Researchers at Tohoku University developed a photonic router that can direct single and entangled (quantum) photons at unprecedented levels of efficiency. This may bring us closer to realizing superfast quantum tech.

In a world-first, researchers from the Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have directly observed the evolution of the elusive dark excitons in atomically thin materials, laying the foundation for new breakthroughs in both classical and quantum information technologies. Their findings have been published in Nature Communications. Professor Keshav Dani, head of the unit, highlights the significance: "Dark excitons have great potential as information carriers, because they are inherently less likely to interact with light, and hence less prone to degradation of their quantum properties. However, this invisibility also makes them very challenging to study and manipulate. Building on a previous breakthrough at OIST in 2020, we have opened a route to the creation, observation, and manipulation of dark excitons."

Physicists in Australia and Britain have reshaped quantum uncertainty to sidestep the restriction imposed by the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle – a result that could underpin future ultra-precise sensor technology used in navigation, medicine and astronomy.

Caltech physicists have created the largest qubit array ever assembled: 6,100 neutral-atom qubits trapped in a grid by lasers. Previous arrays of this kind contained only hundreds of qubits.   

Led by Professor Bartosz A. GRZYBOWSKI, researchers at the Center for Robotized and Algorithmic Synthesis (CARS) within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Ulsan, South Korea, put their robots to the challenge and extend the traditional view of chemical reactions. Historically, such reactions have been represented as one-line formulas describing the conversion of substrates into a desired and rigidly defined major product, with byproducts acknowledged but undesirable and generally considered unproductive. The CARS work, to be published in Nature on Sept 24, tells us that reactions should be thought of as complex networks programmable to yield different products under different conditions.