Physicists at MPQ have tested quantum mechanics to a completely new level of precision using hydrogen spectroscopy, and in doing so they came much closer to solving the well-known proton charge radius puzzle, which is baffling science for more than a decade. more

Physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics have developed the basic technology for a new "quantum modem". It will allow users to connect to a future quantum internet that is based on the existing fibre optic network infrastructure. more

Our eyes are sensitive to only three spectral color bands (red, green, blue), and we can no longer distinguish colors if it becomes very dark. Spectroscopists can identify many more colors by the frequencies of the light waves, so that they can distinguish atoms and molecules by their spectral fingerprints. Scientists have now recorded broad spectra with close to one hundred thousand colors in almost complete darkness. more

A German-Canadian collaboration, with physicists from the attoworld-team of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, and the Joint Attosecond Science Laboratory of the National Research Council and the University of Ottawa, has discovered a new way of tracing the ultrafast oscillations of the electric field in laser light waves. more

Physicists at the MPQ have engineered the lightest optical mirror imaginable. The novel metamaterial is made of a single structured layer consisting only of a few hundred identical atoms arranged in the two dimensional array of an optical lattice formed by interfering laser beams. So far, the mirror is the only one of its kind.  more

An international team of physicists from the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität (LMU) and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics together with collaborators from the University of Cambridge, TU Berlin and the Université Libre de Bruxelles succeeded in realizing a novel genuine time-dependent topological system with ultracold atoms in periodically-driven optical honeycomb lattices. more

Semiconductors play an important role, be it in electronics, optoelectronics or photovoltaics. But like other solid bodies, they are quantum many-body systems. Therefore, a calculation of their material properties would overburden conventional computers. Instead, this task could be performed by a quantum system with comparable properties that is fully controllable from the outside. more