Catching up

As may be obvious from my pace of posting, the last couple of weeks have been very busy and intense for multiple reasons.  I hope that once the academic year really ends I can get back into more of a routine.

Two notable stories this week:

• Two papers were published back-to-back in Science (here and here, with commentary here) that demonstrate (a) that comparatively macroscopic mechanical oscillators - drumheads - can be operated as true quantum objects (cooled down to the point where the thermal energy scale \(k_{\mathrm{B}}T\) is small compared to the quantum energy level spacing \(\hbar \omega\) (this has been done before); and that these resonators can be quantum mechanically entangled, so that the two have to be treated as a single quantum system when understanding measurements performed on each individually.   This can be used, in the case of the second paper, to allow clever measurement schemes that shift measurement back-action (see here for a nice tutorial) away from a target system, enabling precision measurements of the target better than standard quantum limits.  
• IBM has demonstrated 300 mm wafer fabrication of integrated circuits with features and techniques for the upcoming "2 nm node".  As I've mentioned before, we have fully transitioned to the point where labeling new semiconductor manufacturing targets with a length scale is basically a marketing ploy - the transistors on this wafer do not have 2 nm channel lengths, and the wiring does not have 2 nm lines and spaces.  However, this is a very impressive technical demonstration of wafer-scale success in a number of new approaches, including triple-stacked nanosheet gate-all-around transistors.