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US universities are in the firing line of the Trump administration, which is seeking to revoke the visas of foreign students, threatening to withdraw grants and demanding control over academic syllabuses. “The voice of science must not be silenced,” the letter writers say. “We all benefit from science, and we all stand to lose if the nation’s research enterprise is destroyed.”
Particularly hard hit are the country’s eight Ivy League universities, which have been accused of downplaying antisemitism exhibited in campus demonstrations in support of Gaza. Columbia University in New York, for example, has been trying to regain $400m in federal funds that the Trump administration threatened to cancel.
Columbia initially reached an agreement with the government on issues such as banning facemasks on its campus and taking control of its department responsible for courses on the Middle East. But on 8 April, according to reports, the National Institutes of Health, under orders from the Department of Health and Human Services, blocked all of its grants to Columbia.
Harvard University, meanwhile, has announced plans to privately borrow $750m after the Trump administration announced that it would review $9bn in the university’s government funding. Brown University in Rhode Island faces a loss of $510m, while the government has suspended several dozen research grants for Princeton University.
The administration also continues to oppose the use of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in universities. The University of Pennsylvania, from which Donald Trump graduated, faces the suspension of $175m in grants for offences against the government’s DEI policy.
Brain drain
Researchers in medical and social sciences are bearing the brunt of government cuts, with physics departments seeing relatively little impact on staffing and recruitment so far. “Of course we are concerned,” Peter Littlewood, chair of the University of Chicago’s physics department, told Physics World. “Nonetheless, we have made a deliberate decision not to halt faculty recruiting and stand by all our PhD offers.”
David Hsieh, executive officer for physics at California Institute of Technology, told Physics World that his department has also not taken any action so far. “I am sure that each institution is preparing in ways that make the most sense for them,” he says. “But I am not aware of any collective response at the moment.”
Yet universities are already bracing themselves for a potential brain drain. “The faculty and postdoc market is international, and the current sentiment makes the US less attractive for reasons beyond just finance,” warns Littlewood at Chicago.
That sentiment is echoed by Maura Healey, governor of Massachusetts, who claims that Europe, the Middle East and China are already recruiting the state’s best and brightest. “[They’re saying] we’ll give you a lab; we’ll give you staff. We’re giving away assets to other countries instead of training them, growing them [and] supporting them here.”
Science agencies remain under pressure too. The Department of Government Efficiency, run by Elon Musk, has already ended $420m in “unneeded” NASA contracts. The administration aims to cut the year’s National Science Foundation (NSF) construction budget, with data indicating that the agency has roughly halved its number of new grants since Trump became president.
Yet a threat to reduce the percentage of ancillary costs related to scientific grants appeared at least on hold, for now at least. “NSF awardees may continue to budget and charge indirect costs using either their federally negotiated indirect cost rate agreement or the “de minimis” rate of 15%, as authorized by the uniform guidance and other Federal regulations,” says an NSF spokesperson.
Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the US have produced the world’s most powerful ultrashort electron beam to date, concentrating petawatt-level peak powers into femtosecond-long pulses at an energy of 10 GeV and a current of around 0.1 MA. According to officials at SLAC’s Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET-II), the new beam could be used to study phenomena in materials science, quantum physics and even astrophysics that were not accessible before.
High-energy electron beams are routinely employed as powerful probes in several scientific fields. To produce them, accelerator facilities like SLAC use strong electric fields to accelerate, focus and compress bunches of electrons. This is not easy, because as electrons are accelerated and compressed, they emit radiation and lose energy, causing the beam’s quality to deteriorate.
An optimally compressed beam
To create their super-compressed ultrashort beam, researchers led by Claudio Emma at FACET-II used a laser to shape the electron bunch’s profile with millimetre-scale precision in the first 10 metres of the accelerator, when the beam’s energy is lowest. They then took this modulated electron beam and boosted its energy by a factor of 100 in a kilometre-long stretch of downstream accelerating cavities. The last step was to compress the beam by a factor of 1000 by using magnets to turn the beam’s millimetre-scale features into a micron-sized long current spike.
