A team of engineers and researchers from ISMO are back from Vietnam, where they went to collect aerosol samples near the open coal mine Nui Beo, close to Ha Long Bay.

Delayed choice experiment were designed to probe the wave/particle nature of the photon by sending them into an interferometer that displays/or not interference according to the presence/absence of a beam splitter in its exit port. Researchers from ISMO, in a collaboration involving Université Paris Diderot and Université Nice-Antiapolis, showed that entanglement can make one step further in delayed choice experiments and evidence that actually, photons can be at quantum superpositions of wave and particle behaviors. Moreover, the exact form of this superposition can be determined even after the photon was detected.

Such counter intuitive aspects were demonstrated in a paper published in Science [Florian Kaiser, Thomas Coudreau, Perola Milman, Daniel B. Ostrowsky and Sébastien Tanzilli, Science 2 November 2012:Vol. 338 no. 6107 pp. 637-640.]

The control of the dissociative adsorption of individual hydrogen molecules is performed on the silicon surface at the atomic scale. It is achieved using the tip of a low temperature (9 K) scanning tunneling microscope exposed to 10-6 torr of H₂ and by probing the bare Si(100) 2x1 surface at positive bias. This effect is very localized and induced by the tunnel electrons. The statistical study of this process reveals an activation energy threshold matching the creation of at the surface of the STM tip. Our results are supported by ab-inito density functional calculations of a hydrogenated silicon dimer.

(Phys. Rev. B 86, 165441 – Published October 25, 2012)

The MOMA group of the Institute of the Molecular Sciences of Orsay (ISMO), in collaboration with the Reaction Dynamics group of the laboratory Francis Perrin (LFP) developed a very attractive method to show (maybe to control in the future) how large amplitude motions are coupled to frustrated rotations of the methyl groups in AcAc to stimulate the transfer of the H-atom between the two oxygen atoms.

The new result has been published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

The team from the ISMO, University of Cambridge, and the Basque Country have combined tour de force experiments with advanced theories to show how light interacts with matter at nanometre sizes.
The work demonstrates that quantum tunnelling of electrons between nano-sized balls of gold can change the color of the nano-dimer.

The new results, published in the journal Nature, set a fundamental quantum limit on how tightly light can be trapped.