Electromagnetism

When thinking about quantum mechanical systems, single photons and well-isolated ions and atoms may spring to mind, or electrons spreading through a crystal. More exotic in the context of quantum mechanics are genuinely mechanical quantum systems; that is, massive objects in which mechanical motion such as vibration is quantized. In a series of seminal experiments, quintessential quantum-mechanical features have been observed in mechanical systems, including energy quantization and entanglement.

High-accuracy spatially and temporally resolved temperature sensing is critical and has broad applications in diverse fields, such as industrial manufacturing, environmental protection, and healthcare monitoring. Optical-based sensors offer attractive solutions for temperature monitoring in biomedical diagnostics, owing to their advantages of remote detection, minimal intrusion, immunity to electromagnetic interference, and high resolution. These optical sensing modalities can be based on […]

Discovering something for the second time doesn't usually have scientists jump out of their seats with excitement. But that's exactly what happened in the case of Sgr A* (pronounced "sadge-ay-star"), the second black hole imaged.

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) use photons as information carriers and are expected to solve the bottleneck problems of microelectronic chips in terms of speed, power consumption and integration density with their advantages of ultra-high transmission speed, low delay, and anti-electromagnetic crosstalk. They are of key significance to promoting breakthroughs in microelectronics technology, quantum information technology, and micro-sensing technology in the "post-Moore era".

At the dawn of the 1970s, the idea of a massive scalar boson as the keystone of a unified theoretical model of the weak and electromagnetic interactions had yet to become anchored in a field that was still learning to live with what we now know as the standard model of particle physics. As the various breakthroughs of the decade gradually consolidated this theoretical framework, the Brout–Englert–Higgs (BEH) field and its boson emerged as the most promising theoretical model to explain the […]