One of the biggest challenges, Emma says, was to optimise the laser-based modulation of the beam in tandem with the accelerating cavity and magnetic fields of the magnets to obtain the optimally compressed beam at the end of the accelerator. “This was a large parameter space to work in with lots of knobs to turn and it required careful iteration before an optimum was found,” Emma says.
Measuring the ultra-short electron bunches was also a challenge. “These are typically so intense that if you intercept them with, for example, scintillating screens (a typical technique used in accelerators to diagnose properties of the beam like its spot size or bunch length), the beam fields are so strong they can melt these screens,” Emma explains. “To overcome this, we had to use a series of indirect measurements (plasma ionisation and beam-based radiation) along with simulations to diagnose just how strongly compressed and powerful these beams were.”
Beam delivery
According to Emma, generating extremely compressed electron beams is one of the most important challenges facing accelerator and beam physicists today. “It was interesting for us to tackle this challenge at FACET-II, which is a facility designed specifically to do this kind of research on extreme beam manipulation,” he says.
The team has already delivered the new high-current beams to experimenters who work on probing and optimising the dynamics of plasma-based accelerators. Further down the line, they anticipate much wider applications. “In the future we imagine that we will attract interest from users in multiple fields, be they materials scientists, strong-field quantum physicists or astrophysicists, who want to use the beam as a strong relativistic ‘hammer’ to study and probe a variety of natural interactions with the unique tool that we can provide,” Emma tells Physics World.
The researchers’ next step will be to increase the beam’s current by another order of magnitude. “This additional leap will require the use of a different plasma-based compression technique, rather than the current laser-based approach, which we hope to demonstrate at FACET-II in the near future,” Emma reveals.
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Classical vs quantum Mpemba: a) In the classical strong Mpemba effect (sME), the overlap with the slowest decay mode (SDM) drops as the temperature increases until it reaches zero at Ts, the point at which the Mpemba effect is maximized. The overlap then increases as the temperature increases further. With a weak ME, if the overlap between the SDM and the initial state with high temperature TH is smaller than the overlap with the lower-temperature state Tc, the system can reach equilibrium faster. When the ME is strong, the overlap between Ts and SMD is zero, and the system reaches the equilibrium exponentially faster. With no ME, the overlap between the TH state and SDM is at a maximum; therefore, the system reaches the equilibrium more slowly. b) Paths taken by the system when reaching the stationary state. While the system decaying from the normal or weak ME states reaches the stationary state, decay from the sME state follows a straight line to reach equilibrium, implying this is the fastest path. c) Three-energy-level system involved in obtaining the sME. d) Distance vs time on a logarithmic scale. States |2> and |0> exhibit similar slow relaxation rates, whereas the sME state exhibits a fast exponential decay rate when reaching equilibrium. (Courtesy: Hui Jing)
Researchers from China, the UK and Singapore have demonstrated for the first time that choosing the right set of initial conditions can speed up the relaxation process in quantum systems. Their experiments using single trapped ions are a quantum analogue of the classical Mpemba effect, in which hot water can, under certain circumstances, cool faster than cold water. By showing that it is possible to exponentially accelerate the relaxation of a pure state into a stationary state – the hallmark of the so-called strong Mpemba effect – they also provide strategies for designing and analysing open quantum systems such as those used in quantum batteries.
In both the classical and the quantum worlds, the difference between the relaxation process of a system in a strong Mpemba effect (sME) state and any other state is that the decay rate of a sME state is greater than the others. This naturally leads to the conclusion that initial conditions influence the speed at which a system will reach equilibrium. However, the mathematics of the quantum and classical sME are different. While in the classical world an open system is described by the Fokker-Planck equation, with the temperature as the key variable, in the quantum world the Lindblad master equation applies, and the energy of the sME state is what matters.
Paths and overlap
To understand why a quantum system in a particular initial state reaches a steady state faster than any other, we should think about the possible paths that a system can take. One key path is known as the slowest decay mode (SDM), which is the path that takes the system the most time to decay. At the other extreme, the fastest relaxation path is the one taken by a system in the sME initial state. This relaxation path must avoid any overlap with the SDM’s path.
