Interesting phenomena in quantum materials are often found near boundaries between different competing ground states.
Understanding the competition between these states is a central problem in condensed matter physics because of the potential applications to quantum computing and superconductivity.
There are many different types of ground states but the one that’s important here is a charge density wave (CDW). This is where the electron density of a material becomes modulated in a periodic pattern.
TbTe₃, or terbium tritelluride is a quasi-two-dimensional material made up of alternating layers of conducting tellurium (Te) planes and insulating rare-earth terbium (Tb) block layers.
It has attracted a lot of interest recently though because it has two competing CDW states and represents an excellent platform to study new quantum phenomena.
Previous experiments have shown that these states can be tuned when the material is put under pressure, even leading to an induced superconducting state.
These experiments all used an isotropic pressure – the same in all directions. However, because this material is quasi-two dimensional, it would be even more interesting to see how it responds to a strain in one particular direction.
This is exactly what the team at SLAC have done.
They used ultrafast optical reflectivity to probe the dynamics of the competing CDW states in TbTe₃ at different strains.
They found that these two competing states are incredibly similar in energy and become more stable with increasing strain.
What’s really exciting though is the method they used. Their measurements were recorded in a pump-probe setup on timescales of a couple of picoseconds (trillionths of a second).
Combined with the application of a directional strain, this technique could be used in the future to study many other quantum materials with exciting properties.
Optical coherence tomography (OCT), a low-cost imaging technology used to diagnose and plan treatment for eye diseases, also shows potential as a diagnostic tool for assessing rapid hearing loss.
Researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of USC have developed an OCT device that can acquire diagnostic quality images of the inner ear during surgery. These images enable accurate measurement of fluids in the inner ear compartments. The team’s proof-of-concept study, described in Science Translational Medicine, revealed that the fluid levels correlated with the severity of a patient’s hearing loss.
An imbalance between the two inner ear fluids, endolymph and perilymph, is associated with sudden, unexplainable hearing loss and acute vertigo, symptoms of ear conditions such as Ménière’s disease, cochlear hydrops and vestibular schwannomas. This altered fluid balance – known as endolymphatic hydrops (ELH) – occurs when the volume of endolymph increases in one compartment and the volume of perilymph decreases in the other.
Because the fluid chambers of the inner ear are so small, there has previously been no effective way to assess endolymph-to-perilymph fluid balance in a living patient. Now, the Keck OCT device enables imaging of inner ear structures in real time during mastoidectomy – a procedure performed during many ear and skull base surgeries, and which provides optical access to the lateral and posterior semicircular canals (SCCs) of the inner ear.
OCT offers a quicker, more accurate and less expensive way to see inner ear fluids, hair cells and other structures compared with the “gold standard” MRI scans. The researchers hope that ultimately, the device will evolve into an outpatient assessment tool for personalized treatments for hearing loss and vertigo. If it can be used outside a surgical suite, OCT technology could also support the development and testing of new treatments, such as gene therapies to regenerate lost hair cells in the inner ear.
Intraoperative OCT
The intraoperative OCT system, developed by senior author John Oghalai and colleagues, comprises an OCT adaptor containing the entire interferometer, which attaches to the surgical microscope, plus a medical cart containing electronic devices including the laser, detector and computer.
The OCT system uses a swept-source laser with a central wavelength of 1307 nm and a bandwidth of 89.84 nm. The scanning beam spot size is 28.8 µm and has a depth-of-focus of 3.32 mm. The system’s axial resolution of 14.0 µm and lateral resolution of 28.8 µm provide an in-plane resolution of 403 µm2.
The laser output is directed into a 90:10 optical fibre fused coupler, with the 10% portion illuminating the interferometer’s reference arm. The other 90% illuminates the sample arm, passes through a fibre-optic circulator, and is combined with a red aiming beam that’s used to visually position the scanning beam on the region-of-interest.
After the OCT and aiming beams are guided onto the sample for scanning, and the interferometric signal needed for OCT imaging is generated, two output ports of the 50:50 fibre optic coupler direct the light signal into a balanced photodetector for conversion into an electronic signal. A low-pass dichroic mirror allows back-reflected visible light to pass through into an eyepiece and a camera. The surgeon can then use the eyepiece and real-time video to ensure correct positioning for the OCT imaging.
Feasibility study
The team performed a feasibility study on 19 patients undergoing surgery at USC to treat Ménière’s disease (an inner-ear disorder), vestibular schwannoma (a benign tumour) or middle-ear infection with normal hearing (the control group). All surgical procedures required a mastoidectomy.
Immediately after performing the mastoidectomy, the surgeon positioned the OCT microscope with the red aiming beam targeted at the SCCs of the inner ear. After acquiring a 3D volume image of the fluid compartments in the inner ear, which took about 2 min, the OCT microscope was removed from the surgical suite and the surgical procedure continued.
The OCT system could clearly distinguish the two fluid chambers within the SCCs. The researchers determined that higher endolymph levels correlated with patients having greater hearing loss. In addition to accurately measuring fluid levels, the system revealed that patients with vestibular schwannoma had higher endolymph-to-perilymph ratios than patients with Ménière’s disease, and that compared with the controls, both groups had increased endolymph and reduced perilymph, indicating ELH.
The success of this feasibility study may help improve current microsurgery techniques, by guiding complex temporal bone surgery that requires drilling close to the inner ear. OCT technology could help reduce surgical damage to delicate ear structures and better distinguish brain tumours from healthy tissue. The OCT system could also be used to monitor the endolymph-to-perilymph ratio in patients with Ménière’s disease undergoing endolymphatic shunting, to verify that the procedure adequately decompresses the endolymphatic space. Efforts to make a smaller, less expensive system for these types of surgical use are underway.
The researchers are currently working to improve the software and image processing techniques in order to obtain images from patients without having to remove the mastoid bone, which would enable use of the OCT system for outpatient diagnosis.
The team also plans to adapt a handheld version of an OCT device currently used to image the tympanic membrane and middle ear to enable imaging of the human cochlea in the clinic. Imaging down the ear canal non-invasively offers many potential benefits when diagnosing and treating patients who do not require surgery. For example, patients determined to have ELH could be diagnosed and treated rapidly, a process that currently takes 30 days or more.
Oghalai and colleagues are optimistic about improvements being made in OCT technology, particularly in penetration depth and tissue contrast. “This will enhance the utility of this imaging modality for the ear, complementing its potential to be completely non-invasive and expanding its indication to a wider range of diseases,” they write.
