A quantum cousin of the Hall effect could open the door to energy-efficient electronics, better sensors, and more-powerful quantum computers. Researchers have now broken a key barrier to its practical application by controlling the phenomenon electrically, rather than magnetically, for the first time.
Binding together quarks into protons, neutrons and atomic nuclei is a force so strong, it’s in the name. The strong force, which is carried by gluon particles, is the strongest of all fundamental forces of nature – the others being electromagnetism, the weak force and gravity. Yet, it’s the least precisely measured of these four forces. In a paper just submitted to Nature Physics, the ATLAS collaboration describes how it has used the Z boson, the electrically neutral carrier of the weak force, to determine the strength of the strong force with an unprecedented uncertainty of below 1%.