Quick: what’s 4 + 5? Nine right? Slightly less quick: what’s five plus four? Still nine, right? Okay, let’s wait a few seconds. Bear with me. Feel free to have a quick stretch. Now, without looking, ...

Imagine zooming into matter at the quantum scale, where tiny particles can interact in more than a trillion configurations at once. If that sounds complicated, it is. Physicists often rely on ...

Scientists are like prospectors, excavating the natural world seeking gems of knowledge about physical reality. And in the century just past, scientists have dug deep enough to discover that reality’s ...

Researchers shed light on the quantum process of distillable entanglement by developing an exact mathematical expression for it Figure 1: Conceptual artwork depicting ...

Ernst Mach found atoms useful. But he didn’t believe they were real. The 19th century physicist-philosopher gained his greatest fame as an atom denier. He believed that reality consisted of sounds and ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the ...

Hard problems are usually not a welcome sight. But cryptographers love them. That’s because certain hard math problems underpin the security of modern encryption. Any clever trick for solving them ...

Nov. 11, 2025 — UC Santa Barbara physicists have engineered entangled spin systems in diamond that surpass classical sensing limits through quantum squeezing. Their breakthrough enables ...

The Fourier transform is a mathematical operation essential to virtually all fields of physics and engineering. Although there already exists an algorithm that computes the Fourier transform in ...

How it works, why it’s so powerful, and where it’s likely to be most useful first This is the first in a series of explainers on quantum technology. The other two are on quantum communication and post ...