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Home » Page 32

Miniature magnets break field strength record

Physicists at ETH Zurich in Switzerland have produced magnetic fields as high as 40 T in a superconducting coil that has a bore diameter of just 3.1 mm. Until now, creating such intense fields required large and expensive facilities and tens of megawatts of power. The new miniaturized structure requires a few thousand times less power than larger magnets and it could help bring ultrastrong benchtop magnets closer to reality.

“All previous 40 T class magnets have been metres in size, weigh more than six tons, and require about 20 MW of power to operate,” says Alexander Barnes, who led the research effort. “Our miniature magnet can also generate a 40 T magnetic field, but it is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and requires a few watts or less to operate.”

Such a device could be extremely useful for scientists who use strong magnets in their research, he adds. “Rather than having to travel to the few locations in the world that have the resources and space to house a strong magnetic field, with this technology scientists in the future could have access to these magnets in their own laboratory.”

Making the magnet tiny

Barnes and his colleagues, who are nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopists, came up with the idea for their new magnet by asking themselves a simple question: “what do we need to put inside it in our experiments?” The answer was: only the sample and an NMR detection coil.

“So, instead of making magnets expensive and big enough to house all different kinds of equipment, we decided to make the magnet tiny – and just big enough to be able to fit inside it what we need to fit inside it,” says Barnes. In this way, any bulky components can be placed outside the magnet and only the essential elements within the high-field region inside it.

“Think about the right-hand rule and the Biot-Savart law we all learn in first year physics,” he explains. “This law tells us the more electrons moving in a circle, the higher the magnetic field. And the more electrons moving in a circle in a smaller volume close to the sample also means a higher magnetic field. This is all we did – we tried to maximize the electrons moving in a circle near our sample.”

High-temperature superconducting tapes

Strong magnets are needed in a host of research and technology areas, from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and particle accelerators to NMR spectroscopy. Magnetic fields greater than 40 T can be produced using high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tapes. These structures can also be wound together to increase their already very high critical current even further, something that allows the resulting coils to reach higher magnetic fields. A famous example, Barnes reminds us, is the world-record 45.5 T steady-state magnet, which uses a HTS coil as an insert within a resistive background magnet. The problem, however, is that these high-field hybrid magnets are huge and require a lot of power.

Barnes’ team says it might now have overcome this issue with its two compact HTS magnets wound with a conducting tape coated with the superconducting ceramic REBCO. The first magnet, composed of two pancake coils, produces a magnetic field of 38 T and the second, composed of four (quad) pancake coils, a field of 42 T. The researchers say they used a specialized winding technique combined with soldering to make sure there was a jointless connection between the pancake coils at a winding diameter of 3.5 mm.

The strong magnetic fields of the coils stem from the high current-carrying ability of REBCO and the extremely small magnet bore diameter of 3.1 mm. “These magnets reach current densities of 2257 and 1880 Amm−2 at peak currents of 1246 and 1038 A, respectively,” says Barnes, “and despite the much higher current density, they consume a few thousand times less power and require a coil volume over 1000 times smaller than that of the 45.5 T hybrid magnet.”

“Amazing” materials

He says he imagines a “bright future” where there are hundreds and thousands of benchtop magnets capable of 50 T and more, all over the world in academia and industry.  These magnets can be used for NMR and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy, but also quantum computers and other applications. For instance, the ETH Zurich team is working on a project that uses these magnets to build miniature gyrotrons, which are microwave generators. “We have plans to use such devices for spectroscopy, but also for nuclear fusion heating and even vaporizing holes deep in the Earth to extract geothermal energy,” Barnes tells Physics World.

It will not all be plain sailing, however, say the researchers. One of the main challenges in this work, which is detailed in Science Advances, is to avoid damaging the REBCO-coated tapes. These tapes are “amazing” materials, says Barnes. They are a single crystal of rare-earth barium copper oxide and are more than 100 m long, but the problem is that they are subject to mechanical strain. If this strain exceeds a certain, critical threshold, then the superconducting layer can crack, leading to reduced current-carrying capacity as the structure’s resistance increases.

The researchers say they are now busy working on increasing the magnetic fields – they are targeting 50 T soon – and performing NMR inside their existing coils. “ResonX, the commercial partner on this study, is also actively commercializing these magnets,” reveals Barnes.

Magnetic microrobot swarm moves objects with water

Robots tend to move things physically, using arms or other appendages. But what if robots could move objects without physically touching them? Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, the University of Michigan and Cornell University have developed robotic swarms that can manipulate objects using only water, by inducing a fluidic torque.

