News

MSU physicists were part of an international collaboration that has discovered the highest-energy light coming from the sun. Their results, recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters, detail the discovery. The team, who conducted their work at the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory, or HAWC, also found that this type of light, known as gamma rays, is surprisingly bright.

When quantum systems, like those used in quantum computers, operate in the real world, they can lose information to mechanical vibrations. New research led by MSU, however, shows that a better understanding of the coupling between the quantum system and these vibrations can be used to mitigate loss. The research, published in the journal Nature Communications, could help improve the design of quantum computers that companies such as IBM and Google are currently developing.

About three years ago, Wolfgang Mittig and Yassid Ayyad went looking for the universe’s missing mass, better known as dark matter, in the heart of an atom.Their expedition didn’t lead them to dark matter, but they found something that had never been seen before, something that defied explanation. So the team got back to work to make their discovery make sense. Working at the  National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at MSU, they found a new path to their unexpected destination, which they recently detailed in the journal Physical Review Letters.