Science and technology go hand in hand but it’s not always true that basic research leads to applications. Many early advances in thermodynamics, for example, followed the opposite path, emerging from experiments with equipment developed by James Watt, who was trying to improve the efficiency of steam engines. In a similar way, much progress in optics and photonics only arose after the invention of the laser.
The same is true in quantum physics, where many of the most exciting advances are occurring in companies building quantum computers, developing powerful sensors, or finding ways to send information with complete security. The cutting-edge techniques and equipment developed to make those advances then, in turn, let us understand the basic scientific and philosophical questions of quantum physics.
Quantum entanglement, for example, is no longer an academic curiosity, but a tangible resource that can be exploited in quantum technology. But because businesses are now applying this resource to real-world problems, it’s becoming possible to make progress on basic questions about what entanglement is. It’s a case of technological applications leading to fundamental answers, not the other way round.
In a recent panel event in our Physics World Live series, Elise Crull (a philosopher), Artur Ekert (an academic) and Stephanie Simmons (an industrialist) came together to discuss the complex interplay between quantum technology and quantum foundations. Elise Crull, who trained in physics, is now associate professor of philosophy at the City University of New York. Artur Ekert is a quantum physicist and cryptographer at the University of Oxford, UK, and founding director of the Center for Quantum Technologies in Singapore. Stephanie Simmons is chief quantum officer at Photonic, co-chair of Canada’s Quantum Advisory Council, and associate professor of physics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
Quantum panellists From left: Elise Crull, Artur Ekert and Stephanie Simmons. (Courtesy: City University of New York; CC BY The Royal Society; CC BY-SA SBoone)
Presented here is an edited extract of their discussion, which you can watch in full online.
Can you describe the interplay between applications of quantum physics and its fundamental scientific and philosophical questions?
Stephanie Simmons: Over the last 20 years, research funding for quantum technology has risen sharply as people have become aware of the exponential speed-ups that lie in store for some applications. That commercial potential has brought a lot more people into the field and made quantum physics much more visible. But in turn, applications have also let us learn more about the fundamental side of the subject.
We’re learning so much at a fundamental level because of technological advances
Stephanie Simmons
They have, for example, forced us to think about what quantum information really means, how it can be treated as a resource, and what constitutes intelligence versus consciousness. We’re learning so much at a fundamental level because of those technological advances. Similarly, understanding those foundational aspects lets us develop technology in a more innovative way.
If you think about conventional, classical supercomputers, we use them in a distributed fashion, with lots of different nodes all linked up. But how can we achieve that kind of “horizontal scalability” for quantum computing? One way to get distributed quantum technology is to use entanglement, which isn’t some kind of afterthought but the core capability.
How do you manage entanglement, create it, distribute it and distil it? Entanglement is central to next-generation quantum technology but, to make progress, you need to break free from previous thinking. Rather than thinking along classical lines with gates, say, an “entanglement-first” perspective will change the game entirely.
Artur Ekert: As someone more interested in the foundations of quantum mechanics, especially the nature of randomness, technology has never really been my concern. However, every single time I’ve tried to do pure research, I’ve failed because I’ve discovered it has interesting links to technology. There’s always someone saying: “You know, it can be applied to this and that.”
Think about some of the classic articles on the foundations of quantum physics, such as the 1935 Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) paper suggesting that quantum mechanics is incomplete. If you look at them from the perspective of data security, you realize that some concepts – such as the ability to learn about a physical property without disturbing it – are relevant to cryptography. After all, it offers a way into perfect eavesdropping.
So while I enjoy the applications and working with colleagues on the corporate side, I have something of a love–hate relationship with the technological world.
Fundamental benefits Despite being so weird, quantum entanglement is integral to practical applications of quantum mechanics. (Courtesy: iStock/Jian Fen)
Elise Crull: These days physicists can test things that they couldn’t before – maybe not the really weird stuff like indefinite causal ordering but certainly quantum metrology and the location of the quantum-classical boundary. These are really fascinating areas to think about and I’ve had great fun interacting with physicists, trying to fathom what they mean by fundamental terms like causality.
Was Schrödinger right to say that it’s entanglement that forces our entire departure from classical lines of thought? What counts as non-classical physics and where is the boundary with the quantum world? What kind of behaviour is – and is not – a signature of quantum phenomena? These questions make it a great time to be a philosopher.
Do you have a favourite quantum experiment or quantum technology that’s been developed over the last few decades?
Artur Ekert: I would say the experiments of Alain Aspect in Orsay in the early 1980s, who built on the earlier work of John Clauser, to see if there is a way to violate Bell inequalities. When I was a graduate student in Oxford, I found the experiment absolutely fascinating, and I was surprised it didn’t get as much attention at the time as I thought it should. It was absolutely mind-blowing that nature is inherently random and refutes the notion of local “hidden variables”.
There are, of course, many other beautiful experiments in quantum physics. There are cavity quantum electrodynamic and ion-trap experiments that let physicists go from controlling a bunch of atoms to individual atoms or ions. But to me the Aspect experiment was different because it didn’t confirm something that we’d already experienced. As a student I remember thinking: “I don’t understand this; it just doesn’t make sense. It’s mind-boggling.”
Elise Crull: The Bell-type experiments are how I got interested in the philosophy of quantum mechanics. I wasn’t around when Aspect did his first experiments, but at the recent Helgoland conference marking the centenary of quantum mechanics, he was on stage with Anton Zeilinger debating the meaning of Bell violations. So, it’s an experiment that’s still unsettled almost 50 years later and we have different stories involving causality to explain it.
The game is to go from a single qubit or small quantum systems to many-body quantum systems and to look at the emergent phenomena there
Elise Crull
I’m also interested in how physicists are finding clever ways to shield systems from decoherence, which is letting us see quantum phenomena at higher and higher levels. It seems the game is to go from a single qubit or small quantum systems to many-body quantum systems and to look at the emergent phenomena there. I’m looking forward to seeing further results.
Stephanie Simmons: I’m particularly interested in large quantum systems, which will let us do wonderful things like error correction and offer exponential speed-ups on algorithms and entanglement distribution for large distances. Having those capabilities will unlock new technology and let us probe the measurement problem, which is the core of so many of the unanswered questions in quantum physics.