Strong viscous interactions exist in microscale systems, which can be used to generate fluid flows that actuate passive objects. In their previous research, the researchers found that this manipulation can be influenced by the number of microrobots, the spin rate of microrobots and the position of the microrobots relative to the object. This latest work, published in Science Advances, has gone one step further, demonstrating that a magnetic robot swarm can assemble, transport and reorganize objects that are many times larger than the microrobots themselves.

“This study is the third in a series of papers where our team explores how microscale robot swarms can coordinate using simple global control signals,” says Kirstin Petersen of Cornell University, “Rather than controlling each robot individually, we broadcast the same signal to the entire group and rely on the robots’ interactions with each other and with their environment to produce different collective behaviours. Here, we showed that those interactions could also be used to manipulate external structures through the fluid flows generated by the swarm”.

The robots are microdisks with diameters of about 300 µm and because they are magnetic, they can be rotated using an externally applied magnetic field. When each individual microrobot spins, it drags the fluid around it, which generates a force in the liquid. While this force is small for an individual robot, combining hundreds of robots together that spin in unison (and/or increasing the spin speed of the robots) creates a much larger flow force in the water – generating a high enough torque to move objects.

“The most exciting result is that the robot collective can use the fluidic torque it generates to manipulate structures much larger than the robots themselves, without physical contact. It suggests that you could add actuation to otherwise passive objects simply by introducing microrobots in the surrounding fluid,” Petersen tells Physics World.

To demonstrate this approach, the researchers positioned the microrobots inside and outside of concentric floating ring structures, and used the number of robots, their positions and spin speeds to act as a form of control for moving objects. They found that the robots could spread out and surround the object, rotating it in the process, or they could crawl around the edges of an object, allowing them to reorganize objects. The ability to change these parameters and obtain different torques provided a tuneable and programmable way of using the microrobot swarms.

The researchers extended the principles to mechanical systems, using the microrobot to turn miniature gear trains (after turning the first gear, the other gears moved by conventional mechanical contact). They also rotated 3D floating objects that were 45,000 times the mass of an individual robot. Here, placing the robots on top of the object generated sufficient torque to rotate it, despite the mass difference.

The team also found that the microrobot swarm could dynamically assemble objects using coordinated fluid flows, in which the robots switched between their rotational function and crawling ability to move objects along a surface. This adaptive behaviour not only allowed the manipulation of objects, but also their reorganization – including expelling, dispersing and aggregating objects – based on the environment and task requirements.

The introduction of these small robots into fluids essentially turns the fluid from a passive medium into a small-scale motor. For applications where there is a risk of structural damage from mechanical manipulation, contactless manipulation could be highly beneficial. For example, this type of mechanism could be useful in microscale manufacturing and biomedical engineering, particularly for miniature device assembly, biological matter transport and targeted manipulation within the human body.

When asked about what’s next for this research, Petersen tells Physics World that “the other authors are focusing specifically on innovating microrobots, whereas my lab is studying the broader question of how collectives coordinate through their shared environment while keeping individual agents simple. We are exploring natural and engineered fluid-coupled swarms across a wide range of size scales”.

Why mentorship is vital for the future of physics

A couple of months ago I wrote about whether it’s possible to teach the art of entrepreneurship or if it’s a skill that’s innate to individuals. My article led to some invaluable feedback, notably from one reader who said that, yes, of course it can be taught. Not, they said, from formal lectures but mainly through mentoring by people who’ve learned the art of entrepreneurship themselves.

That idea got me thinking about the wider benefit of “giving back” one’s experience to others who could gain from that wisdom. All professional scientists and engineers will have benefited at one time or another from the generous guidance of other people – be they teachers, lecturers, or work colleagues. So perhaps we should think about how we can do the same.

The value of a professional interaction, however small, should not be overlooked

It’s easy to imagine our lives are so inconsequential that we have nothing to teach – and even if we do have something to say, we certainly haven’t got the time to tell others about it. But the value of a professional interaction, however small, should not be overlooked. A timely moment at any career stage can make all the difference to an individual’s professional impact and future success. The scope of opportunity for giving back is broad.

Volunteering and internships

In my experience, local schools are always grateful for career guidance from professionals. Staff at my company, for example, often give career talks at their children’s schools. We take part in events such as assemblies, career evenings or careers weeks and we are currently keen to provide work experience for 16- and 17-year-olds in year 12. If we go ahead, I am sure pupils will be eager to snap opportunities up.

