Aurelia Butler

Researchers from the University of Portsmouth have unveiled a quantum sensing scheme that achieves the pinnacle of quantum sensitivity in measuring the transverse displacement between two interfering photons.
This new technique has the potential to enhance superresolution imaging techniques that already employ single-photon sources as probes for the localization and tracking of biological samples, such as single-molecule localization microscopy with quantum dots.
Traditionally, achieving ultra-high precision in nanoscopic techniques has been constrained by the limitations of standard imaging methods, such as the diffraction limit of cameras and highly magnifying objectives. However, this new quantum sensing scheme circumvents these obstacles, paving the way for unprecedented levels of precision.
At the heart of this innovation lies an interferometric technique that not only achieves unparalleled spatial precision, but also maintains its effectiveness regardless of the overlap between displaced photonic wave packets. The precision of this technique is only marginally reduced when dealing with photons differing in nonspatial degrees of freedom, marking a significant advancement in quantum-enhanced spatial sensitivity.
Study co-author Professor Vincenzo Tamma, Director of the Quantum Science and Technology Hub, said: “These results shed new light on the metrological power of two-photon spatial interference and can pave the way to new high-precision sensing techniques.
“Other potential applications for the research could be found in the development of quantum sensing techniques for high-precision refractometry and astrophysical bodies localisation, as well as high-precision multi-parameter sensing schemes, including 3D quantum localisation methods. More

A new study co-authored by Sophie Janicke-Bowles, associate professor in Chapman University’s School of Communication, sheds light on the role that new and traditional media play in promoting and affecting character development, emotions, prosocial behavior and well-being (aka happiness) in youth.
Her research and teaching focus on positive psychology, media and new communication technologies, and media and spirituality. The study, published April 13 in Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), investigates how adolescents perceive and engage with digital communication, including connectedness, positive social comparison, authentic self-presentation, civil participation and self-control.
“This was such an amazing research study to be part of as we all are craving more nuanced answers on how digital technologies affect our children,” said Janicke-Bowles.
Janicke-Bowles’ research contributes to the understanding of digital flourishing (positive social media experiences) among adolescents, highlighting the importance of supportive parental mediation and digital skills in promoting positive digital engagement. Moving forward, interventions aimed at enhancing digital flourishing should consider the role of parental guidance and support in shaping adolescents’ online experiences. Adolescents who flourish in their digital communication over time are more likely to have parents who know their way around technology and who actively support their children to positively communicate online. For adolescents who digitally flourish less, their self-control over digital communication decreases. To increase digital flourishing, interventions can aim in assisting adolescents in their control over their digital communication and encourage parents to take an active role in their young adults’ digital communication.These findings underscore the significance of parental influence and support in fostering positive digital communication experiences among adolescents.
In addition to her recent research, Janicke-Bowles has a distinguished history of exploring the intersection of media and psychology. As a member of a research team from Florida State and Penn State universities, she received a $1.9 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to investigate the impact of media content on self-transcendent emotions. Her academic journey, spanning from clinical and media psychology in Germany to mass communication in the United States, underscores her commitment to understanding the profound effects of media on human experiences. More