Figuring out how to get reliable quantum systems out of noisy quantum systems was not at all obvious. It took a good decade for various teams around the world to do that. You’re pushing the edges of performance but it’s a really fast-moving space and I would say quantum-error correction is the technology that I think is most underappreciated.
How large could a quantum object or system be? And if we ever built it, what new fundamental information about quantum mechanics would it tell us?
Artur Ekert: Technology has driven progress in our understanding of the quantum world. We’ve gone from being able to control zillions of atoms in an ensemble to just one but the challenge is now to control more of them – two, three or four. It might seem paradoxical to have gone from many to one and back to many but the difference is that we can now control those quantum states. We can engineer those interactions and look at emerging phenomena. I don’t believe there will be a magic number where quantum will stop working – but who knows? Maybe when we get to 42 atoms the world will be different.
Elise Crull: It depends what you’re looking for. To detect gravitational waves, LIGO already uses Weber bars, which are big aluminium rods – weighing about a tonne – that vibrate like quantum oscillators. So we already have macroscopic systems that need to be treated quantum mechanically. The question is whether you can sustain entanglement longer and over greater distance.
What are the barriers to scaling up quantum devices so they can be commercially successful?
Stephanie Simmons: To unleash exponential speed-ups in chemistry or cybersecurity, we will need quantum computers with 400 to 2000 application-grade logical qubits. They will need to perform to a certain degree of precision, which means you need error correction. The overheads will be high but we’ve raised a lot of money on the assumption that it all pans out, though there’s no reason to think there’s a limit.
I don’t feel like there’s anything that would bar us from hitting that kind of commercial success. But when you’re building things that have never been built before, there are always “unknown unknowns”, which is kind of fun. There’s always the possibility of seeing some kind of interesting emergent phenomenon when we build very large quantum systems that don’t exist in nature.
Large potential After successfully being able to figure out how to control single atoms at a time, quantum physicists now want to control large groups of atoms – but is there a limit to how big quantum objects can be? (Courtesy: Shutterstock/S Castelli)
Artur Ekert: To build a quantum computer, we have to create enough logical qubits and make them interact, which requires an amazing level of precision and degree of control. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to do that, but what would be fascinating is if – in the process of doing so – we discovered there is a fundamental limit.
While I support all efforts to build quantum computers, I’d almost like them to fail because we might then discover something that refutes quantum physics
Artur Ekert
So while I support all efforts to build quantum computers, I’d almost like them to fail because we might then discover something that refutes quantum physics. After all, building a quantum computer is probably the most complicated and sophisticated experiment in quantum physics. It’s more complex than the whole of the Apollo project that sent astronauts to the Moon: the degree of precision of every single component that is required is amazing.
If quantum physics breaks down at some point, chances are it’ll be in this kind of experiment. Of course, I wish all my colleagues investing in quantum computing get a good return for their money, but I have this hidden agenda. Failing to build a quantum computer would be a success for science: it would let us learn something new. In fact, we might even end up with an even more powerful “post-quantum” computer.
Surely the failure of quantum mechanics, driven by those applications, would be a bombshell if it ever happened?
Artur Ekert: People seeking to falsify quantum prediction are generally looking at connections between quantum and gravity so how would you be able to refute quantum physics with a quantum computer? Would it involve observing no speed-up where a speed-up should be seen, or would it be failure of some other sort?
My gut feeling is make this quantum experiment as complex and as sophisticated as you want, scale it up to the limits, and see what happens. If it works as we currently understand it should work, that’s fine, we’ll have quantum computers that will be useful for something. But if it doesn’t work for some fundamental reason, it’s also great – it’s a win–win game.
Are we close to the failure of quantum mechanics?
Elise Crull: I think Arthur has a very interesting point. But we have lots of orders of magnitude to go before we have a real quantum computer. In the meantime, many people working on quantum gravity – whether string theory or canonical quantum gravity – are driven by their deep commitment to the universality of quantization.
There are, for example, experiments being designed by some to disprove classical general relativity by entangling space–time geometries. The idea is to kick out certain other theories or find upper and lower bounds on a certain theoretical space. I think we will make a lot of progress by not by trying to defeat quantum mechanics but to look at the “classicality” of other field theories and try to test those.
How will quantum technology benefit areas other than, say, communication and cryptography?
Stephanie Simmons: History suggests that every time we commercialize a branch of physics, we aren’t great at predicting where that platform will go. When people invented the first transistor, they didn’t anticipate the billions that you could put onto a chip. So for the new generation of people who are “quantum native”, they’ll have access to tools and concepts with which they’ll quickly become familiar.
You have to remember that people think of quantum mechanics as counterintuitive. But it’s actually the most self-consistent set of physics principles. Imagine if you’re a character in a video game and you jump in midair; that’s not reality, but it’s totally self-consistent. Quantum is exactly the same. It’s weird, but self-consistent. Once you get used to the rules, you can play by them.
I think that there’s a real opportunity to think about chemistry in a much more computational sense. Quantum computing is going to change the way people talk about chemistry. We have the opportunity to rethink the way chemistry is put together, whether it’s catalysts or heavy elements. Chemicals are quantum-mechanical objects – if you had 30 or 50 atoms, with a classical computer it would just take more bits than there are atoms in the universe to work out their electronic structure.
Has industry become more important than academia when it comes to developing new technologies?
Stephanie Simmons: The grand challenge in the quantum world is to build a scaled-up, fault-tolerant, exponentially sped-up quantum system that could simultaneously deliver the repeaters we need to do all the entanglement distribution technologies. And all of that work, or at least a good chunk of it, is in companies. The focus of that development has left academia.
Industry is the most fast-moving place to be in quantum at the moment, and things will emerge that will surprise people
Stephanie Simmons
Sure, there are still contributions from academia, but there is at least 10 times as much going on in industry tackling these ultra-complicated, really complex system engineering challenges. In fact, tackling all those unknown unknowns, you actually become a better “quantum engineer”. Industry is the most fast-moving place to be in quantum at the moment, and things will emerge that will surprise people.
Competitive edge Most efforts to build quantum computers are now in industry, not academia. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/Bartlomiej K Wroblewski)
Artur Ekert: We can learn a lot from colleagues who work in the commercial sector because they ask different kinds of questions. My own first contact was with John Rarity and Paul Tabster at the UK Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, which became QinetiQ after privatization. Those guys were absolutely amazing and much more optimistic than I was about the future of quantum technologies. Paul in particular is an unsung hero of quantum tech. He showed me how you can think not in terms of equations, but devices – blocks you can put together, like quantum LEGO.
