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From all things One and from One all things, wrote the Greek philosopher Heraclitus some 2,500 years ago. He was describing monism, the ancient idea that all is one that, fundamentally, everything we see or experience is an aspect of one unified whole. Heraclitus wasnt the first, nor the last, to advocate the idea. The ancient Egyptians believed in an all-encompassing but elusive unity symbolised by the goddess Isis, often portrayed with a veil and worshipped as all that has been and is and shall be and the mother and father of all things.

This worldview also follows in straightforward fashion from the findings of quantum mechanics (QM), the uncanny physics of subatomic particles that departs from the classical physics of Isaac Newton and experience in the everyday world. QM, which holds that all matter and energy exist as interchangeable waves and particles, has delivered computers, smartphones, nuclear energy, laser scanners and arguably the best-confirmed theory in the entirety of science. We need the mathematics underlying QM to make sense of matter, space and time. Two processes of quantum physics lead directly to the notion of an interconnected universe and a monistic foundation to nature overall: entanglement, natures way of integrating parts into a whole, and the topic of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics; and decoherence, caused by the loss of quantum information, and the reason why we experience so little quantum weirdness in our daily lives.

Yet, despite the throughline in philosophy and physics, the majority of Western thinkers and scientists have long rejected the idea that reality is literally unified, or nature and the Universe a system of one. From judges in the Inquisition (1184-1834) to quantum physicists today, the thought that a single system underlies everything has been too odd to believe. In fact, though philosophers have been proposing monism for thousands of years, and QM is, after all, an experimental science, Western culture has regularly lashed out against the concept and punished those promoting the idea.

It wasnt always that way. In ancient times, the concept of monism held more weight in the popular mind. Philosophers in the school of Pythagoras (c570-490 BCE), renowned for his alleged discovery of the geometrical relation among the three sides of a right triangle, identified the number one as the centre of the Universe. Heraclitus contemporary Parmenides (c520-460 BCE) believed in reality as a timeless one, that is and that is not not to be. And Plato, arguably the most influential philosopher ever, is said to have taught monism as a secret doctrine at his academy, to be disseminated only orally. Indeed, monism later evolved into a trademark of his school, and Neoplatonists such as Plotinus (c205-270 CE) wrote about the one that is all things and beings generator. Around the same time, mystery cults popular in late antiquity advocated a hidden unity behind the many gods of the Greco-Roman polytheistic pantheon, and understood the different deities as representations of the various facets of a single, unified reality.

Later on, philosophical ideas derived from Platos monistic instincts competed with Christianity to become the dominant worldview of the Roman Empire. Christianity prevailed.

Even then, Christianity adopted Platonic ideas by identifying the monistic One with God. But Christianity drew also on dualistic philosophies such as Manichaeism, which advocated a world caught in an epic struggle between good and evil. This is how concepts such as God and devil, heaven and hell, or angels and demons received their prominent role among Christian beliefs. At the same time, the monistic influences were pushed into an otherworldly beyond. The Christian God was understood as different from the natural world that he governs from outside.

A student who claimed that God, the world, and nature, are but one thing was hanged for blasphemy

With the Christian Church rising to political power and the fall of the Roman Empire, much of antiquitys culture and philosophy got lost, and monism got suppressed as a heresy. If all is One, God gets conflated with the world, and medieval theology understood that as atheism or a devaluation of God.

When in 855 John Scotus Eriugena, a medieval philosopher at the court of the Frankish emperor Charles the Bald, described God as an indivisible unity holding together all things, he got condemned and his books forbidden. Sure, these monistic ideas inspired philosophers, but theologians saw them as an intrusion into the realm of religion. By the 13th century, a group of scholars in Paris had resorted to the stance that there exists a double truth: that what is right in natural philosophy may be wrong at the same time in theology, and vice versa.