I have also seen the benefit of scientists and engineers developing videos, workbooks and other materials for primary-school children to learn about concepts in science and technology. It is important to make an impact at the earliest possible stage, which is where the talent pipeline starts. Once students are in their teens and have made their subject choices, it becomes hard – if not impossible – to influence them.

Internships are another great way of giving back. For the last eight years, I have been running a data-science internship programme at GE – and I just wish I’d started it sooner. Initially, we offered summer-long placements, but after a year we added year-long roles to the mix. I will be honest, colleagues were hugely sceptical about how much value these roles would bring, but their worry proved unfounded.

The vast majority of our interns have been extremely productive under our guidance and, after finishing, have gone on to secure graduate positions within GE or other tech firms. It’s vital, however, that interns are properly supported. As well as being given comprehensive induction and training, interns must be part of an established project team, whose members are always on hand to give guidance, answer questions, and provide the interns with clear tasks and goals.

It’s also important to set expectations of professionalism when at work. We are fortunate in GE that interns are taken on as regular employees and so have access to a wide range of employee and company benefits. Interns therefore find it easier to feel part of the company and adopt its ethos. Remember too, that the benefits work both ways. Interns bring you new perspectives and fresh ideas, while also keeping the rest of the team stimulated.

Professional societies and professorships

Being a member of a professional body is also a great way to give back to the community. The Institute of Physics (IOP), for example, has an active volunteer community, along with special interest groups and regional and national branches that are all run by member volunteers, with help from IOP staff. Becoming an IOP volunteer also gives you the chance to influence and help shape the physics community.

By meeting like-minded colleagues, you can build your network and give back to the community at the same time

You could, for example, get involved with running lectures, seminars, webinars and career outreach events. By meeting like-minded colleagues, you can build your network and give back to the community at the same time. There are some great examples, notably Deborah Phelps, a physicist in engineering who ended up launching the IOP’s girl-guiding badge.

For more experienced industrialists, another way to give back is to become a visiting professor. Being fortunate enough to hold such a position myself, they let you go back to university and share your knowledge and experience with current students. It’s invaluable for universities too, allowing students to learn what real-life careers look like and what skills they might need beyond the technical knowledge gained during a degree.

Visiting professorships tend to be awarded directly by universities. But competitive awards exist too. The Royal Academy of Engineering, for example, runs a scheme that brings engineers, entrepreneurs, consultants and other industry insiders into UK universities to boost undergraduate engineering education. Covering areas that would appeal to physicists, such as energy, materials and electronics, the scheme lets experts deliver face-to-face teaching, mentoring and curriculum development for three years.

The Royal Society, meanwhile, runs an entrepreneur-in-residence scheme that’s been taken up by people like Fiona Riddich, who originally studied maths and physics before joining the energy industry. She’s mentored students at the University of Edinburgh and developed a project called Energy@Edinburgh to raise awareness of researchers’ work, promote interdisciplinary exchange, grow staff understanding of the energy market, and encourage innovation and translation of research.

I have only scratched the surface of what can be done for the good of our scientific and engineering community, but there is plenty of opportunity and few, if any, barriers to entry. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of doing this, especially for growing our pipeline of technical breakthroughs and developing talented people for the future.

My challenge to you is to tell your colleagues what you’re already doing to “give back” – and why. And if you’re doing nothing to give back, now is the perfect time to get started.

Where do thunderstorms form?

The amount of moisture in soil – and the way this moisture is distributed – combined with wind patterns in the lowest few kilometres of the atmosphere can influence where thunderstorms begin and how they develop. This new finding, from researchers at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH) could help in the development of new early warning systems for such events, which are increasing worldwide and becoming more intense and dangerous as the climate warms.

Thunderstorms can develop quickly on hot afternoons, sometimes in less than half an hour of clouds building up, but predicting where they originate can be difficult.

A team of researchers led by meteorologist Christopher Taylor has now discovered that patches of dry soil 10–50 km across can combine with the wind field and affect how quickly convective storm clouds (cumulonimbus) form and grow.

“We already knew that differences in wind speed and direction with height (the ‘vertical wind shear’) in the atmosphere are critical ingredients for severe storm development, whilst gradients in land surface heating across the landscape can induce weak winds near the ground,” explains Taylor. “These two elements are usually studied separately, but we put them together and found that convective clouds grow very rapidly when the winds that steer them, some 3–4 km above the ground, oppose local surface-generated winds near the ground.”