Over time, I saw more and more of my colleagues, students and postdocs going into the commercial world. Some even set up their own companies and I have a huge respect for my colleagues who’ve done that. I myself am involved with Speqtral in Singapore, which does satellite quantum communication, and I’m advising a few other firms too.
Most efforts to build quantum devices are now outside academia. In fact, it has to be that way because universities are not designed to build quantum computers, which requires skills and people not found in a typical university. The only way to work out what quantum is good for is through start-up companies. Some will fail; but some will survive – and the survivors will be those that bet on the right applications of quantum theory.
What technological or theoretical breakthrough do you most hope to see that make the biggest difference?
Elise Crull: I would love someone to design an experiment to entangle space–time geometries, which would be crazy but would definitely kick general relativity off the table. It’s a dream that I’d love to see happen.
Stephanie Simmons: I’m really keen to see distributed logical qubits that are horizontally scalable.
Artur Ekert: On the practical side, I’d like to see real progress in quantum-error-correcting codes and fault-tolerant computing. On the fundamental side, I’d love experiments that provide a better understanding of the nature of randomness and its links with special relativity.
Researchers in the US have directly imaged a class of extremely low-energy atomic vibrations called moiré phasons for the first time. In doing so, they proved that these vibrations are not just a theoretical concept, but are in fact the main way that atoms vibrate in certain twisted two-dimensional materials. Such vibrations may play a critical role in heat and charge transport and how quantum phases behave in these materials.
“Phasons had only been predicted by theory until now, and no one had ever directly observed them, or even thought that this was possible,” explains Yichao Zhang of the University of Maryland, who co-led the effort with Pinshane Huang of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Our work opens up an entirely new way of understanding lattice vibrations in 2D quantum materials.”
A second class of moiré phonons
When two sheets of a 2D materials are placed on top of each other and slightly twisted, their atoms form a moiré pattern, or superlattice. This superlattice contains quasi-periodic regions of rotationally aligned regions (denoted AA or AB) separated by a network of stacking faults called solitons.
Materials of this type are also known to possess distinctive vibrational modes known as moiré phonons, which arise from vibrations of the material’s crystal lattice. These modes vary with the twist angle between layers and can change the physical properties of the materials.
In the new work, which is published in Science, the researchers used a powerful microscopy technique called electron ptychography that enabled them to image samples with spatial resolutions as fine as 15 picometres (1 pm = 10-12 m). At this level of precision, explains Zhang, subtle changes in thermally driven atomic vibrations can be detected by analysing the shape and size of individual atoms. “This meant we could map how atoms vibrate across different stacking regions of the moiré superlattice,” she says. “What we found was striking: the vibrations weren’t uniform – atoms showed larger amplitudes in AA-stacked regions and highly anisotropic behaviour at soliton boundaries. These patterns align precisely with theoretical predictions for moiré phasons.”
Good vibrations: The experiment measured thermal vibrations in a single atom. (Courtesy: Yichao Zhang et al.)
Zhang has been studying phonons using electron microscopy for years, but limitations on imaging resolutions had largely restricted her previous studies to nanometre (10-9 m) scales. She recently realized that electron ptychography would resolve atomic vibrations with much higher precision, and therefore detect moiré phasons varying across picometre scales.
She and her colleagues chose to study twisted 2D materials because they can support many exotic electronic phenomena, including superconductivity and correlated insulated states. However, the role of lattice dynamics, including the behaviour of phasons in these structures, remains poorly understood. “The problem,” she explains, “is that phasons are both extremely low in energy and spatially non-uniform, making them undetectable by most experimental techniques. To overcome this, we had to push electron ptychography to its limits and validate our observations through careful modelling and simulations.”
This work opens new possibilities for understanding (and eventually controlling) how vibrations behave in complex 2D systems, she tells Physics World. “Phasons can affect how heat flows, how electrons move, and even how new phases of matter emerge. If we can harness these vibrations, we could design materials with programmable thermal and electronic properties, which would be important for future low-power electronics, quantum computing and nanoscale sensors.”
More broadly, electron ptychography provides a powerful new tool for exploring lattice dynamics in a wide range of advanced materials. The team is now using electron ptychography to study how defects, strain and interfaces affect phason behaviour. These imperfections are common in many real-world materials and devices and can cause their performance to deteriorate significantly. “Ultimately, we hope to capture how phasons respond to external stimuli, like how they evolve with change in temperature or applied fields,” Zhang reveals. “That could give us an even deeper understanding of how they interact with electrons, excitons or other collective excitations in quantum materials.”
Entranced by quantum William Phillips. (Courtesy: NIST)
William Phillips is a pioneer in the world of quantum physics. After graduating from Juniata College in Pennsylvania in 1970, he did a PhD with Dan Kleppner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he measured the magnetic moment of the proton in water. In 1978 Phillips joined the National Bureau of Standards in Gaithersburg, Maryland, now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he is still based.
Phillips shared the 1997 Nobel Prize for Physics with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji for their work on laser cooling. The technique uses light from precisely tuned laser beams to slow atoms down and cool them to just above absolute zero. As well as leading to more accurate atomic clocks, laser cooling proved vital for the creation of Bose–Einstein condensates – a form of matter where all constituent particles are in the same quantum state.
To mark the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, Physics World online editor Margaret Harris sat down with Phillips in Gaithersburg to talk about his life and career in physics. The following is an edited extract of their conversation, which you can hear in full on the Physics World Weekly podcast.
How did you become interested in quantum physics?
As an undergraduate, I was invited by one of the professors at my college to participate in research he was doing on electron spin resonance. We were using the flipping of unpaired spins in a solid sample to investigate the structure and behaviour of a particular compound. Unlike a spinning top, electrons can spin only in two possible orientations, which is pretty weird and something I found really fascinating. So I was part of the quantum adventure even as an undergraduate.
What did you do after graduating?
I did a semester at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, working on electron spin resonance with two physicists from Argentina. Then I was invited by Dan Kleppner – an amazing physicist – to do a PhD with him at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He really taught me how to think like a physicist. It was in his lab that I first encountered tuneable lasers, another wonderful tool for using the quantum properties of matter to explore what’s going on at the atomic level.
Chilling out William Phillips working on laser-cooling experiments in his laboratory circa 1986. (Courtesy: NIST)
Quantum mechanics is often viewed as being weird, counter-intuitive and strange. Is that also how you felt?
