Research Highlights

With the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of researchers including members from the Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics at ETH Zurich measured ammonia in the atmosphere of a cold brown dwarf, showing that the isotopic abundance of ammonia can be used to study how giant gas planets form.

In a feat of optical waveguide engineering, researchers from the Institute for Quantum Electronics at ETH Zurich have successfully observed terahertz solitons in a ring quantum cascade laser.

Traffic obstructions are not only a nuisance for our everyday mobility; they can also have negative consequences for the smallest particles such as electrons. If physicists want to study very fast dynamics in matter using soft X-rays, a clear path for electrons is required.

Metamaterials defy conventions, making rigid media flexible, soft materials transmit signals, and sound and light behave in bizarre ways. Metamaterials are engineered to possess properties not found in nature.

In the photoelectric effect, a photon ejects an electron from a material. Researchers at ETH have now used attosecond laser pulses to measure the time evolution of this effect in molecules. From their results they can deduce the exact location of a photoionization event. 

Light particles do not usually react to magnetic fields. Researchers at ETH Zurich have now shown how photons can still be influenced by electric and magnetic fields. In the future that method could be used to create strong artificial magnetic fields for photons.

CERN’s CMS experiment – one of the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider received a new heart today – a pixel detector much like a high-speed digital camera that snaps images up to 40 million times per second.

When matter is cooled to near absolute zero, intriguing phenomena emerge. These include supersolidity, where crystalline structure and frictionless flow occur together. ETH researchers have succeeded in realising this strange state experimentally for the first time.

Theoretical physicists from ETH Zurich deliberately misled intelligent machines, and thus refined the process of machine learning. They created a new method that allows computers to categorise data – even when humans have no idea what this categorisation might look like.

Quantum systems consisting of many particles are a major challenge for physicists, since their behaviour can be determined only with immense computational power. ETH physicists have now discovered an elegant way to simplify the problem.

A research team has observed structures racing out from the centre of a young star's debris disk at high speeds. It is still unclear what causes the phenomenon.

In experiments using ultracold atoms and laser light, ETH researchers have measured a stepwise change in conductivity as the atoms pass through tiny structures. This is the first time that this quantum effect has been observed for electrically neutral particles.