This combination, he says, effectively increases the supply of moist, buoyant air into a cloud, accelerating the updraughts responsible for lightning and heavy rain.

“Storm initiations are clearly favoured in specific locations”

The result, he explains, challenges conventional thinking that over flat terrain, where cumulonimbus first develop, is essentially random. “In fact, under the conditions we studied – across sub-Saharan Africa – storm initiations are clearly favoured in specific locations, based on a combination of soil and wind conditions on that day.”

The work, which is detailed in Nature, could help in the development of more localized storm forecasting, he says, particularly in tropical areas where soil moisture gradients and wind shear are strong and can lead to flash flooding, lightning and strong winds.

The UKCEH team obtained its result by studying satellite images of 2.2 million afternoon storms in 2004–2024. They were able to obtain high-resolution data from the images and so observe fine-scale details of the wetness of soils.

The principle they have identified would be applicable to predicting thunderstorm formation in other parts of the world, such as Asia, the Americas, Australia and Europe – and not just the worst-hit tropical regions in Africa.

Ground-based measurement networks are scarce in Africa

Taylor and colleagues say they have been working with meteorological services in Africa for the last few years and contributing to international efforts to provide early warning systems for severe storms. Convective storms can be particularly damaging in built-up urban areas with intense rainfall damaging infrastructures such as roads and sanitation systems. “Unlike in the UK, where ground-based measurement networks are the backbone of weather forecasting, they are scarce in Africa and there are only a handful of meteorological radars here, explains Taylor. “We therefore had to rely on satellite data, which provide good quality information on some aspects of the coupled land-atmosphere system – notably the temperature (and therefore the height) of clouds and estimates of moisture in the top few centimetres of the soil.”

From this information, the researchers inferred how soil moisture affects evapotranspiration and atmospheric heating, how pressure gradients created by these heating patterns affect winds locally and, finally, how these inferred local winds interact with growing convective clouds.

The insights gleaned from this study could help improve the accuracy of short-term weather forecasts by providing a better indication of where storms are likely to appear within a region, Taylor says. “Just how much more skilful a forecast will be is an open question, but we have good reason to believe that in parts of Africa it could provide a big advance. In general, weather forecasting is a rapidly evolving field thanks to AI, and so the translation from research finding to application could be rapid.”

The researchers say they are now starting to look at how weather forecast models depict the processes described in their work. “Early indications suggest that models solving physical equations on a fine enough grid (of around 4 km) can capture the relationships between soil moisture, wind shear and cloud growth, but operational weather forecast models will require more accurate information on spatial variations of soil moisture to produce better forecasts,” says Taylor.

“We are also looking at how predictive models based on deep learning can exploit the new knowledge to provide forecasters with early indications of where storms may appear later in the day,” he reveals.

Researchers from China dominate IOPP outstanding reviewer awards

More than 1600 researchers from 74 different countries have won “outstanding reviewer awards” from IOP Publishing, with researchers from China making up almost a third of awardees. The annual award recognises scientists who have delivered exceptional peer-review reports for IOP Publishing journals over the past year.

Reviewer feedback to authors plays a crucial role in the peer-review process, boosting the quality of published papers for the benefit of authors and the wider scientific community. Awards such as those from IOP Publishing are an attempt by publishers to raise the importance of courteous and constructive peer review.

This year’s recipients were selected from about 35,000 reviewers who submitted peer-review reports to IOP Publishing journals in 2025. Journal editors evaluated nominees based on the volume, timeliness and quality of their reviews.

A total of 1621 individuals have been honoured with a 2025 award. China makes up 30% of awardees followed by 16% from the US and just over 6% from India. Some 10% of this year’s award winners are also based in lower middle-income countries or territories.

“High quality peer review is essential to maintaining trust in science as it safeguards the quality and integrity of academic work,” notes Laura Feetham-Walker, IOP Publishing’s reviewer engagement manager. “I’d like to thank this year’s winners, whose thoughtful and rigorous reviews help advance scientific discovery and strengthen the communities we serve.”

The IOPP’s outstanding reviewer programme has been awarded annually since 2016. The IOPP also recently introduced a peer review excellence certification programme that provides free peer review training and certification. In 2025, more than 1500 reviewers took the initiative.

Quiz of the week: how many antiprotons did CERN transport by truck?

