C5 – Measurement & Open Systems (GKLS)
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Where Does the Quantum World End? An Operational FBA View on Nanoparticle Interference (MUSCLE)
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5 min read
In 2026, a Vienna team demonstrated quantum interference of sodium nanoparticles with more than 7,000 atoms (masses >170,000 Da) in the MUSCLE interferometer—setting a new size record for matter-wave interference. “Where does the quantum world end?” can thus be sharpened experimentally: How large may an object become, and how “classical” may its environment be, before…
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In https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01476 (preprint, 2025), Guo et al. extract an EWS time delay τEWS for quantum transitions via spin- and angle-resolved photoemission and report strongly material-dependent attosecond scales (among others ~150 as in 1T-TiSe2/1T-TiTe2, >200 as in CuTe, 26 as in Cu). The central finding is that the measured timescale covaries with the (effective) symmetry and dimensionality of the electronic structure.…
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In a new CMS analysis at the CERN LHC, Z bosons are used as a “tag” in PbPb heavy-ion collisions, and in Z–hadron correlations a soft depletion/wake signature is found on the away-side. If a “cosmic primordial soup” truly responds like a fluid, then exactly such a pattern should show up as a precise, repeatable…
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The WinFuture article popularizes an optics result whose primary source is Yessenov et al. (arXiv 2025; Optica 2026): a direct observation of a spatially structured Montgomery effect (lensless self-imaging) that generalizes the Talbot effect to aperiodic structures and is claimed to show repeated strongly focused spots (~10 µm) in free space. According to the abstract, a dynamic…
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Superconductivity as a Null-Test Regime: Is There an Entropy Residual Beyond the Heat Balance?
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6 min read
In the microscopic theory of superconductivity by Bardeen, Cooper & Schrieffer (1957), an energy gap leads to strongly suppressed dissipative quasiparticle contributions at low temperatures, enabling a very low-loss reference mode of operation. Josephson (1962) predicts, for tunnel junctions, a lossless DC supercurrent up to a critical limit as well as a dissipative voltage state…
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In https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.15495 (preprint; PRL 136 (2026) 057201), Morrell, Elliott & Grier show that two acoustically levitated EPS spheres can enter emergent active stationary states without periodic driving; in one regime, these states break spatiotemporal symmetry and form a continuous classical time crystal. The authors also provide data and analysis code as an OSF repository (https://dx.doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/SX7UG).…
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Z-Boson Tagging in Heavy-Ion Plasma: Operational Null Tests for “Liquid Primordial Matter”
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6 min read
The news item https://www.ingenieur.de/technik/fachbereiche/rekorde/urknall-im-labor-cern-experiment-zeigt-erstmals-fluessige-urmaterie/ can be traced back to the primary CMS Collaboration work in https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09307 (preprint, 2025): there, Z-boson tagging correlations of soft charged hadrons in pseudorapidity and azimuth relative to the Z direction in PbPb collisions at 5.02 TeV per nucleon pair are evaluated for the first time, with a pp reference, focusing…
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Tracing ΛΛ̄ spin correlations back to the QCD vacuum: FBA handles, null tests, Pass/Fail
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4 min read
In https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09920-0, the STAR Collaboration reports a relative polarization of 18 ± 4% in ΛΛ̄ pairs and a strong dependence on the pair separation, which is read as a decoherence signature. From an FBA perspective, what is exciting is that an alleged “vacuum → detector” path can be operationalized as a channel: Which coarse-graining steps…