Research led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has demonstrated that small changes in the isotopic content of thin semiconductor materials can influence their optical and electronic properties, possibly opening the way to new and advanced designs with the semiconductors.
Partly because of semiconductors, electronic devices and systems become more advanced and sophisticated every day. That’s why for decades researchers have studied ways to improve semiconductor compounds to influence how they carry electrical current. One approach is to use isotopes to change the physical, chemical and technological properties of materials.
Isotopes are members of a family of an element that all have the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons and thus different masses. Isotope engineering has traditionally focused on enhancing so-called bulk materials that have uniform properties in three dimensions, or 3D. But new research led by ORNL has advanced the frontier of isotope engineering where current is confined in two dimensions, or 2D, inside flat crystals and where a layer is only a few atoms thick. The 2D materials are promising because their ultrathin nature could allow for precise control over their electronic properties.
“We observed a surprising isotope effect in the optoelectronic properties of a single layer of molybdenum disulfide when we substituted a heavier isotope of molybdenum in the crystal, an effect that opens opportunities to engineer 2D optoelectronic devices for microelectronics, solar cells, photodetectors and even next-generation computing technologies,” said ORNL scientist Kai Xiao.
Yiling Yu, a member of Xiao’s research team, grew isotopically pure 2D crystals of atomically thin molybdenum disulfide using molybdenum atoms of different masses. Yu noticed small shifts in the color of light emitted by the crystals under photoexcitation, or stimulation by light.
“Unexpectedly, the light from the molybdenum disulfide with the heavier molybdenum atoms was shifted farther to the red end of the spectrum, which is opposite to the shift one would expect for bulk materials,” Xiao said. The red shift indicates a change in the electronic structure or optical properties of the material.
Xiao and the team, working with theorists Volodymyr Turkowski and Talat Rahman at the University of Central Florida, knew that the phonons, or crystal vibrations, must be scattering the excitons, or optical excitations, in unexpected ways in the confined dimensions of these ultrathin crystals. They discovered how this scattering shifts the optical bandgap to the red end of the light spectrum for heavier isotopes. “Optical bandgap” refers to the minimum amount of energy needed to make a material absorb or emit light. By adjusting the bandgap, researchers can make semiconductors absorb or emit different colors of light, and such tunability is essential for designing new devices.

ORNL’s Alex Puretzky described how different crystals grown on a substrate can show small shifts in emitted color caused by regional strain in the substrate. To prove the anomalous isotope effect and measure its magnitude to compare with theoretical predictions, Yu grew molybdenum disulfide crystals with two molybdenum isotopes in one crystal.
“Our work was unprecedented in that we synthesized a 2D material with two isotopes of the same element but with different masses, and we joined the isotopes laterally in a controlled and gradual manner in a single monolayer crystal,” Xiao said. “This enabled us to observe the intrinsic anomalous isotope effect on the optical properties in the 2D material without the interference caused by an inhomogeneous sample.”
The study demonstrated that even a small change of isotope masses in the atomically thin 2D semiconductor materials can influence optical and electronic properties — a finding that provides an important basis for continued research.
“Previously, the belief was that to make devices such as photovoltaics and photodetectors, we had to combine two different semiconductor materials to make junctions to trap excitons and separate their charges. But actually, we can use the same material and just change its isotopes to create isotopic junctions to trap the excitons,” Xiao said. “This research also tells us that through isotope engineering, we can tune the optical and electronic properties to design new applications.”
For future experiments, Xiao and the team plan to collaborate with the experts at the High Flux Isotope Reactor and the Isotope Science and Engineering Directorate at ORNL. These facilities can provide various highly enriched isotope precursors to grow different isotopically pure 2D materials. The team can then further investigate the isotope effect on spin properties for their application in spin electronics and quantum emission.
This work was supported by DOE’s Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division and was performed at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, or CNMS, at ORNL, an Office of Science user facility. The CNMS supported the TOF-SIMS, STEM and optical spectroscopy measurements. More

A first-ever stretchy electronic skin could equip robots and other devices with the same softness and touch sensitivity as human skin, opening up new possibilities to perform tasks that require a great deal of precision and control of force.
The new stretchable e-skin, developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, solves a major bottleneck in the emerging technology. Existing e-skin technology loses sensing accuracy as the material stretches, but that is not the case with this new version.
“Much like human skin has to stretch and bend to accommodate our movements, so too does e-skin,” said Nanshu Lu, a professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics who led the project. “No matter how much our e-skin stretches, the pressure response doesn’t change, and that is a significant achievement.”
The new research was published today in Matter.
Lu envisions the stretchable e-skin as a critical component to a robot hand capable of the same level of softness and sensitivity in touch as a human hand. This could be applied to medical care, where robots could check a patient’s pulse, wipe the body or massage a body part.
Why is a robot nurse or physical therapist necessary? Around the world, millions of people are aging and in need of care, more than the global medical system can provide.
“In the future, if we have more elderly than available caregivers, it’s going to be a crisis worldwide,” Lu said. “We need to find new ways to take care of people efficiently and also gently, and robots are an important piece of that puzzle.”
Beyond medicine, human-caring robots could be deployed in disasters. They could search for injured and trapped people in an earthquake or a collapsed building, for example, and apply on-the-spot care, such as administering CPR.

