Rolf Landauer, a unique physicist, dies
Landauer was born in Stuttgart in 1927 but had to leave Germany because his family was Jewish. He studied physics at Harvard University in the United States and joined IBM after two years at the Natio...
Optical computing moves forward
The pairs are created by illuminating a semiconductor quantum well with a pulsed laser diode. A slight voltage difference on the semiconductor keeps the electron and the hole in separate levels inside...
Putting the quantum brakes on light
Electromagnetically induced transparency relies on interference between different electronic transitions in an atom and has been used to make opaque media transparent at certain wavelengths in the pas...
Read article: Quantum solitons
Quantum solitons
Two of the most remarkable properties of light – squeezing and solitons – are being combined in a new generation of experiments that could revolutionize optics and communications
Macroscopic spin moves
James Kikkawa and David Awschalom of the University of California, Santa Barbara have now shown that they can use electric fields to transport electrons through a distance of 0.1 mm in gallium arsenid...
The force of acoustics
“The idea of using white noise to mimic zero-point fluctuations is clever, ” said Steve Lamoreaux of Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US. “The fundamentals are quite different f...
Microlasers get even smaller
Attempts to scale down current laser designs have been made before, but the devices were not efficient enough for real applications. Now a group of researchers from Darmstadt University of Technology,...
Quantum teleportation goes beyond two states
In quantum teleportation the quantum state of an object held by “Alice” is instantaneously sent to “Bob”. The technique works by sending one half of an “entangled” ...
Wireless quantum encryption
The technique is based on characteristics of individual photons that are generated randomly between the sender and the receiver. Although researchers have already transmitted quantum encryption keys t...
