The interference of many atoms, and a new approach to boson sampling

In daily life, when two objects are “indistinguishable,” it’s due to an imperfect state of knowledge. As a street magician scrambles the cups and balls, you could, in principle, keep track of which ball is which as they are passed between the cups. However, at the smallest scales in nature, even the magician cannot tell

Physicists reach atomic-scale telegraphy with light

In the 1880s Heinrich Hertz discovered that a spark jumping between two pieces of metal emits a flash of light—rapidly oscillating electromagnetic waves—which can be picked up by an antenna. To honor his groundbreaking work, the unit of frequency was named “Hertz” in 1930. Hertz’s findings were later used by Guglielmo Marconi (Nobel Prize in