Physics News Backlog

Once again, physics news stories are piling up in my RSS reader, so here's a collection of recent stuff:

• My old group at NIST has done cool things with Bose-Eisntein condensates in an optical lattice. They load atoms into a regular array of sites, and then split each site into a double well, which is a classic test system for quantum theories. This is cool not only because it was done by people I know, but also because it's really similar to work that I did as a post-doc.
• A French group has made a single electron source, that produces, well, single electrons more or less on demand. Like everybody else in the world, they pitch this as a potential tool for quantum computing, but it's kind of cool in its own right.
• Things keep getting weirder with "supersolid" helium, as new neutron diffraction measurements probing the distribution of states in the "supersolid" don't show the distribution you would expect. something weird is going on there.
• Misha Lukin's group at Harvard has demonstrated the manipulation of single nuclear spins in diamond. This is yet another experiment with a quantum computing connection, as you might conceivably be able to use these sorts of spins as qubits. And, really, how cool would it be to make a quantum computer out of a block of diamond? It'd be sparkly in multiple states at the same time.
• Finally, a group at NIST has set a new distance record for quantum key distribution, sending entangled photons through 200 km of optical fiber. This isn't as cool as the headline made me think at first-- I thought this was a new open-air limit, but it's not. It's still neat stuff, though, hence the link.

And there's what I've been reading in physics news in the past week or so.