Mark Mitchison

Diagram of our system: a driven qubit coupled to a collective environment mode (the reaction coordinate).

We find strong system-bath coupling can suppress current fluctuations in a driven quantum system, allowing violation of thermodynamic uncertainty relations! We understand this in terms of the system hybridising with a collective environment mode, which leads to antibunching in the current statistics

Current fluctuations in nonequilibrium open quantum systems beyond weak coupling: a reaction coordinate approach We investigate current fluctuations in open quantum systems beyond the weak-coupling and Markovian regimes, focusing on a coherently driven qubit strongly coupled to a structured bosonic environment. ...

Congratulations to @khalak.bsky.social on her first lead-author paper 🥳 in collaboration with @saulovmo.bsky.social and our @aspects-quantum.bsky.social colleagues in Murcia

arxiv.org/abs/2510.14926

Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 The Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 was awarded to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electri...

Superconducting circuits win the Physics Nobel Prize! Congrats to Clarke, Devoret and Martinis, and everyone else involved in these discoveries 👏

www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physi...

The top five physics Nobel prizes of the 21st century revealed – Physics World Matin Durrani counts down the five most significant physics Nobels since 2000

At PW headquarters, we're all waiting with bated breath for this morning's physics #NobelPrize. If you're doing the same, why not pass the time by reading/arguing with our editor @matindurrani.bsky.social's picks of the 5 most notable physics Nobels this century? physicsworld.com/a/the-top-fi... 🧪⚛️

When you realize the whole yearly budget for Quantum journal is equal to 8 Nature APCs - and they don't even wreck your paper in proof stage because...there is none

The University of Glasgow groundspeople are going to be quite annoyed when they come in to work tomorrow...

Kavan Modi standing in front of a projector slide titled Quantum Process Tomography

Awesome to have Kavan Modi visit us at King’s and talk about his work characterising correlated errors in quantum computers, using Quantum Process Tensor Tomography 🤩

Pride in Place Strategy The Pride in Place Strategy will help build stronger communities, create thriving places and empower local people.

The govt published its strategy to revitalise local communities last week

There is a heavy focus on directing funding to high streets and community spaces, which is part of the reason for declining "pride in place"

But it seems misguided for a few reasons

Short thread

www.gov.uk/government/p...

If I was a tutoring company and I wanted to convince you that I could teach your kids maths, I would probably not have an advert that said “3=2” on it!

That’s just me though.

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA

10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

Nobel Prize Laureate Roger Penrose, Yvette Fuentes, and myself, request your help in order to save an archive of incredible scientific and historical value. Please raise awareness by *sharing*, or *contribute*:

www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/roger-penr...

Two-panel meme. Top panel: A distressed, shadowy figure with the text “struggling in your field of work”. Bottom panel: A smiling figure with the text “struggling in multiple fields at once but your combination is unique enough so you’re still one of the interdisciplinary experts”.

Want some free career advice? #AcademicChatter

Elon Musk addresses the ‘unite the kingdom’ march crowd via video link – UK politics live Met Police believe 110,000 people attending rally, with one group in Whitehall throwing projectiles at officers

The owner of and absolute unquestionable algorithm controller of a preferred communications channel of the UK Government calling for violence and the overthrow of the Government. www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

I've complained a couple times about the lack of physics community here but not done much about it! New commitment: I'll post one interesting arXiv paper a day until things are better.

(To the folks who follow me for non-physics science policy, don't worry; plenty more of that reporting to come.)

M365 Copilot fails to up productivity in UK government trial : AI tech shows promise writing emails or summarizing meetings. Don't bother with anything more complex

Two trials will be repeated endlessly despite always producing the same results:

1) Does UBI work? (yes)
2) Does AI improve productivity? (no)

Correlated decoherence and thermometry with mobile impurities in a 1D Fermi gas We theoretically investigate the correlated decoherence dynamics of two mobile impurities trapped within a gas of ultracold fermionic atoms. We use a mean-field approximation to self-consistently desc...

Another great collab with our friends in Okinawa, my brilliant student Sindre Brattegard’s second paper is finally out! arxiv.org/abs/2508.20050 Building on his last paper, here we showed that you can use impurities as thermometers for an ultracold gas, even when the impurities are moving around!

🔍 How uncertain can quantum systems be?
Saulo Moreira shares work developing new bounds that show how quantum effects—like coherence and correlations—can break classical limits on uncertainty.
This helps us better understand how quantum systems behave when measured.

Emanuel Schwarzhans discusses how entropy production powers detection—and limits it. Efficiency, jitter, dead time, dark counts: all tied to thermodynamic cost.

What defines a clock in quantum mechanics?
Paul Erker explores the minimal ingredients for timekeeping in the quantum regime, introducing autonomous quantum clocks and the thermodynamic trade-offs that constrain their precision.
A deep dive into time, entropy, and the limits of quantum tech.

ASPECTS' Javier Prior presents his team's work looking at how strong coupling reshapes heat flow in open quantum systems—exploring non-Markovian effects, coherence-driven fluctuations & new equilibrium states.

🕰️ What’s the real cost of reading time?
ASPECTS experiment reveals that the measurement of quantum ticks—not their generation—is the dominant source of entropy in quantum timekeeping.
Far from wasteful, this quantum-to-classical transition boosts precision. #FLQT2025

Simon Sundelin kicks off our ASPECTS day at the FLQT conference. Learn more here: www.aspects-quantum.com/flqt2025

Dr Shane Dooley standing on the stage, next to the first slide of his talk titled “Remote quantum sensing through a thermal Floquet spin chain”

So many great talks at Fundamental Limits of Quantum Technologies already, and many more yet to come! Here’s Shane Dooley of DIAS telling us about metrology using many-body quantum systems 🤩

www.aspects-quantum.com/flqt2025
@aspects-quantum.bsky.social

'Immigration doesn't bother me but it seems to bother everyone else' – Everyone.

This is what happens when the media runs away with Hard Right narratives.

Illustration of the three-way trade off between dark count rate (top), detection time uncertainty (jitter, bottom left) and dead time (bottom right). These cannot all be simultaneously improved, but must be traded off against one another, if the detector’s rate of steady-state entropy production (centre) is fixed.

Fresh on arXiv! arxiv.org/abs/2508.16375 By casting detectors as autonomous thermal machines, we uncover the link between entropy production and the detector’s efficiency, timing jitter, dead time and dark counts. Outstanding work by Manu Schwarzhans with my @aspects-quantum.bsky.social friends ❤️

Former C of E vicar found guilty of indecent assault against nine women Jury continues to deliberate further charges against Chris Brain, who led Nine O’Clock Service movement in Sheffield between 1986 and 1995

I imagine Reform’s new policy will be forced deportation of vicars in response to this? Protect our women etc

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

FLQT 2025 — ASPECTS Fundamental Limits of Quantum Technologies conference, Dublin, 25-29 August 2025

I'll be giving a talk at FLQT next week! www.aspects-quantum.com/flqt2025

Anyone else going?

THREAD: Resurgence

or: How do physicists keep getting away with ignoring infinitely big things?

I wrote about this back when everyone was still on twitter. Someone asked me a question and I think it's an excellent occasion to repost the thread.

1/20

Google Scholar Is Doomed Academia built entire careers on a free Google service with zero guarantees. What could go wrong?

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared