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Ultrafast viscosity measurement

In our latest article, Lars Madsen, Catxere Casacio, Alex Terrasson, Warwick Bowen and collaborators measure the viscosity of a fluid within twenty microseconds and extreme precision—up to the point where the remnant uncertainty stems from its thermal molecular collisions. Read on in Nature Photonics!

A bead trapped in optical tweezers performs thermally driven motion.
From: Madsen, Lars S. et al. Ultrafast viscosity measurement with ballistic optical tweezers. Nat. Photonics (2021)
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Making mechanical qubits

Yasmine Sfendla, Chris Baker, Glen Harris, Ray Harrison, Warwick Bowen and collaborating professor Lin Tian from UC Merced have set a step towards developing the elusive all-mechanical qubit. All you need is some superfluid and a slab of silicon! Get the recipe at npj Quantum Information.

Computer-simulated image of a thin film of fluid covering a periodically perforated slab. In the middle, a hole is missing. There, the fluid is moving up and down like water in a pond.
Superfluid wave trapped in a phononic crystal (or “acoustic metamaterial”).
From: Sfendla, Yasmine L., et al. Extreme quantum nonlinearity in superfluid thin-film surface waves. npj Quantum Inf 7, 62 (2021)