Learn about the extinct species of "dirt ant" that was found in 16-million-year-old Dominican amber, adding an important piece to an evolutionary puzzle.
Even as NASA and its partners on the ISS shift to commercial space stations, NASA’s former deputy administrator believes there will still be a role for multilateral coordination.
Tracking global migration has long been hampered by poor, outdated data. Now researchers have harnessed social media data to create a near real-time map of international movement.
In this week's episode of Space Minds, Bill Nye, CEO of the Planetary Society sits down with host David Ariosto. The conversation starts with Bill's journey but quickly pivots to the proposed science budget cuts at NASA.
A key player in the European DeepTech market and a leading Polish space technology company, Creotech Instruments S.A., has signed the largest contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to […]
The Texas Space Commission has awarded more than $26 million to five companies in the latest round of awards designed to stimulate the state’s space industry.
GPS is not only a cornerstone to our military superiority, it is foundational to our national and global economic stability. In fact, analysts warn that GPS outages could cost our […]
Workers who recently lost their jobs at the National Institute for Occupational Safety say they’re concerned that there’s no plan for managing biological samples tied to research projects.
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope confirmed that the planet K2-18b has traces of dimethyl sulfide, a potential biosignature of marine microorganisms.
This podcast features Alonso Gutierrez, who is chief of medical physics at the Miami Cancer Institute in the US. In a wide-ranging conversation with Physics World’s Tami Freeman, Gutierrez talks about his experience using Elekta’s Leksell Gamma Knife for radiosurgery in a busy radiotherapy department.
Learn how the boundaries of the magma chamber beneath Yellowstone have been located, and discover how these boundaries hint at the volcano’s future behavior.
A concept from quantum information theory appears to explain at least some of the peculiar behaviour of so-called “strange” metals. The new approach, which was developed by physicists at Rice University in the US, attributes the unusually poor electrical conductivity of these metals to an increase in the quantum entanglement of their electrons. The team say the approach could advance our understanding of certain high-temperature superconductors and other correlated quantum structures.
While electrons can travel through ordinary metals such as gold or copper relatively freely, strange metals resist their flow. Intriguingly, some high-temperature superconductors have a strange metal phase as well as a superconducting one. This phenomenon that cannot be explained by conventional theories that treat electrons as independent particles, ignoring any interactions between them.
To unpick these and other puzzling behaviours, a team led by Qimiao Si turned to the concept of quantum Fisher information (QFI). This statistical tool is typically used to measure how correlations between electrons evolve under extreme conditions. In this case, the team focused on a theoretical model known as the Anderson/Kondo lattice that describes how magnetic moments are coupled to electron spins in a material.
Correlations become strongest when strange metallicity appears
These analyses revealed that electron-electron correlations become strongest at precisely the point at which strange metallicity appears in a material. “In other words, the electrons become maximally entangled at this quantum critical point,” Si explains. “Indeed, the peak signals a dramatic amplification of multipartite electron spin entanglement, leading to a complex web of quantum correlations between many electrons.”
What is striking, he adds, is that this surge of entanglement provides a new and positive characterization of why strange metals are so strange, while also revealing why conventional theory fails. “It’s not just that traditional theory falls short, it is that it overlooks this rich web of quantum correlations, which prevents the survival of individual electrons as the elementary objects in this metallic substance,” he explains.
To test their finding, the researchers, who report their work in Nature Communications, compared their predictions with neutron scattering data from real strange-metal materials. They found that the experimental data was a good match. “Our earlier studies had also led us to suspect that strange metals might host a deeply entangled electron fluid – one whose hidden quantum complexity had yet to be fully understood,” adds Si.
The implications of this work are far-reaching, he tells Physics World. “Strange metals may hold the key to unlocking the next generation of superconductors — materials poised to transform how we transmit energy and, perhaps one day, eliminate power loss from the electric grid altogether.”
The Rice researchers say they now plan to explore how QFI manifests itself in the charge of electrons as well as their spins. “Until now, our focus has only been on the QFI associated with electrons spins, but electrons also of course carry charge,” Si says.
Boeing announced April 16 it has built the ground-based twin for a mission aiming to demonstrate quantum networking in space, marking a key milestone ahead of launching a small satellite called Q4S next year.
Learn about Mars' defunct magnetic field, which may have sustained life on the planet and covered only its southern hemisphere over 4 billion years ago.
A recent study could help repurpose existing drugs, develop new medicines targeted to broad disease processes, and eventually lead to a personalized approach.
Connexion
Science Magazine
SpaceNews
Wired