These conflicts framed the relationship between religion and the developing sciences. After Nicolaus Copernicus advocated a heliocentric model of the planetary system in 1543, proposing that Earth and planets revolved around the Sun, instead of the Universe around Earth, his book was suspended by the Inquisition in 1616; for more than 200 years, it was allowed to be published only in editions that stressed it presented just a mathematical model but no statement about reality. That same year, Galileo Galilei was warned by the cardinal Robert Bellarmine, an inquisitor and one of the judges who had condemned Giordano Bruno to be burnt at the stake, to teach the heliocentric model not as truth but only as a hypothesis.

In 1600, Bruno, an early advocate of the Copernican model, was burned alive in Rome. Among his heresies was his monistic philosophy, affirming that the whole is one and that Nature is none other than God in things. In 1619, Lucilio Vanini, who had preached a religion of nature where a leaf of grass was proof of God, got his tongue cut out and was strangled at the stake, his body burned in Toulouse. And in 1697, Thomas Aikenhead, a student who claimed that God, the world, and nature, are but one thing, was hanged for blasphemy in Edinburgh.

Science in those early days often emerged as a sort of soft monism. Johannes Kepler, who discovered that Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun in elliptical orbits, tried to understand nature in terms of harmonies and symmetries. Brunos influence and the ideas of monism directly inspired his efforts to develop a unified theory and find harmonic, beautiful patterns in the natural world.

The monist influence was even more apparent in the work of Newton, best known for his theory of gravity. One of Newtons most important accomplishments was the insight that gravity acts universally on all bodies on Earth and elsewhere in the Universe. He explicitly compared this feature with the idea of an all-encompassing divinity that he adopted from the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth. One and the same divinity [exercises] its powers in all bodies whatsoever, Newton wrote.

Michael Faraday, who proposed force fields were permeating the Universe, made significant steps toward the unification of electricity and magnetism a monistic point of view, indeed.

Albert Einstein, who gave us such concepts as the curved universe and space-time, believed that the separation of humans from the rest of the Universe was essentially an optical delusion of consciousness.

Monism has resurfaced again and again by inspiring humanitys greatest creations and creators across the arts. Mozarts opera The Magic Flute (1791) included a eulogy of Isis. Beethoven kept the quote I am all that is, that has been and will be, and no mortal has ever lifted my veil, attributed to Isis, in a frame on his desk. The Romantic poets from Goethe to Coleridge to Wordsworth describe the longing for a reconciliation of ego and the world within nature.

Despite all this, the hard line of the Church stuck: monism could influence science and inspire our greatest art, but the idea that it quite literally described nature was rejected by the overwhelming majority through the years. To the present day, we tend to believe that monism and nature, or monism and science, dont belong together; that the hypothesis of all is One simply isnt proper science at all.

If anything should convince us to change our mind, it is the experimental science of quantum mechanics and its underlying mathematics. One famous feature of QM is that there is no strict separation between particles and waves. What had been considered as a particle before, for example an electron, can sometimes behave as a wave, while waves (such as, for example, light) can absorb and emit energy in discrete portions, understood as particle-like quanta. In contrast to a particle though, a wave doesnt exist in a specific place. It stretches out over the surface of a pond or the expanse of the Universe; it is non-local, in physics lingo. A quantum object described as a wave exists in several places simultaneously until it gets measured. In that instant, the object seems to collapse into one of its potential locations.

This leads to the weirdest aspect of QM entanglement, a property of quantum systems made up of two or more particles. According to the quantum pioneer Erwin Schrdinger writing in 1935, entanglement is the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought.

Consider observing a wave pattern on your pond that you know results from two ripples combined, such as two stones dropped into the water. Just by looking at the water surface, you wont be able to tell what these individual ripples were to start. For instance, the pattern could have arisen from two stones causing two equal swells in the water, or from a small stone causing a third of the swell and a larger stone creating two-thirds.

Taking this logic at face value, nothing we see really exists; there are no particles or physicists or cats or dogs

The same is true for entangled quantum systems: you may know the complete system perfectly well but at the same time know nothing about its constituents until we pin them down by experiment, measuring them. In such an experiment, the very act of measurement would destroy the original whole.

