Quantum physics

Alex Sushkov is updating an old technology with new quantum tricks in hopes of sensing the magnetic influence of dark matter.

Scientists are pursuing materials that can conduct electricity with perfect efficiency under ambient conditions. In this episode, the physicist Siddharth Shanker Saxena tells co-host Janna Levin about what makes this hunt so difficult and consequential.

After years of false starts, a team of computer scientists has found a way to efficiently deduce the Hamiltonian of a physical system at any constant temperature.

Black holes are inescapable traps for most of what falls into them — but there can be exceptions. The theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind speaks with co-host Janna Levin about the black hole information paradox and how it has propelled modern physics.

Teleporting people through space is still science fiction. But quantum teleportation is dramatically different and entirely real. In this episode, Janna Levin interviews the theoretical physicist John Preskill about teleporting bits and the promise of quantum technology.

Researchers have shown that a problem relating to the energy of a quantum system is easy for quantum computers but hard for classical ones.

Time is all around us: in the language we use, in the memories we revisit and in our predictions of the future. But what exactly is it? The physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek joins Steve Strogatz to discuss the fundamental hallmarks of time.

A series of advances seemed to promise the impossible: the existence of quantum states that would never, ever fall into disarray. But physicists are now discovering that the pull of disorder may not be so easily overcome.

In an atomically thin stack of semiconductors, a mechanism unseen in any natural substance causes electrons’ spins to align.