 

Fancy some more? Check out our puzzles page.

Magnetic friction defies centuries-old law

Through new experiments with magnetic materials, physicists in Austria, Hong Kong and Germany have overturned a simple law of friction that has held for over 300 years. Led by Clemens Bechinger at the University of Konstanz, the team’s discovery shows how internal collective dynamics in these materials can cause friction to peak at a certain applied, load before dropping sharply. The effect could prove especially promising in applications where friction needs to be precisely controlled.

In 1699, French physicist Guillaume Amontons published his rediscovery of an effect first observed by Leonardo da Vinci: that the force of friction between two sliding surfaces is proportional to the load pressing them together. He also showed that this relationship is monotonic, meaning friction continues to grow as the load increases, forcing stronger interactions between the surfaces.

Since then, Amontons’ law has held up to close experimental scrutiny. “It is actually quite remarkable that this simple law holds across a wide range of very different materials,” Bechinger says. “At the same time, this classical picture does not account for systems where internal degrees of freedom – such as magnetic order – play an active role.”

Little microscopic insight

For all its success, Amontons’ law offers little insight into the microscopic mechanisms underlying friction. To probe these mechanisms, many studies have turned to atomic force microscopy, which measures the motion of a nanoscale tip as it is scanned across a surface. While powerful, this technique can only capture frictional mechanisms over extremely local regions. As a result, it is less well suited to systems where friction emerges from larger-scale effects.

In particular, magnetic materials host regions of aligned atomic spins that can extend across millimetres. When two magnetic surfaces slide past each other, these spins continuously reorient in response to their changing interactions. However, this reconfiguration isn’t instantaneous.

Famously, magnetic systems can display hysteresis, whereby a material’s response to an external magnetic field depends to the history of its magnetization. For two interacting magnetic surfaces, hysteresis means that spin realignments to lag behind the sliding motion, causing the system to undergo repeated cycles of delayed switching. In the process, the kinetic energy of the sliding motion is partly dissipated, increasing the overall friction experienced by the surfaces.

To explore these effects in more detail, Bechinger’s team developed a new experimental platform that moves beyond the constraints of conventional techniques. Instead of applying a load directly, they varied the interaction strength between two extended magnetic surfaces by precisely controlling their separation distance.

Monitoring magnetization

“Using millimetre-sized rotatable magnets, this allowed us to directly monitor the orientations of their magnetization during sliding, and to correlate these changes quantitatively with the measured friction force,” Bechinger explains.

As the surfaces were brought closer together, the researchers observed that friction initially rose, in line with the expectations of Amontons’ law. However, this trend did not continue indefinitely: at an intermediate separation distance, friction reached a maximum.

“A peak occurs when competing magnetic interactions drive the system into a frustrated state,” Bechinger continues. “This causes repeated, hysteretic switching of magnetic orientations during sliding, which strongly enhances energy dissipation.”

Beyond this point, the effect was weakened by further decreases in separation distance, and friction dropped sharply: a clear departure from the monotonic behaviour predicted by Amonton’s law.

Altogether, the team’s findings show that friction can arise entirely from the internal collective dynamics of the material, rather than from direct mechanical contact alone. As Bechinger explains, the ability to tune these effects could open up new technological possibilities.

“This opens up new possibilities for designing wear-free, contactless frictional systems and suggests that friction itself can serve as a sensitive probe of microscopic ordering,” he says. “Potential applications could range from magnetic sensing to programmable metamaterials.”

The research is described in Nature Materials.

Word wave puzzle no.1

  1. Enter a word guess – in this game the word has six letters.
  2. After submitting your guess, each letter in the guessed word is coloured to provide feedback:
    • Green: The letter is correct and is in the correct position in the target word.
    • Yellow: The letter is correct but is in the wrong position in the target word.
    • Grey: The letter is not in the target word at all.
  3. Using this colour feedback, refine your next guess.
  4. Continue guessing until you correctly identify the hidden word(s) or run out of attempts.

If you need any hints, read our news article here.

Fancy some more? Check out our puzzles page.

How IOP Publishing cut its carbon footprint by 36% since 2020

My guest in this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast is Liz Martin, who is sustainability lead at IOP Publishing. We chat about how the scholarly publisher has reduced its carbon emissions by 36% when compared to a 2020 baseline – and the challenges and opportunities for achieving further reductions.

Martin talks about the importance of cooperation and partnerships – both internal and external – to achieving environmental goals. This includes engaging with both suppliers and employees on how to reduce carbon emissions.