I’m the kind of person entranced by everything in the natural world. But even in graduate school, I don’t think I understood just how strange entanglement is. If two particles are entangled in a particular way, and you measure one to be spin “up”, say, then the other particle will necessarily be spin “down” – even though there’s no connection between them. Not even a signal travelling at the speed of light could get from one particle to the other to tell it, “You’d better be ‘down’ because the first one was measured to be ‘up’.” As a graduate student I didn’t understand how deliciously weird nature is because of quantum mechanics.
Is entanglement the most challenging concept in quantum mechanics?
It’s not that hard to understand entanglement in a formal sense. But it’s hard to get your mind wrapped around it because it’s so weird and distinct from the kinds of things that we experience on a day-to-day basis. The thing that it violates – local realism – seems so reasonable. But experiments done first by John Clauser and then Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger, who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2022, basically proved that it happens.
What quantum principle has had the biggest impact on your work?
Superposition has enabled the creation of atomic clocks of incredible precision. When I first came to NIST in 1978, when it was still called the National Bureau of Standards, the very best clock in the world was in our labs in Boulder, Colorado. It was good to one part in 1013.
Because of Einstein’s general relativity, clocks run slower if they’re deeper in a gravitational potential. The effect isn’t big: Boulder is about 1.5 km above sea level and a clock there would run faster than a sea level clock by about 1.5 parts in 1013. So if you had two such clocks – one at sea level and one in Boulder – you’d barely be able to resolve the difference. Now, at least in part because of the laser cooling and trapping ideas that my group and I have worked on, one can resolve a difference of less than 1 mm with the clocks that exist today. I just find that so amazing.
What research are you and your colleagues at NIST currently involved in?
Our laboratory has been a generator of ideas and techniques that could be used by people who make atomic clocks. Jun Ye, for example, is making clocks from atoms trapped in a so-called optical lattice of overlapping laser beams that are better than one part in 1018 – two orders of magnitude better than the caesium clocks that define the second. These newer types of clocks could help us to redefine the second.
We’re also working on quantum information. Ordinary digital information is stored and processed using bits that represent 0 or 1. But the beauty of qubits is that they can be in a superposition state, which is both 0 and 1. It might sound like a disaster because one of the great strengths of binary information is there’s no uncertainty; it’s one thing or another. But putting quantum bits into superpositions means you can do a problem in a lot fewer operations than using a classical device.
In 1994, for example, Peter Shor devised an algorithm that can factor numbers quantum mechanically much faster, or using far fewer operations, than with an ordinary classical computer. Factoring is a “hard problem”, meaning that the number of operations to solve it grows exponentially with the size of the number. But if you do it quantum mechanically, it doesn’t grow exponentially – it becomes an “easy” problem, which I find absolutely amazing. Changing the hardware on which you do the calculation changes the complexity class of a problem.
How might that change be useful in practical terms?
Shor’s algorithm is important because of public key encryption, which we use whenever we buy something online with a credit card. A company sends your computer a big integer number that they’ve generated by multiplying two smaller numbers together. That number is used to encrypt your credit card number. Somebody trying to intercept the transmission can’t get any useful information because it would take centuries to factor this big number. But if an evildoer had a quantum computer, they could factor the number, figure out your credit card and use it to buy TVs or whatever evildoers buy.
Now, we don’t have quantum computers that can do this yet – they can’t even do simple problems, let alone factor big numbers. But if somebody did do that, they could decrypt messages that do matter, such as diplomatic or military secrets. Fortunately, quantum mechanics comes to the rescue through something called the no-cloning theorem. These quantum forms of encryption prevent an eavesdropper from intercepting a message, duplicating it and using it – it’s not allowed by the laws of physics.
Sharing the excitement William Phillips performing a demo during a lecture at the Sigma Pi Sigma Congress in 2000. (Courtesy: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)
Quantum processors can be made from different qubits – not just cold atoms but trapped ions, superconducting circuits and others, too. Which do you think will turn out best?
My attitude is that it’s too early to settle on one particular platform. It may well be that the final quantum computer is a hybrid device, where computations are done on one platform and storage is done on another. Superconducting quantum computers are fast, but they can’t store information for long, whereas atoms and ions can store information for a really long time – they’re robust and isolated from the environment, but are slow at computing. So you might use the best features of different platforms in different parts of your quantum computer.
But what do I know? We’re a long way from having quantum computers that can do interesting problems faster than classical device. Sure, you might have heard somebody say they’ve used a quantum computer to solve a problem that would take a classical device a septillion years. But they’ve probably chosen a problem that was easy for a quantum computer and hard for a classical computer – and it was probably a problem nobody cares about.
When do you think we’ll see quantum computers solving practical problems?
People are definitely going to make money from factoring numbers and doing quantum chemistry. Learning how molecules behave could make a big difference to our lives. But none of this has happened yet, and we may still be pretty far away from it. In fact, I have proposed a bet with my colleague Carl Williams, who says that by 2045 we will have a quantum computer that can factor numbers that a classical computer of that time cannot. My view is we won’t. I expect to be dead by then. But I hope the bet will encourage people to solve the problems to make this work, like error correction. We’ll also put up money to fund a scholarship or a prize.
What do you think quantum computers will be most useful for in the nearer term?
What I want is a quantum computer that can tackle problems such as magnetism. Let’s say you have a 1D chain of atoms with spins that can point up or down. Quantum magnetism is a hard problem because with n spins there are 2n possible states and calculating the overall magnetism of a chain of more than a few tens of spins is impossible for a brute-force classical computer. But a quantum computer could do the job.
There are quantum computers that already have lots of qubits but you’re not going to get a reliable answer from them. For that you have to do error correction by assembling physical qubits into what’s known as a logical qubit. They let you determine whether an error has happened and fix it, which is what people are just starting to do. It’s just so exciting right now.
What development in quantum physics should we most look out for?
The two main challenges are: how many logical qubits we can entangle with each other; and for how long they can maintain their coherence. I often say we need an “immortal” qubit, one that isn’t killed by the environment and lasts long enough to be used to do an interesting calculation. That’ll determine if you really have a competent quantum computer.
Reflecting on your career so far, what are you most proud of?
Back in around 1988, we were just fooling around in the lab trying to see if laser cooling was working the way it was supposed to. First indications were: everything’s great. But then we discovered that the temperature to which you could laser cool atoms was lower than everybody said was possible based on the theory at that time. This is called sub-Doppler laser cooling, and it was an accidental discovery; we weren’t looking for it.
