Science Highlights

Scientists have long held that electricity is carried by individual electrons with discrete charges moving in a metal, even in the case of electrons clumped into quasiparticles. However, “strange metals” fail to obey this paradigm. Researchers have observed a radical quantum blurring of electrons in strange metal into a featureless liquid, potentially pointing toward a new theory of electrical transport.

Atomic nuclei with “magic numbers” of protons or neutrons in their nuclear shells are extremely stable. Nuclear physicists are especially interested in nuclei with doubly magic numbers—those that have full shells for both protons and neutrons. One example is the tin isotope Sn-100, which has 50 protons and 50 neutrons. To prepare for future work on Sn-100, researchers studied the properties of isotopes of indium as they approached 50 neutrons. This helps to demonstrate how adding single particles changes the properties of a nucleus.

Bacteria commonly produce toxins that are lethal to themselves, but also produce the required antitoxins. These toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems may be useful in modifying bacteria for biotechnology applications, but the systems have unpredictable behavior. A new study of communities instead of individual species makes TA systems easier to understand and use.

Simulations of equations from the Standard Model of particle physics are too difficult for classical supercomputers. In this research, scientists for the first time created scalable quantum circuits to prepare a simulation of the starting state for a particle accelerator collision to test aspects of strong interactions. The researchers first determined these circuits for small systems using classical computers, then scaled the quantum circuits to a large system on more than 100 qubits of IBM’s quantum computers.

The transplutonium actinides are highly radioactive and rare, making them difficult to study. To examine their chemical properties, researchers typically use non-radioactive lanthanides as surrogates. In this study, scientists streamlined the synthesis of transplutonium actinide compounds, which allowed for more accurate direct comparisons of lanthanides and heavy actinide compounds, showing that transplutonium actinides have truly unique properties.

Simulations of quantum many-body problems are a challenge for even the most powerful conventional computers. Quantum computing has the potential to solve this challenge using an approach called an analog quantum simulation. To succeed, these simulations need theoretical approximations of how quantum computers represent many-body systems. In this research, nuclear physicists developed a new framework to analyze these approximations and minimize their effects.

Two experiment collaborations, the g2p and EG4 collaborations, combined their complementary data on the proton’s inner structure to improve calculations of a phenomenon in atomic physics known as the hyperfine splitting of hydrogen. An atom of hydrogen is made up of an electron orbiting a proton. The overall energy level of hydrogen depends on the spin orientation of the proton and electron. If one is up and one is down, the atom will be in its lowest energy state. But if the spins of these particles are the same, the energy level of the atom will increase by a small, or hyperfine, amount. These spin-born differences in the energy level of an atom are known as hyperfine splitting.

An early-career physicist mathematically connects timelike and spacelike form factors, opening the door to further insights into the inner workings of the strong force. A new lattice QCD calculation connects two seemingly disparate reactions involving the pion, the lightest particle governed by the strong interaction. One reaction is known as the spacelike process, where an electron is bounced off a pion. The second reaction, known as the timelike process, is when an electron and antielectron collide, annihilate each other, and produce two pions. The lattice QCD numerical calculation is simultaneously able to describe the spacelike and timelike processes, demonstrating the interconnectedness of different reactions described by QCD. While this connection had been observed experimentally, now physicists have the math to corroborate it.