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With a quantum coprocessor in the cloud, physicists from Innsbruck, Austria, open the door to the simulation of previously unsolvable problems in chemistry, materials research or high-energy physics. The research groups led by Rainer Blatt and Peter Zoller report how they simulated particle physics phenomena on 20 quantum bits and how the quantum simulator self-verified the result for the first time.

The human eye is particularly sensitive to green, but less sensitive to blue and red. Chemists led by Hubert Huppertz at the University of Innsbruck have now developed a new red phosphor whose light is well perceived by the eye. This increases the light yield of white LEDs by around one sixth, which can significantly improve the energy efficiency of lighting systems.

In order to understand the global carbon cycle, deep-sea exploration is essential, an international team led by geologists from Innsbruck concludes. For the first time, they succeeded in quantifying the amount of organic carbon transported into the deep sea by a single tectonic event, the giant Tohoku-oki earthquake in 2011.

Innsbruck quantum physicists have constructed a diode for magnetic fields and then tested it in the laboratory. The device, developed by the research groups led by the theorist Oriol Romero-Isart and the experimental physicist Gerhard Kirchmair, could open up a number of new applications. Electric diodes are essential electronic components that conduct electricity in one direction but prevent conduction in the opposite one.

350,000 years of climate history hidden in Devils Hole cave: Geologists from the University of Innsbruck study rainfall patterns in the distant past to better understand how deserts in the southwest United States will be impacted by future climate change. Beneath the Amargosa desert of the southwest United States lies a hidden gem for climate research.

An international group of researchers has achieved the world's first multi-qubit demonstration of a quantum chemistry calculation performed on a system of trapped ions, one of the leading hardware platforms in the race to develop a universal quantum computer. The research, led by Cornelius Hempel and Thomas Monz, explores a promising pathway for developing effective ways to model chemical bonds and reactions using quantum computers.

A new strategy to investigate quantum entanglement up to thousands of particles A team of physicists from ICTP-Trieste and IQOQI-Innsbruck has come up with a surprisingly simple idea to investigate quantum entanglement of many particles. Instead of digging deep into the properties of quantum wave functions - which are notoriously hard to experimentally access - they propose to realize physical systems governed by the corresponding entanglement Hamiltonians .

A team led by Austrian experimental physicist Rainer Blatt has succeeded in characterizing the quantum entanglement of two spatially separated atoms by observing their light emission. This fundamental demonstration could lead to the development of highly sensitive optical gradiometers for the precise measurement of the gravitational field or the earth's magnetic field.

An Innsbruck team of experimental physicists, in collaboration with theorists from Innsbruck and Hannover, has for the first time observed so-called roton quasiparticles in a quantum gas. Empirically introduced by Landau to explain the bizarre properties of superfluid liquid Helium, these quasiparticles reflect an "energy softening" in the system as precursor of a crystallization instability.

Mud stories provide new insights in the seismic hazard along the Chilean subduction zone By analyzing sediment cores from Chilean lakes, an international team of scientists discovered that giant earthquakes reoccur with relatively regular intervals. When also taking into account smaller earthquakes, the repeat interval becomes increasingly more irregular to a level where earthquakes happen randomly in time.

Emissions of volatile organic compounds higher than previously assumed In the scientific journal PNAS, researchers from Innsbruck, Austria, present the world's first chemical fingerprint of urban emission sources of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Accordingly, the abatement strategy for organic solvents is having an effect in Europe.

On the way to an intelligent laboratory, physicists from Innsbruck and Vienna present an artificial agent that autonomously designs quantum experiments. In initial experiments, the system has independently (re)discovered experimental techniques that are nowadays standard in modern quantum optical laboratories.

A study carried out by an international team of researchers and published in the journal Physical Review X shows that ion-trap technologies available today are suitable for building large-scale quantum computers. The scientists introduce trapped-ion quantum error correction protocols that detect and correct processing errors.

Quantum devices allow us to accomplish computing and sensing tasks that go beyond the capabilities of their classical counterparts. However, protecting quantum information from being corrupted by errors is difficult. An international team of researchers from Innsbruck, Harvard, Copenhagen and Waterloo put forward a new method to protect quantum information stored in trapped ions.

The quantum world is fragile; error correction codes are needed to protect the information stored in a quantum object from the deteriorating effects of noise. Quantum physicists in Innsbruck have developed a protocol to pass quantum information between differently encoded building blocks of a future quantum computer, such as processors and memories.

Quantum physicists in Oriol Romero-Isart's research group in Innsbruck show in two current publications that, despite Earnshaw's theorem, nanomagnets can be stably levitated in an external static magnetic field owing to quantum mechanical principles. The quantum angular momentum of electrons, which also causes magnetism, is accountable for this mechanism.

Physicsts are developing quantum simulators, to help solve problems that are beyond the reach of conventional computers. However, they first need new tools to ensure that the simulators work properly. Innsbruck researchers around Rainer Blatt and Christian Roos, together with researchers from the Universities of Ulm and Strathclyde, have now implemented a new technique in the laboratory that can be used to efficiently characterize the complex states of quantum simulators.

Physicists demonstrate how heating up a quantum system can be used as a universal probe for exotic states of matter In physical sciences, certain quantities appear as integer multiples of fundamental and indivisible elements. This quantization of physical quantities, which is at the heart of our description of Nature, made its way through the centuries, as evidenced by the antique concept of the atom.

In the quantum world, our intuition for moving objects is strongly challenged and may sometimes even completely fail. Experimental physicists of the University of Innsbruck in collaboration with theorists from Munich, Paris and Cambridge have found a quantum particle which shows an intriguing oscillatory back-and-forth motion in a one-dimensional atomic gas.

Traffic contributes more to nitrogen oxide emissions in Europe than previously thought. This is the result of a current study carried out by scientists from the University of Innsbruck. The research team headed by Thomas Karl shows that even newer air quality models underestimate traffic related nitrogen oxide pollution by up to a factor of 4.