Soft matter is a broad class of materials with many examples found in everyday life: foods, crude oil, many biological materials, granular materials, liquid crystals, plastics. All of these are unified by the property that they’re readily deformable because the elastic energy is of the same order of magnitude as the ambient thermal energy. …Read more.

The role of the surroundings, or environment, in quantum mechanics has long captivated physicists’ attention. Recently, quantum phase transitions (QPT)– a qualitative change in the ground state as a function of a parameter– have been shown to occur in systems coupled to a dissipative environment. …Read more.

onductor quantum dots (QDs) are a leading approach for the implementation of solid-state based qubits. In principle, either charge or spin can be used to encode a qubit. However, in the last ten years or so, a disproportionally large quantity of research has been devoted to spin qubits, mainly because of the relatively long single-qubit dephasing times for spin qubits. …Read more.

Despite living in a complex, room temperature, solid-state environment, the spin of electrons bound to a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) defect in diamond can exist in a delicate quantum superposition over relatively long timescales. …Read more.

Organic (opto)electronic materials have been explored in a variety of applications in electronics and photonics. They offer several advantages over traditional silicon technology, including low-cost processing, fabrication of large-area flexible devices, and widely tunable properties through functionalization of the molecules. …Read more.

On September 14, 2015 the two ground-based interferometers that comprise the LIGO network directly observed the gravitational-wave signature of a 1.3 billion-year-old binary black hole merger. This incredible discovery is not only the first direct detection of gravitational waves, which cements Einstein’s prediction of their existence, it is also the first ever observation of two black holes merging. …Read more.

Recent experiments at CWRU (Singer) have developed organic cavity polaritons that display world-record vacuum Rabi splittings of more than an eV.‭ ‬This ultrastrongly coupled polaritonic matter is a new regime for exploring non-linear optical effects.‭ ‬After an introduction to polariton physics, we‭ apply quantum optics theory to quantitatively determine various non-linear optical effects including types of‭ ‬low harmonic generation‭ (‬SHG and THG‭) ‬in single and double cavity polariton systems. …Read more.

During the past 130 years the range of sizes and costs for scientific apparatus has expanded enormously. While some groundbreaking science is still done at modest cost, other experiments now require several billions of dollars to achieve their goals. …Read more.

In electromagnetism effects of the magnetic field are generally ignored. However in recent optical experiments intense magnetic light scattering has been observed as the result of a dynamic magneto-electric interaction that transcends the bounds of the multipole expansion through magnetic torque due to the Lorentz force. …Read more.

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