Hui Jing, a physicist at China’s Hunan Normal University who co-led the study, points out that a fundamental characteristic of the quantum sME is that its relaxation path includes the so-called Liouvillian exceptional point (LEP). At this point, an eigenvalue of the dynamical generator, which is the Liovillian superoperator that describes the time evolution of the open quantum system through the Lindblad master equation, changes from real to complex. When the eigenvalue of the SDM is real, the system is successfully prepared in the sME. When the eigenvalue of the SDM acquires an imaginary part, the overlap between the prepared sME state and the SDM is no longer zero. The LEP therefore signals the transition from strong to weak Mpemba effect.
Experimental set-up
To create a pure state that presents zero overlap with the SDM in an open quantum system, Jing and colleagues trapped a 40Ca+ ion and coupled three of its energy levels through laser interactions. The first laser beam, with a wavelength of 729 nm, coupled the ground state with the two excited states with coupling strengths characterized by Rabi frequencies Ω1 and Ω2. A second, circularly polarized laser beam at 854 nm controlled the decay between the first excited state and the ground state.
By tuning the Rabi frequencies, researchers were able to explore different relaxation regimes of the system. When the ratio between the Rabi frequencies was much smaller or bigger than the LEP, they observed the sME and weak ME, respectively. When the ratio equalled the LEP, the transition from sME to weak ME took place.
This work, which is described in Nature Communications, marks the first experimental realization of the quantum strong Mpemba effect. According to Jing, the team’s methods offer an experimental alternative to existing ways of increasing the ion cooling rate or enhancing the efficiency of quantum batteries. Now, the group plans to study how the quantum Mpemba effect behaves at the LEP, since this point could lead to faster decay rates.
“Fusion is now within reach” and represents “one of the economic opportunities of the century”. Not the words of an optimistic fusion scientist but from Kerry McCarthy, parliamentary under-secretary of state at the UK’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
She was speaking on Tuesday at the inaugural Fusion Fest by Economist Impact. Held in London, the day-long event featured 400 attendees and more than 60 speakers from around the world.
McCarthy outlined several initiatives to keep the UK at the “forefront of fusion”. That includes investing £20m into Starmaker One, a £100m endeavour announced in early April to kickstart UK investment fusion fund.
The usual cliché is that fusion is always being 20 years away, perhaps not helped by large international projects such as the ITER experimental fusion reactor that is currently being built in Cadarache, France, which has struggling with delays and cost hikes.
Yet many delegates at the meeting were optimistic that significant developments are within reach with private firms racing to demonstrate “breakeven” – generating more power out than needed to fuel the reaction. Some expect “a few” private firms to announce breakeven by 2030.
And these aren’t small ventures. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, based in Massachusetts, US, for example, has 1300 people. Yet large international companies are, for the moment, only dipping their toe into the fusion pool.
While some $8bn has already been spent by private firms on fusion, many expect the funding floodgates to open once breakeven has been achieved in a private lab.
Most stated that a figure of about $50-60bn, however, would be needed to make fusion a real endeavour in terms of delivering power to the grid, something that could happen in the 2040s. But it was reiterated throughout the day that fusion must provide energy at a price that consumers would be willing to pay.
On target
It is not only private firms that are making progress. Many will point out that ITER has laid much of the groundwork in terms of fostering a fusion “ecosystem” – a particular buzzword of the day – that was demonstrated, in part, by the significant attendence at the event.
In a recent shot, she said that the device had produced 7 MJ with about 2 MJ having been delivered to the small capsule target. This represents a gain of about 3.4 – much more than its previous record of 2.4.
NIF, which is based on inertial confinement fusion rather than magnetic confinement, is currently undergoing refurbishment and upgrades. It is hoped that this will increase the energy input to about 2.6 MJ but gains of between 10-15 will be demonstrated if the technique can go anywhere.
Despite the number of fusion firms ballooning from a handful in the early 2010s to some 30 today, the general feeling at the meeting was that only a few will likely go on to build power plants, with the remainder using fusion for other sectors.
The issue is that no-one knew what technology would likely succeed, so all to play for.
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