IOP Publishing is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Institute of Physics, which is the professional body and learned society for physics in the UK and Ireland. It produces over 100 scholarly journals, around half of which are published jointly with or on behalf of partner societies and research organizations. Physics World is also brought to you by IOP Publishing.

  • You can download a PDF of IOP Publishing’s Sustainability Report 2025 here.

Many-body effects at the world’s largest physics conference

Many-body physics is the study of large ensembles of interacting particles and their collective behaviour. These systems are notoriously difficult to simulate, yet they underpin phenomena such as superconductivity and superfluidity. Thus, they are of great interest to understand. As a many-body physicist myself, I arrived at my first American Physical Society (APS) meeting with a different curiosity: understanding what the largest physics conference in the world was all about.

Last week, I joined a crowd of 14,000 scientists convening in Denver, Colorado for the annual Global Physics Summit, hosted by the APS.

On Sunday morning, the day before the conference, I walked alone through the streets of downtown Denver. Silence filled the frigid air. A light flurry of snow covered the empty streets in white. It seemed that the city was still asleep.

But Denver was abruptly awakened on Monday morning, as I found myself well-accompanied by the crowd collectively moving towards the Colorado Convention Center for an 8 a.m. start. Inside, the conference was humming with its own emergent dynamics, with lines forming around coffee stations and people bustling to find their way to wherever they were going.

Throughout the day, I was faced with the repeated indecision of choosing between over 80 simultaneous sessions. Some sessions housed APS’s infamous blitz talks with speakers racing to pack as many graphs and equations into their allotted 10 min. Having barely enough time to write down the takeaways, I tried, often in vain, to fill my memory as quickly as possible.

Other sessions featured longer talks on hot topics in physics. By evening, my mind was swimming with notions of scalable quantum computing and physics funding issues and public engagement opportunities and the infiltration of AI slop into every corner of the scientific process. These sessions offered me a necessary reminder that science is not performed in a vacuum. With that said, the purely technical sessions on ultracold atomic gases served as a necessary reprieve for me that day.

Ultracold atoms, cooled to only a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, provide physicists with a clean and controllable platform for studying quantum many-body physics. At its heart, this physics is governed by interparticle correlations.

Seeing single atoms
Seeing single atoms A fluorescence image taken under a quantum gas microscope. Each dot is one atom (Courtesy: Candice Chua)

During my PhD, we measured two-body correlations and observed bosons spatially bunching together—unlike their antisocial fermionic counterparts. While the stereotypical physicist may be notoriously antisocial, the APS lanyard seemed to overturn that reputation.

Over dinner one evening, I requested a table for one. Only a moment later, I was joined by a physicist I’d never met before, and the evening unfolded behind pleasant chatter of 2D materials and the lack of vegetables in our travel diets.

Two tables down sat a professor whose work I admired. I’ll admit that I embarrassingly (or, more favourably, courageously) walked to the washroom so that I could pass by his table and say hello. I had met him once last year, but he didn’t remember me. So, I kept talking until he agreed that he remembered, and that it was nice to run into each other again. Whether true or not, I accepted it as a win. Without an APS lanyard, I probably would have avoided that conversation.

Single-atom resolution

On Thursday, a session titled “Novel imaging and quantum sensing technologies” caught my eye since I work with a quantum gas microscope. The microscope is a high-magnification imaging system that affords us the resolution of individual atoms. The microscopic information is far richer than what is obtained by a bulk imaging technique such as absorption.

Similarly, at the conference, I found the greatest value in individual conversations. Conversing with employees at the career fair, though exhausting, was far more effective than listening to panels on how to plan for careers that I couldn’t decide if I wanted.

By the end of the week, I started to recognize people I had already met over the few days prior. I saw every reunion or simple “Oh! Hi” as miraculous rather than a given, based on the size of the conference. People shared with me their personal journeys navigating the hardships and uncertainties of today’s world, others about the trade-offs and uncertainties in their experimental results. Some of the most fulfilling and deeply human conversations were the spontaneous ones that arose outside the doors of sessions that we had meant to be in.

When Friday rolled around, the city emptied as quickly as it had filled. For me, I retreated into the sunny Boulder mountains, mulling over the lingering resolution of singular people whose shared words and ideas were now intertwined with my own. Ignoring my fear of getting lost, I followed my instincts deeper into the dry heat of the afternoon, one step at a time.

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