News and Events

Wed, Oct 14, 4 pm (C215 ESC, and online)
Quantum Error Correction with Trapped Atomic Ions

Quantum information processing with atomic qubits typically proceeds by identifying two energy eigenstates in each atom to serve as the basis for qubits.  The atoms, however, have far more internal quantum states than this, and can therefore store and process far more than one qubit each, at least in principle.  Since these resources already exist in atomic processors, I will discuss ways they might be used more efficiently.  In particular, this suggests the idea of using each atom as a so-called logical qubit, which is a qubit that can recover from errors.  As compared to the current paradigm in which many atoms are required per logical qubit, the idea of single-atom logical qubits is attractive, and I will outline some of the requirements and ideas for how this might become a reality.

What causes the swirl in the Shrimp Nebula? Its high speed is likely. What is sure is that Sh2-188 is one of the larger planetary nebulas on the night sky, by angular size, spanning about half the diameter of the Moon. Moreover, the white-dwarf core -- leftover from the Sun-like star that shed its outer atmosphere -- is moving unusually fast through interstellar space, creating a bow shock most visible on the upper left that is similar to a boat plowing through water. Although faint, the Shrimp Nebula glows also by compressing and brightening gas on its leading edge. The featured image was taken in the light of hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen by a backyard telescope in Krakow, Poland and then digitally adjusted to approximate the nebula's true colors. APOD's email for image submissions has changed. Please see: APOD Submissions APOD's main NASA site has moved: From apod.nasa.gov to science.nasa.gov/apod
Temp:  78 °FN2 Boiling:76.0 K
Humidity: 31%H2O Boiling:   368.6 K
Pressure:86 kPaSunrise:7:30 AM
Wind:4 m/s   Sunset:6:58 PM
Precip:0 mm   Sunlight:701 W/m²  
Celebrating Dr. Allred's retirement from 4 decades of teaching.
41 years of launches, demos, and unforgettable labs: Celebrating Dr. Grant Hart
Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne Inspires BYU Students with the Future of Gravitational-Wave Science

Selected Publications

William P. Heaps, Anne Elise Packard, Kristina M. McCammon, Tyler P. Green, Joseph P. Talley, Bradley C. Bundy, and Dennis Della Corte

The glomerular filtration barrier poses a significant challenge for circulating proteins, with molecules below ~60–70 kDa facing rapid renal clearance. Endogenous proteins have evolved sophisticated evasion mechanisms including oligomerization, carrier binding, electrostatic repulsion, and FcRn-mediated recycling. Understanding these natural strategies provides blueprints for engineering therapeutic proteins with improved pharmacokinetics. This review examines how endogenous proteins resist filtration, evaluates their application in protein engineering, and discusses clinical translation including established technologies (PEGylation, Fc-fusion) and emerging strategies (albumin-binding domains, glycoengineering). We address critical challenges of balancing half-life extension with tissue penetration, biological activity, and immunogenicity—essential considerations for the rational design of next-generation therapeutics with optimized dosing and enhanced efficacy.

The AGN Space Telescope and Optical Reverberation Mapping (STORM) 2 campaign targeted Mrk 817 with intensive multiwavelength monitoring and found its soft X-ray emission to be strongly absorbed. We present results from 157 near-IR spectra with an average cadence of a few days. Whereas the hot dust reverberation signal as tracked by the continuum flux does not have a clear response, we recover a dust reverberation radius of ∼90 lt-days from the blackbody dust temperature light curve. This radius is consistent with previous photometric reverberation mapping results when Mrk 817 was in an unobscured state. The heating/cooling process we observe indicates that the inner limit of the dusty torus is set by a process other than sublimation, rendering it a luminosity-invariant “dusty wall” of a carbonaceous composition. Assuming thermal equilibrium for dust optically thick to the incident radiation, we derive a luminosity of ∼6 × 1044 erg s−1 for the source heating it. This luminosity is similar to that of the obscured spectral energy distribution, assuming a disk with an Eddington accretion rate of . Alternatively, the dust is illuminated by an unobscured lower luminosity disk with , which permits the UV–optical continuum lags in the high-obscuration state to be dominated by diffuse emission from the broad-line region. Finally, we find hot dust extended on scales ≳ 140–350 pc, associated with the rotating disk of ionised gas we observe in spatially resolved [S III] λ9531 images. Its likely origin is in the compact bulge of the barred spiral host galaxy, where it is heated by a nuclear starburst.

Volume 1 of the FCC Feasibility Report presents an overview of the physics case, experimental programme, and detector concepts for the Future Circular Collider (FCC). This volume outlines how FCC would address some of the most profound open questions in particle physics, from precision studies of the Higgs and EW bosons and of the top quark, to the exploration of physics beyond the Standard Model. The report reviews the experimental opportunities offered by the staged implementation of FCC, beginning with an electron-positron collider (FCC-ee), operating at several centre-of-mass energies, followed by a hadron collider (FCC-hh). Benchmark examples are given of the expected physics performance, in terms of precision and sensitivity to new phenomena, of each collider stage. Detector requirements and conceptual designs for FCC-ee experiments are discussed, as are the specific demands that the physics programme imposes on the accelerator in the domains of the calibration of the collision energy, and the interface region between the accelerator and the detector. The report also highlights advances in detector, software and computing technologies, as well as the theoretical tools/reconstruction techniques that will enable the precision measurements and discovery potential of the FCC experimental programme. The content and structure of this report are guided by the scope and priorities defined in the mandate of the FCC Feasibility Study. It is therefore not intended to serve as an exhaustive review of the full physics potential of FCC. Several topics, already covered in earlier reports such as the FCC CDR, are not reiterated here or are addressed only briefly, in alignment with the study’s focus. This volume reflects the outcome of a global collaborative effort involving hundreds of scientists and institutions, aided by a dedicated community-building coordination, and provides a targeted assessment of the scientific opportunities and experimental foundations of the FCC programme.

Micah R. Shepherd, Carson F. Cunningham, and Kent L. Gee

In August 2023, the Antares 230 launched successfully for the NG-19 resupply mission to the International Space Station. Acoustic measurements were taken at various locations around the launch pad, ranging from 60 to 200 m away from the vehicle. The analysis focused on azimuthal and polar angles to investigate the vehicle’s sound directivity during the launch. Spectral data were evaluated as functions of frequency, angular position around the pad, and orientation relative to the vehicle. A spatio-spectral analysis was conducted to interpret the data effectively. Initial findings reveal that maximum sound levels are associated with wider angles relative to the plume for stations closer to the source. The peak frequency at all stations was observed to be between 20 and 60 Hz, which is common for vehicles of this size. Although proximity to the rocket complicates distinguishing between angles, making directivity analysis challenging, a spatio-spectral analysis best reveals the spectral features of the noise.

Molecule generation is advancing rapidly in chemical discovery and drug design. Flow-matching methods have recently set the state of the art (SOTA) in unconditional molecule generation, surpassing score-based diffusion models. However, diffusion models still lead in property-guided generation. In this work, we introduce PropMolFlow, an approach for property-guided molecule generation based on geometry-complete SE(3)-equivariant flow matching. Integrating five different property embedding methods with a Gaussian expansion of scalar properties, PropMolFlow achieves competitive performance against previous SOTA diffusion models in conditional molecule generation while maintaining high structural stability and validity. Additionally, it enables higher sampling speed with fewer time steps compared with baseline models. We highlight the importance of validating the properties of generated molecules through density functional theory calculations. Furthermore, we introduce a task to assess the model’s ability to propose molecules with under-represented property values, assessing its capacity for out-of-distribution generalization.