People got excited and our friends in Paris at the École Normale came up with explanations for what was going on. Steve Chu, who was at that point at Stanford University, was also working on understanding the theory behind it, and that really changed things in an important way. In fact, all of today’s laser-cooled caesium atomic clocks use that feature that the temperature is lower than the original theory of laser cooling said it was.
Another thing that has been particularly important is Bose–Einstein condensation, which is an amazing process that happens because of a purely quantum-mechanical feature that makes atoms of the same kind fundamentally indistinguishable. It goes back to the work of Satyendra Nath Bose, who 100 years ago came up with the idea that photons are indistinguishable and therefore that the statistical mechanics of photons would be different from the usual statistical mechanics of Boltzmann or Maxwell.
Bose–Einstein condensates, where almost all the atoms are in the same quantum state, were facilitated by our discovery that the temperature could be so much lower. To get this state, you’ve got to cool the atoms to a very low temperature – and it helps if the atoms are colder to start with.
Did you make any other accidental discoveries?
We also accidentally discovered optical lattices. In 1968 a Russian physicist named Vladilen Letokhov came up with the idea of trapping atoms in a standing wave of light. This was 10 years before laser cooling arrived and made it possible to do such a thing, but it was a great idea because the atoms are trapped over such a small distance that a phenomenon called Dicke narrowing gets rid of the Doppler shift.
Everybody knew this was a possibility, but we weren’t looking for it. We were trying to measure the temperature of the atoms in the laser-cooling configuration, and the idea we came up with was to look at the Doppler shift of the scattered light. Light comes in, and if it bounces off an atom that’s moving, there’ll be a Doppler shift, and we can measure that Doppler shift and see the distribution of velocities.
So we did that, and the velocity distribution just floored us. It was so odd. Instead of being nice and smooth, there was a big sharp peak right in the middle. We didn’t know what it was. We thought briefly that we might have accidentally made a Bose–Einstein condensate, but then we realized, no, we’re trapping the atoms in an optical lattice so the Doppler shift goes away.
It wasn’t nearly as astounding as sub-Doppler laser cooling because it was expected, but it was certainly interesting, and it is now used for a number of applications, including the next generation of atomic clocks.
How important is serendipity in research?
Learning about things accidentally has been a recurring theme in our laboratory. In fact, I think it’s an important thing for people to understand about the way that science is done. Often, science is done not because people are working towards a particular goal but because they’re fooling around and see something unexpected. If all of our science activity is directed toward specific goals, we’ll miss a lot of really important stuff that allows us to get to those goals. Without this kind of curiosity-driven research, we won’t get where we need to go.
In a nutshell, what does quantum meant to you?
Quantum mechanics was the most important discovery of 20th-century physics. Wave–particle duality, which a lot of people would say was the “ordinary” part of quantum mechanics, has led to a technological revolution that has transformed our daily lives. We all walk around with mobile phones that wouldn’t exist were it not for quantum mechanics. So for me, quantum mechanics is this idea that waves are particles and particles are waves.
Researchers in Canada have used electrochemistry to increase the rate of nuclear fusion within a metal target that is bombarded with high-energy deuterium ions. While the process is unlikely to lead to a new source of energy – it consumes far more energy than it produces – further research could provide new insights into fusion and other areas of science.
Although modern fusion reactors are huge projects sometimes costing billions, the first evidence for an artificial fusion reaction – observed by Mark Oliphant and Ernest Rutherford in 1934 – was a simple experiment in which deuterium nuclei in a solid target were bombarded with deuterium ions.
Palladium is a convenient target for such experiments because the metal’s lattice has the unusual propensity to selectively absorb hydrogen (and deuterium) atoms. In 1989 the chemists Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton excited the world by claiming that the electrolysis of heavy water using a palladium cathode caused absorbed deuterium atoms to undergo spontaneous nuclear fusion under ambient conditions (with no ion bombardment). However, this observation of “cold fusion” could not be reproduced by others.
Now, Curtis Berlinguette at the University of British Columbia and colleagues have looked at whether electrochemistry could enhance the rate of fusion triggered by bombarding palladium with high-energy deuterium ions.
Benchtop accelerator
In the new work, the researchers used a palladium foil as the cathode in an electrochemical cell that was used in the electrolysis of heavy water. The other side of the cathode was the target for a custom-made benchtop megaelectronvolt particle accelerator. Kuo-Yi Chen, a postdoc in Berlinguette’s group, developed a microwave plasma thruster that was used to dissociate deuterium into ions. “Then we have a magnetic field that directs the ions into that metal target,” explains Berlinguette. The process, called plasma immersion ion implantation, is sometimes used to dope semiconductors, but has never previously been used to trigger nuclear fusion. Their apparatus is dubbed the Thunderbird Reactor.
The researchers used a neutron detector surrounding the apparatus to count the fusion events occurring. They found that, when they turned on the reactor, they initially detected very few events. However, as the amount of deuterium implanted in the palladium grew, the number of fusion events grew and eventually plateaued. The researchers then switched on the electrochemical cell, driving deuterium into the palladium from the other side using a simple lead-acid battery. They found that the number of fusion events detected increased another 15%.
Currently, the reactor produces less than 10-10 times the amount of energy it consumes. However, the researchers believe it could be used in future research. “We provide the community with an apparatus to study fusion reactions at lower energy conditions than has been done before,” says Berlinguette. “It’s an uncharted experimental space so perhaps there might be some interesting surprises there…What we are really doing is providing the first clear experimental link between electrochemistry and fusion science.”
Berlinguette also notes that, even if the work never finds any productive application in nuclear fusion research, the techniques involved could be useful elsewhere. In high temperature superconductivity, for example, researchers often use extreme pressures to create metal hydrides: “Now we’re showing you can do this using electrochemistry instead,” he says. He also points to the potential for deuteration of drugs, which is an active area of research in pharmacology.
The research is described in a paper in Nature, with Chen as lead author.
Jennifer Dionne and her graduate student Amy McKeown-Green at Stanford University in the US are impressed: “In the work back in the 1930s they had a static target,” says McKeown-Green. “This is a really cool example of how you can perturb the system in this low-energy, sub-million Kelvin regime.” She would be interested to see further analysis on exactly what the temperature is and whether other metals show similar behaviours.