E-skin technology senses pressure from contact, letting the attached machine know how much force to use to, for example, grab a cup or touch a person. But, when conventional e-skin is stretched, it also senses that deformation. That reading creates additional noise that skews the sensors’ ability to sense the pressure. That could lead to a robot using too much force to grab something.
In demonstrations, the stretchability allowed the researchers to create inflatable probes and grippers that could change shape to perform a variety of sensitive, touch-based tasks. The inflated skin-wrapped probe was used on human subjects to capture their pulse and pulse waves accurately. The deflated grippers can conformably hold on to a tumbler without dropping it, even when a coin is dropped inside. The device also pressed on a crispy taco shell without breaking it.
The key to this discovery is an innovative hybrid response pressure sensor that Lu and collaborators have been working on for years. While conventional e-skins are either capacitive or resistive, the hybrid response e-skin employs both responses to pressure. Perfecting these sensors, and combining them with stretchable insulating and electrode materials, enabled this e-skin innovation.
Lu — who is also affiliated with the Department of Biomedical Engineering, the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the Texas Materials Institute — and her team are now working toward the potential applications. They are collaborating with Roberto Martin-Martin, assistant professor at the College of Natural Sciences’ Computer Science Department to build a robotic arm equipped with the e-skin. The researchers and UT have filed a provisional patent application for the e-skin technology, and Lu is open to collaborating with robotics companies to bring it to market.
Other authors on the paper are Kyoung-Ho Ha and Sangjun Kim of the Walker Department of Engineering; Zhengjie Li, Heeyong Huh and Zheliang Wang of the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics; and Hongyang Shi, Charles Block and Sarnab Bhattacharya of the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Ha is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics at Northwestern University, and Block is now a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Computer Science. More

The interest in antimicrobial solutions for personal and multi-user touch screens, such as tablets and mobile devices, has grown in recent years. Traditional methods like sprayable alcohols or wipes are not ideal for these delicate displays. Antimicrobial coatings applied directly to the glass are a promising alternative, but only if they are transparent and long-lasting. Previous proposed coating solutions, such as photocatalytic metal oxides (e.g., TiO2 and ZnO), have posed some challenges. Additionally, these coatings typically require light and moisture to be antimicrobial and eliminate the microbes present on the surface.
Copper is a well-known biocidal metal with high efficacy against a wide range of microorganisms, and it has been traditionally used for objects such as door handles and hospital bedrails. However, copper coatings are predominantly opaque, which to date has prevented the realization of a transparent, copper-based antimicrobial solution suitable for displays. Furthermore, the high electrical conductivity of the metal film can negatively interfere with the touch-sensing functionality featured on mobile devices.
A team of researchers has designed and implemented a transparent nanostructured copper surface (TANCS) that is non-conductive, and resistant against the growth of certain bacteria. In a recent study, published in the journal Communications Materials, ICFO researchers Christina Graham, Alessia Mezzadrelli led by ICREA Prof. Valerio Pruneri, and colleagues from Corning, including Wageesha Senaratne, Santona Pal, Dean Thelen, Lisa Hepburn and Prantik Mazumder, have described their new approach to develop this surface.
The fabrication process of this surface involved depositing an ultra-thin copper film with a nominal thickness of 3.5nm onto a glass substrate. Then, the researchers used a rapid thermal annealing process to form dewetted Cu nanoparticles with optimal size and distribution. The specific design and method provided an antimicrobial effect, transparency, color neutrality, and electrical insulation. Finally, additional layers of SiO2 and fluorosilanes were deposited on top of the nanoparticles, providing environmental protection and improved durability properties with use-test cases.
The authors of the study examined the fabricated coating morphology, optical response, antimicrobial efficacy, and mechanical durability. The TANCS showed the ability to eliminate over 99.9% of “Staphylococcus Aureus” present in the tested surfaces within two hours, under stringent dry test conditions. Moreover, the substrate demonstrated optical transparency allowing for 70-80% light transmission in the visible range (380-750nm), color neutrality. Finally, the surfaces showed to have a prolonged effectiveness with use-test cases, maintaining their antimicrobial activity even after a rigorous wipe testing procedure.
“This is a great example of creating a multi attribute product while co-optimizing the attributes high efficacy antimicrobial properties that work under dry test conditions for touch enabled , display use test cases. Our goal was to show the connections with biological performance and physical attributes, and provide further guidance for future research,” said Wageesha Senaratne, researcher at Corning and leading co-author of the study.
“This new approach of considering the dewetting process opens to a variety of new possibilities to exploit some specific properties of metals while being able to thoughtfully change the others. Here for example, we were able to preserve the powerful antimicrobial effect of the copper while obtaining transparency and insulation despite the use of a metal,” said Alessia Mezzadrelli, author of the study and PhD student of the Nano-Glass project.

