Technology News

Two years ago, Martin Rinard's group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory proposed a surprisingly simple way to make some computer procedures more efficient: Just skip a bunch of steps. Although the researchers demonstrated several practical applications of the technique, dubbed loop perforation, they realized it would be a hard sell. "The main impediment to adoption of this technique," Imperial College London's Cristian Cadar commented at the time, "is that developers are reluctant to adopt a technique where they don't exactly understand what it does to the program."

Ultracold quantum gases have exceptional properties and offer an ideal system to study basic physical phenomena. By choosing erbium, the research team led by Francesca Ferlaino from the Institute of Experimental Physics, University of Innsbruck, selected a very exotic element, which due to its particular properties offers new and fascinating possibilities to investigate fundamental questions in quantum physics. “Erbium is comparatively heavy and has a strongly magnetic character.