Ion trap helped create quantum defects in two places at once
Andrew Brooks, National Physical Laboratory/Scientific Photography Library
Exotic quantum cracks are formed by charged atoms that exist in a superposition that exists in two places at the same time. This is the first step toward a deeper understanding of the behavior of such quantum defects in everything from matter to the entire universe.
Defects are everywhere – think tears in textiles or cloudy imperfections in shiny crystals – but in quantum systems they can have the additional property of being topological. So the overall structure is…
