Research
Ultra-cold mini twisters
A team of quantum physicists from Innsbruck, Austria, led by three-time ERC laureate Francesca Ferlaino has established a new method to observe vortices in dipolar quantum gases. These quantum vortices are considered a strong indication of superfluidity, the frictionless flow of a quantum gas, and have now been experimentally detected for the first time in dipolar gases
Superconducting diode without magnetic field in multilayer graphene
Superconductors are the key to lossless current flow. However, the realization of superconducting diodes has only recently become an important topic of fundamental research. An international research team involving the theoretical physicist Mathias Scheurer has now succeeded in reaching a milestone: the demonstration of an extremely strong superconducting diode effect in a single two-dimensional superconductor. They report on this in Nature Physics.
Missing building block for quantum optimization developed
Optimization challenges in logistics or finance are among the first possible applications of quantum machines. Physicists from Innsbruck, Austria, have now developed a method that enables optimization problems to be investigated on quantum hardware that already exists today. For this purpose, they have developed a special quantum gate.
Error-Free Quantum Computing Gets Real
For quantum computers to be useful in practice, errors must be detected and corrected. At the University of Innsbruck, Austria, a team of experimental physicists has now implemented a universal set of computational operations on fault-tolerant quantum bits for the first time, demonstrating how an algorithm can be programmed on a quantum computer so that errors do not spoil the result.
Physicist shed light on the darkness
Experimental physicists led by Gerhard Kirchmair, together with theoretical physicists at the University of Oulu, Finland, have succeeded for the first time in controlling protected quantum states - so-called dark states - in superconducting quantum bits. The entangled states are 500 times more robust and could be used, for example, in quantum simulations. The method could also be used on other technological platforms.
Quantum sensors: Measuring even more precisely
Two teams of physicists led by Peter Zoller and Thomas Monz at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, have designed the first programmable quantum sensor, and tested it in the laboratory. To do so they applied techniques from quantum information processing to a measurement problem. The innovative method promises quantum sensors whose precision reaches close to the limit set by the laws of nature.
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