“Hydrogen and elements like deuterium tend to sit in the interstitial sites in the palladium lattice and, at room temperature and pressure, about 70% of those will be full,” explains Dionne. “A cool thing about this paper is that they showed how an electrical bias increases the amount of deuteration of the target. It was either completely obvious or completely counter-intuitive depending on how you look at it, and they’ve proved definitively that you can increase the amount of deuteration and then increase the fusion rate.”
Researchers in the US who receive tenure produce more novel but less impactful work, according to an analysis of the output of more than 12,000 academics across 15 disciplines. The study also finds that publication rates rise steeply and steadily during tenure-track, typically peaking the year before a scientist receives a permanent position. After tenure, their average publication rate settles near the peak value.
Carried out by data scientists led by Giorgio Tripodi from Northwestern University in Illinois, the study examined the publication history of academics five years before tenure and five years after. The researchers say that the observed pattern – a rise before tenure, followed by a peak and then a steady level – is highly reproducible.
“Tenure in the US academic system is a very peculiar contract,” explains Tripodi. “It [features] a relatively long probation period followed by a permanent appointment [which is] a strong incentive to maximize research output and avoid projects that are more likely to fail during the tenure track.”
The study reveals that academics in non-lab-based disciplines, such as mathematics, business, economics, sociology and political science, exhibit a fall in research output after tenure. But for those in the other 10 disciplines, including physics, publication rates are sustained around the pre-tenure peak.
“In lab-based fields, collaborative teams and sustained funding streams may help maintain high productivity post-tenure,” says Tripodi. “In contrast, in more individual-centred disciplines like mathematics or sociology, where research output is less dependent on continuous lab operation, the post-tenure slowdown appears to be more pronounced.”
The team also looked at the proportion of high-impact papers – defined as those in the top 5% of a field – and found that researchers in all 15 disciplines publish more high-impact papers before tenure than after. As for “novelty” – defined as atypical combinations of work – this increases with time, but the most novel papers tend to appear after tenure.
According to Tripodi, once tenure and job security has been secured, the pressure to publish shifts towards other objectives – a move that explains the plateau or decline seen in the publication data. “Our results show that tenure allows scientists to take more risks, explore novel research directions, and reorganize their research portfolio,” he adds.
Prototype system: A drone photo of the Engineering Development Array 2 (EDA2) used in the survey. (Courtesy: D Grigg)
The largest ever survey of low-frequency radio emissions from satellites has detected emissions from the Starlink satellite “mega-constellation” across scientifically important low-frequency bands, including some that are protected for radio astronomy by international regulations. These emissions, which come from onboard electronics and are not intentional transmissions, could mask the weak radio-wave signals that astronomers seek to detect. As well as being damaging for radio astronomy, the researchers at Australia’s Curtin University who conducted the survey say their findings highlight the need for new regulations that cover unintended transmissions, not just deliberate ones.
“It is important to note that Starlink is not violating current regulations, so is doing nothing wrong,” says Steven Tingay, the executive director of the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy (CIRA) and a member of the survey team. Discussions with Starlink operator SpaceX on this topic, he adds, have been “constructive”.
The main purpose of Starlink and other mega-constellations is to provide Internet coverage around the world, including in areas that were previously unable to access it. In addition to SpaceX’s Starlink, other mega-constellations include Amazon’s Kuiper (US) and Eutelsat’s OneWeb (UK). This list is likely to expand in the future, with hundreds to tens of thousands of additional satellites planned for launch by China’s Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (operator of the G60 Starlink/Qianfan constellation) and the Russian Federation (operator of the Sfera constellation).
While the effects of mega-constellations on optical astronomy have been widely studied, study leader Dylan Grigg, a PhD student in CIRA’s International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, says that researchers are just beginning to realize the extent to which they are also adversely affecting radio astronomy. These effects extend to some of the most radio-quiet places on Earth. Indeed, several radio telescopes that were deliberately built in low-radio-noise locations – including the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Western Australia and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, as well as Europe’s Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) – have recently detected interfering satellite signals.
Largest survey of satellite effects on radio astronomy data
To understand the scale of the problem, Tingay, Grigg and colleagues turned to a radio telescope called the Engineering Development Array 2 (EDA2). This is a prototype station for the low-frequency half of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA-Low), which will be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope when it comes online later this decade.
Using the EDA2, the researchers imaged the sky every two seconds at the frequencies that SKA-Low will cover. They did this using a software package Grigg developed that autonomously detects and identifies satellites in the images the EDA2 creates.
Although this was not the first time EDA2 has been deployed to analyse the effects of satellites on radio astronomy data, Grigg says it is the most comprehensive. “Ours is the largest survey looking into Starlink emissions at SKA-Low frequencies, with over 76 million of the images analysed,” he explains. “With the real SKA-Low coming online soon, we need as much information as possible to understand the threat satellite interference poses to radio astronomy.”
Emissions at protected frequencies
During the survey period, the researchers say they detected more than 112 000 radio emissions from over 1800 Starlink satellites. At some frequencies, up to 30% of all survey images contained at least one Starlink detection.
“While Starlink is not the only satellite network, it is the most immediate and frequent source of potential interference for radio astronomy,” Grigg says. “Indeed, it launched 477 satellites during this study’s four-month data collection period alone and has the most satellites in orbit – more than 7000 during the time of this study.”
But it is not only the sheer number of satellites that poses a challenge for astronomers. So, too, does the strength and frequency of their emissions. “Some satellites were detected emitting in bands where no signals are supposed to be present at all,” Grigg says. The list of rogue emitters, he adds, included 703 satellites the team identified at 150.8 MHz – a frequency that is meant to be reserved for radio astronomy under International Telecommunication Union regulations. “Since these emissions may come from components like onboard electronics and they’re not part of an intentional signal, astronomers can’t easily predict them or filter them out,” he says.
Potential for new regulations and mitigations
From a regulatory perspective, the widespread detection of unintended emissions, including within protected frequency bands, demonstrates the need for international regulation and limits on unintended emissions, Grigg tells Physics World. The Curtin team is now working with other radio astronomy research groups around the world with the aim of introducing updated policies that would regulate the impact of satellite constellations on radio astronomy.
In the meantime, Grigg says, “We are in an ongoing dialogue with SpaceX and are hopeful that we can continue to work with them to introduce mitigations to their satellites in the future.”
Dark matter could be accumulating inside planets close to the galactic centre, potentially even forming black holes that might consume the afflicted planets from the inside-out, new research has predicted.
