News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Measuring the energy of quantum states requires detecting energy changes so exceptionally small they are hard to pick out from background fluctuations, like using only a thermometer to try and work out if someone has blown out a candle in the room you're in. New research in Nature Communications from a team in Finland presents sensitive quantum thermometry hitting the bounds that nature allows.

US and Austrian physicists have observed quantum entanglement among 'billions of billions' of flowing electrons in a quantum critical material. The research appears this week in Science and provides the strongest direct evidence to date of entanglement's role in bringing about quantum criticality.

Experimental physicists have combined several measurements of quantum materials into one in their ongoing quest to learn more about manipulating and controlling the behavior of them for possible applications. They even coined a term for it -- magneto-elastoresistance, or MER.

Concerns about the scarcity of lithium and other materials necessary in the now-ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries have recently driven many researchers to look for alternatives, such as sodium and potassium. Prof Shinichi Komaba from Tokyo University of Science, Japan, and his team have worked for over a decade on this topic. In his latest review article, he extensively discusses his findings on the recent advances, promises, and limitations of potassium-ion batteries.

An international team of physicists, materials scientists, and mechanical engineers has confirmed the high thermal conductivity predicted in isotopically enriched cubic boron nitride, the researchers report in the electronic edition of the journal Science. c-BN is particularly challenging to make and it's difficult to measure its thermal conductivity accurately when the value is high. The team overcame these challenges, and measured thermal conductivity values for the c-BN samples that were close to their predictive calculations.