The introduction of these transparent antimicrobial surfaces holds significant promise in a world increasingly reliant on touchable displays, including smartphones or tablets.
“While further development is necessary for full-fledged commercial deployment, this is a step in the right direction to enable antimicrobial touch screens for public or personal displays,” said Prantik Mazumder, researcher at Corning and co-author of the study.
“The proof-of-concept surface we have developed with Corning is an example of our continuous joint efforts in the development of enhanced multifunctional display screen glass using nano-structuring,” said Valerio Pruneri, ICREA professor at ICFO and coordinator of the Nano-Glass project.
This research has been partially funded by the Nano-Glass project, a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (MSCA-ITN-2020), focused on research of glass materials and their nano-structuring. The project is aimed at developing innovative nano-structuring designs and methods for advanced glass screens for a better display of information as well as new optical fibers for information security. More

Proximity is key for many quantum phenomena, as interactions between atoms are stronger when the particles are close. In many quantum simulators, scientists arrange atoms as close together as possible to explore exotic states of matter and build new quantum materials.
They typically do this by cooling the atoms to a stand-still, then using laser light to position the particles as close as 500 nanometers apart — a limit that is set by the wavelength of light. Now, MIT physicists have developed a technique that allows them to arrange atoms in much closer proximity, down to a mere 50 nanometers. For context, a red blood cell is about 1,000 nanometers wide.
The physicists demonstrated the new approach in experiments with dysprosium, which is the most magnetic atom in nature. They used the new approach to manipulate two layers of dysprosium atoms, and positioned the layers precisely 50 nanometers apart. At this extreme proximity, the magnetic interactions were 1,000 times stronger than if the layers were separated by 500 nanometers.
What’s more, the scientists were able to measure two new effects caused by the atoms’ proximity. Their enhanced magnetic forces caused “thermalization,” or the transfer of heat from one layer to another, as well as synchronized oscillations between layers. These effects petered out as the layers were spaced farther apart.
“We have gone from positioning atoms from 500 nanometers to 50 nanometers apart, and there is a lot you can do with this,” says Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT. “At 50 nanometers, the behavior of atoms is so much different that we’re really entering a new regime here.”
Ketterle and his colleagues say the new approach can be applied to many other atoms to study quantum phenomena. For their part, the group plans to use the technique to manipulate atoms into configurations that could generate the first purely magnetic quantum gate — a key building block for a new type of quantum computer.
The team has published their results today in the journal Science. The study’s co-authors include lead author and physics graduate student Li Du, along with Pierre Barral, Michael Cantara, Julius de Hond, and Yu-Kun Lu — all members of the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, the Department of Physics, and the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT.

Peaks and valleys
To manipulate and arrange atoms, physicists typically first cool a cloud of atoms to temperatures approaching absolute zero, then use a system of laser beams to corral the atoms into an optical trap.
Laser light is an electromagnetic wave with a specific wavelength (the distance between maxima of the electric field) and frequency. The wavelength limits the smallest pattern into which light can be shaped to typically 500 nanometers, the so-called optical resolution limit. Since atoms are attracted by laser light of certain frequencies, atoms will be positioned at the points of peak laser intensity. For this reason, existing techniques have been limited in how close they can position atomic particles, and could not be used to explore phenomena that happen at much shorter distances.
“Conventional techniques stop at 500 nanometers, limited not by the atoms but by the wavelength of light,” Ketterle explains. “We have found now a new trick with light where we can break through that limit.”
The team’s new approach, like current techniques, starts by cooling a cloud of atoms — in this case, to about 1 microkelvin, just a hair above absolute zero — at which point, the atoms come to a near-standstill. Physicists can then use lasers to move the frozen particles into desired configurations.
Then, Du and his collaborators worked with two laser beams, each with a different frequency, or color, and circular polarization, or direction of the laser’s electric field. When the two beams travel through a super-cooled cloud of atoms, the atoms can orient their spin in opposite directions, following either of the two lasers’ polarization. The result is that the beams produce two groups of the same atoms, only with opposite spins.

