A collaboration between Stuart Parkin's group at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle (Saale) and ...

Randomness is incredibly useful. People often draw straws, throw dice or flip coins to make fair choices. Random numbers can enable auditors to make completely unbiased selections. Randomness is also ...

A century ago, the strange behavior of atoms and elementary particles led physicists to formulate a new theory of nature. That theory, quantum mechanics, found immediate success, proving its worth ...

One of the pieces of equipment for the quantum random number generator in the NIST Boulder laboratories. Very little in this life is truly random. A coin flip is influenced by the flipper’s force, its ...

Forgetting feels like a failure of attention, but physics treats it as a fundamental process with a measurable price. At the ...

Quantum information theory is a field of study that examines how quantum technologies store and process information. Over the ...

Light is usually described using quantum mechanics when phenomena like entanglement enter the picture. But a new paper shows ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

We’re celebrating 180 years of Scientific American. Explore our legacy of discovery and look ahead to the future. This year is the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, according to ...

Olival Freire Jr is a professor of physics and the history of physics at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. What makes matter stable? Why are atoms as they are? Why do different materials vary ...

A rift runs deep through the heart of physics. The general theory of relativity, which describes gravity, clashes with quantum physics. In an effort to seal that physics fissure, untold numbers of ...