According to the standard model of cosmology, all galaxies including the Milky Way sit inside huge haloes of dark matter, with the greatest density at the centre. This dark matter primarily interacts only through gravity, although some popular models such as weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS) do imply that dark-matter particles may occasionally scatter off normal matter.
This has led PhD student Mehrdad Phoroutan Mehr and Tara Fetherolf of the University of California, Riverside, to make an extraordinary proposal: that dark matter could elastically scatter off molecules inside planets, lose energy and become trapped inside those planets, and then grow so dense that they collapse to form a black hole. In some cases, a black hole could be produced in just ten months, according to Mehr and Fetherolf’s calculations, reported in Physical Review D.
Even more remarkable is that while many planets would be consumed by their parasitic black hole, it is feasible that some planets could actually survive with a black hole inside them, while in others the black hole might evaporate, Mehr tells Physics World.
“Whether a black hole inside a planet survives or not depends on how massive it is when it first forms,” he says.
This leads to a trade-off between how quickly the black hole can grow and how soon the black hole can evaporate via Hawking radiation – the quantum effect that sees a black hole’s mass radiated away as energy.
The mass of a dark-matter particle remains unknown, but the less massive it is, and the more massive a planet is, then the greater the chance a planet has of capturing dark matter, and the more massive a black hole it can form. If the black hole starts out relatively massive, then the planet is in big trouble, but if it starts out very small then it can evaporate before it becomes dangerous. Of course, if it evaporates, another black hole could replace it in the future.
“Interestingly,” adds Mehr, “There is also a special in-between mass where these two effects balance each other out. In that case, the black hole neither grows nor evaporates – it could remain stable inside the planet for a long time.”
Keeping planets warm
It’s not the first time that dark matter has been postulated to accumulate inside planets. In 2011 Dan Hooper and Jason Steffen of Fermilab proposed that dark matter could become trapped inside planets and that the energy released through dark-matter particles annihilating could keep a planet outside the habitable zone warm enough for liquid water to exist on its surface.
Mehr and Fetherolf’s new hypothesis “is worth looking into more carefully”, says Hooper.
That said, Hooper cautions that the ability of dark matter to accumulate inside a planet and form a black hole should not be a general expectation for all models of dark matter. Rather, “it seems to me that there could be a small window of dark-matter models where such particles could be captured in stars at a rate that is high enough to lead to black hole formation,” he says.
Currently there remains a large parameter space for the possible properties for dark matter. Experiments and observations continue to chip away at this parameter space, but there remain a very wide range of possibilities. The ability of dark matter to self-annihilate is just one of those properties – not all models of dark matter allow for this.
If dark-matter particles do annihilate at a sufficiently high rate when they come into contact, then it is unlikely that the mass of dark matter inside a planet would ever grow large enough to form a black hole. But if they don’t self-annihilate, or at least not at an appreciable rate, then a black hole formed of dark matter could still keep a planet warm with its Hawking radiation.
Searching for planets with black holes inside
The temperature anomaly that this would create could provide a means of detecting planets with black holes inside them. It would be challenging – the planets that we expect to contain the most dark matter would be near the centre of the galaxy 26,000 light years away, where the dark-matter concentration in the halo is densest.
Even if the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could detect anomalous thermal radiation from such a distant planet, Mehr says that it would not necessarily be a smoking gun.
“If JWST were to observe that a planet is hotter than expected, there could be many possible explanations, we would not immediately attribute this to dark matter or a black hole,” says Mehr. “Rather, our point is that if detailed studies reveal temperatures that cannot be explained by ordinary processes, then dark matter could be considered as one possible – though still controversial – explanation.”
Another problem is that black holes cannot be distinguished from planets purely through their gravity. A Jupiter-mass planet has the same gravitational pull as a Jupiter-mass black hole that has just eaten a Jupiter-mass planet. This means that planetary detection methods that rely on gravity, from radial velocity Doppler shift measurements to astrometry and gravitational microlensing events, could not tell a planet and a black hole apart.
The planets in our own Solar System are also unlikely to contain much dark matter, says Mehr. “We assume that the dark matter density primarily depends on the distance from the centre of the galaxy,” he explains.
Where we are, the density of dark matter is too low for the planets to capture much of it, since the dark-matter halo is concentrated in the galactic centre. Therefore, we needn’t worry about Jupiter or Saturn, or even Earth, turning into a black hole.
This episode features a wide-ranging interview with the astrochemist Ewine van Dishoeck, who is professor emeritus of molecular astrophysics at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. In 2018 she was awarded The Kavli Prize in Astrophysics and in this podcast she talks about her passion for astrochemistry and how her research combines astronomy, astrophysics, theoretical chemistry and laboratory experiments.
Van Dishoeck talks about some of the key unanswered questions in astrochemistry, including how complex molecules form on the tiny specks of dust in interstellar space. We chat about the recent growth in our understanding of exoplanets and protoplanetary discs and the prospect of observing signs of life on distant planets or moons.
The Atacama Large Millimetre Array radio telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope are two of the major facilities that Van Dishoeck has been involved with. She talks about the challenges of getting the astronomy community to agree on the parameters of a new observatory and explains the how collaborative nature of these projects ensures that instruments meet the needs of multiple research communities.
Van Dishoeck looks to the future of astrochemistry and what new observatories could bring to the field. The interview ends with a call for the next generation of scientists to pursue careers in astrochemistry.
This podcast is sponsored by The Kavli Prize.
The Kavli Prize honours scientists for basic research breakthroughs in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience – transforming our understanding of the big, the small and the complex. One million dollars is awarded in each of the three fields. The Kavli Prize is a partnership among The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, and The Kavli Foundation (USA).
The vision for The Kavli Prize comes from Fred Kavli, a Norwegian-American entrepreneur and philanthropist who turned his lifelong fascination with science into a lasting legacy for recognizing scientific breakthroughs and for supporting basic research.
The Kavli Prize follows a two-year cycle, with an open call for nominations between 1 July and 1 October in odd-numbered years, and an announcement and award ceremony during even-numbered years. The next Kavli Prize will be announced in June 2026. Visit kavliprize.org for more information.
The Kavli Prize honours scientists for basic research breakthroughs in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience – transforming our understanding of the big, the small and the complex. One million dollars is awarded in each of the three fields. The Kavli Prize is a partnership among The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, and The Kavli Foundation (USA).