Each laser beam formed a standing wave, a periodic pattern of electric field intensity with a spatial period of 500 nanometers. Due to their different polarizations, each standing wave attracted and corralled one of two groups of atoms, depending on their spin. The lasers could be overlaid and tuned such that the distance between their respective peaks is as small as 50 nanometers, meaning that the atoms gravitating to each respective laser’s peaks would be separated by the same 50 nanometers.
But in order for this to happen, the lasers would have to be extremely stable and immune to all external noise, such as from shaking or even breathing on the experiment. The team realized they could stabilize both lasers by directing them through an optical fiber, which served to lock the light beams in place in relation to each other.
“The idea of sending both beams through the optical fiber meant the whole machine could shake violently, but the two laser beams stayed absolutely stable with respect to each others,” Du says.
Magnetic forces at close range
As a first test of their new technique, the team used atoms of dysprosium — a rare-earth metal that is one of the strongest magnetic elements in the periodic table, particularly at ultracold temperatures. However, at the scale of atoms, the element’s magnetic interactions are relatively weak at distances of even 500 nanometers. As with common refrigerator magnets, the magnetic attraction between atoms increases with proximity, and the scientists suspected that if their new technique could space dysprosium atoms as close as 50 nanometers apart, they might observe the emergence of otherwise weak interactions between the magnetic atoms.
“We could suddenly have magnetic interactions, which used to be almost negligible but now are really strong,” Ketterle says.
The team applied their technique to dysprosium, first super-cooling the atoms, then passing two lasers through to split the atoms into two spin groups, or layers. They then directed the lasers through an optical fiber to stabilize them, and found that indeed, the two layers of dysprosium atoms gravitated to their respective laser peaks, which in effect separated the layers of atoms by 50 nanometers — the closest distance that any ultracold atom experiment has been able to achieve.
At this extremely close proximity, the atoms’ natural magnetic interactions were significantly enhanced, and were 1,000 times stronger than if they were positioned 500 nanometers apart. The team observed that these interactions resulted in two novel quantum phenomena: collective oscillation, in which one layer’s vibrations caused the other layer to vibrate in sync; and thermalization, in which one layer transferred heat to the other, purely through magnetic fluctuations in the atoms.
“Until now, heat between atoms could only by exchanged when they were in the same physical space and could collide,” Du notes. “Now we have seen atomic layers, separated by vacuum, and they exchange heat via fluctuating magnetic fields.”
The team’s results introduce a new technique that can be used to position many types of atom in close proximity. They also show that atoms, placed close enough together, can exhibit interesting quantum phenomena, that could be harnessed to build new quantum materials, and potentially, magnetically-driven atomic systems for quantum computers.
“We are really bringing super-resolution methods to the field, and it will become a general tool for doing quantum simulations,” Ketterle says. “There are many variants possible, which we are working on.”
This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense. More

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have successfully leveraged robotic assistance in the manufacture of wind turbine blades, allowing for the elimination of difficult working conditions for humans and the potential to improve the consistency of the product.
Although robots have been used by the wind energy industry to paint and polish blades, automation has not been widely adopted. Research at the laboratory demonstrates the ability of a robot to trim, grind, and sand blades. Those necessary steps occur after the two sides of the blade are made using a mold and then bonded together.
“I would consider it a success,” said Hunter Huth, a robotics engineer at NREL and lead author of a newly published paper detailing the work. “Not everything operated as well as we wanted it to, but we learned all the lessons we think we need to make it meet or exceed our expectations.”
The paper, “Toolpath Generation for Automated Wind Turbine Blade Finishing Operations,” appears in the journal Wind Energy. The coauthors, all from NREL, are Casey Nichols, Scott Lambert, Petr Sindler, Derek Berry, David Barnes, Ryan Beach, and David Snowberg.
The post-molding operations to manufacture wind turbine blades require workers to perch on scaffolding and wear protective suits including respiratory gear. Automation, the researchers noted, will boost employee safety and well-being and help manufacturers retain skilled labor.
“This work is critical to enable significant U.S.-based blade manufacturing for the domestic wind turbine market,” said Daniel Laird, director of the National Wind Technology Center at NREL. “Though it may not be obvious, automating some of the labor in blade manufacture can lead to more U.S. jobs because it improves the economics of domestic blades versus imported blades.”
“The motive of this research was to develop automation methods that could be used to make domestically manufactured blades cost competitive globally,” Huth said. “Currently offshore blades are not produced in the U.S. due to high labor rates. The finishing process is very labor intensive and has a high job-turnover rate due to the harsh nature of the work. By automating the finishing process, domestic offshore blade manufacturing can become more economically viable.”
The research was conducted at the Composites Manufacturing Education and Technology (CoMET) facility at NREL’s Flatirons Campus. The robot worked on a 5-meter-long blade segment. Wind turbine blades are considerably longer, but because they bend and deflect under their own weight, a robot would have to be programmed to work on the bigger blades section by section.

