Australian Team Controls Nucleus of Atom Using Only Electric Fields

Thanks to the readers who alerted me to an article on the Phys.org website about an article just published in Nature reporting on a Australian team of engineers who have managed to control nuclear spin exclusively with electric fields, rather than magnetic fields.

Link to the Phys.org article is here:

https://phys.org/news/2020-03-year-old-puzzle-quantum-breakthrough.html

An excerpt from the article:

“In a study published today in Nature, a team of engineers at UNSW Sydney has done what a celebrated scientist first suggested in 1961 was possible, but has eluded everyone since: controlling the nucleus of a single atom using only electric fields.

“This discovery means that we now have a pathway to build quantum computers using single-atom spins without the need for any oscillating magnetic field for their operation,” says UNSW’s Scientia Professor of Quantum Engineering Andrea Morello. “Moreover, we can use these nuclei as exquisitely precise sensors of electric and magnetic fields, or to answer fundamental questions in quantum science.”

The original article in Nature can be accessed here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2057-7

The abstract is available for free; there is a cost to read the full article.