The researchers used a series of scans to create a 3D representation of the position of the blade and to identify precisely the front and rear sections of the airfoil — a special shape of the blade that helps the air flow smoothly over the blade. From there, the team programmed the robot to perform a series of tasks, after which it was judged on accuracy and speed. The researchers found areas for improvement, particularly when it came to grinding. The robot ground down too much in some parts of the blade and not enough in others.
“As we’ve gone through this research, we’ve been moving the goal posts for what this system needs to do to be effective,” Huth said.
The robot was not compared to how a human would perform the same functions.
Huth said an automated system would provide consistency in blade manufacturing that is not possible when humans are doing all the work. He also said a robot would be able to use “tougher, more aggressive abrasives” than a human could tolerate. More

Einstein’s theory of general relativity explains that gravity is caused by a curvature of the directions of space and time. The most familiar manifestation of this is the Earth’s gravity, which keeps us on the ground and explains why balls fall to the floor and individuals have weight when stepping on a scale.
In the field of high-energy physics, on the other hand, scientists study tiny invisible objects that obey the laws of quantum mechanics — characterized by random fluctuations that create uncertainty in the positions and energies of particles like electrons, protons and neutrons. Understanding the randomness of quantum mechanics is required to explain the behavior of matter and light on a subatomic scale.
For decades, scientists have been trying to unite those two fields of study to achieve a quantum description of gravity. This would combine the physics of curvature associated with general relativity with the mysterious random fluctuations associated with quantum mechanics.
A new study in Nature Physics from physicists at The University of Texas at Arlington reports on a deep new probe into the interface between these two theories, using ultra-high energy neutrino particles detected by a particle detector set deep into the Antarctic glacier at the south pole.
“The challenge of unifying quantum mechanics with the theory of gravitation remains one of the most pressing unsolved problems in physics,” said co-author Benjamin Jones, associate professor of physics. “If the gravitational field behaves in a similar way to the other fields in nature, its curvature should exhibit random quantum fluctuations.”
Jones and UTA graduate students Akshima Negi and Grant Parker were part of an international IceCube Collaboration team that included more than 300 scientists from around the U.S., as well as Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and the United Kingdom.
To search for signatures of quantum gravity, the team placed thousands of sensors throughout one square kilometer near the south pole in Antarctica that monitored neutrinos, unusual but abundant subatomic particles that are neutral in charge and have no mass. The team was able to study more than 300,000 neutrinos. They were looking to see whether these ultra-high-energy particles were bothered by random quantum fluctuations in spacetime that would be expected if gravity were quantum mechanical, as they travel long distances across the Earth.
“We searched for those fluctuations by studying the flavors of neutrinos detected by the IceCube Observatory,” Negi said. “Our work resulted in a measurement that was far more sensitive than previous ones (over a million times more, for some of the models), but it did not find evidence of the expected quantum gravitational effects.”
This non-observation of a quantum geometry of spacetime is a powerful statement about the still-unknown physics that operate at the interface of quantum physics and general relativity.
“This analysis represents the final chapter in UTA’s nearly decade-long contribution to the IceCube Observatory,” said Jones. “My group is now pursuing new experiments that aim to understand the origin and value of the neutrinos mass using atomic, molecular and optical physics techniques.” More