It was Schrdinger who clearly summarised what entanglement means:

Entanglement is QMs way of integrating parts into a whole and, when you apply entanglement to the entire Universe, you end up with Heraclitus tenet From all things One. Taking this logic at face value, nothing we see around us really exists; there are no particles or physicists or cats or dogs. The only thing that truly exists is the Universe as a whole.

Yet, while this logic is easy to follow, the conclusion seems bizarre, and is far from a general consensus, even among physicists. In fact, it sparked a controversy that can be traced back to the early history of QM when, in 1927, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg realised that one can never experience both the particle and wave aspects of a quantum object at the same time. Heisenbergs friend and collaborator Wolfgang Pauli tried to illustrate this finding by saying one could look at nature with two different eyes, seeing either particles or waves, but if the observer tried to open both eyes together, they would go astray. This seemed to suggest that reality is fundamentally unobservable, just like the veiled Egyptian goddess Isis. But physics is an experimental science. As a consequence, physicists arent easily convinced about the existence of a hidden quantum reality, even if it may unify the experiences of things such as particles or waves.

Bohr, Heisenberg and Pauli at least remained unconvinced. When they tried to make sense out of quantum mechanics, they came to the conclusion that what we see is real and that there is no underlying, more fundamental quantum reality hiding behind. According to this Copenhagen interpretation, QM doesnt describe a deeper reality but merely our incomplete knowledge of nature.

Schrdingers theoretical wave function, the mathematical expression that describes the different probabilities a quantum object has of being in a given state or location, wasnt accepted as a model of nature but understood as merely a tool to predict what our measurement devices would register. There is no quantum world, Bohr reportedly affirmed. For many years to come, this view became the orthodox interpretation about what QM meant.

From the time Schrdingers paper on entanglement was published in 1935, physicists could have adopted a monistic interpretation of QM, or at least have accepted it as a major contender for Bohrs instrumental interpretation that QM was merely a tool. Yet it appears as if Heisenberg and Bohr, as soon as they had discovered this strange, new quantum reality that was underlying our everyday world and unifying everything in the Universe, shied away from setting out to explore this uncharted territory. Instead, they decided to declare it nonexistent.

This reaction is even more baffling since physicists, of all people, werent completely unaware of the monistic implications of QM. For example, when in 1947 Bohr received the Order of the Elephant, Denmarks highest honour, he designed his own coat of arms that featured a yin and yang symbol, the pictorial representation of the monistic Taoist philosophy that seemingly opposite forces in nature are actually complementary pieces of a fundamental whole on a deeper level of understanding. In a similar spirit, Heisenberg titled his autobiography Der Teil und das Ganze (1969), or The Part and the Whole.

More concretely, the physicist David Bohm wrote in his popular textbook Quantum Theory (1951) that QM requires that we give up the idea that the world can correctly be analysed into distinct parts and replace it with the assumption that the entire universe is basically a single, indivisible unit. By the 1970s, Fritjof Capras bestseller The Tao of Physics (1975) was comparing quantum physics with East Asian spirituality. So why were the monistic implications of quantum physics not taken seriously? Why was quantum physics an apt mathematical model, but considered insufficient to describe the contours of nature itself?

There are many reasons why this didnt happen.

For one thing, despite the monistic inclinations of visionaries like Newton and Kepler, the notion that all is One usually isnt understood as a meaningful statement in science. This One isnt directly observable, and science is an experimental endeavour. But more than that, the Western mind was inclined to restrict science to problem-solving while reserving the absolute and final answers for religion. The mindset has been internalised to this day, even by people who arent necessarily religious themselves.

Whats more, it didnt really seem to matter what the quantum-mechanical wave function implied. The formulas and predictions of quantum physics worked perfectly well and could be applied successfully to the various emerging research fields in nuclear, particle and solid-state physics, irrespective of what one believed about its underlying reality. Moreover, for many years, no one truly understood what happened during a quantum measurement and how quantum mechanics was related to our everyday experience in a world made of large objects existing in definite shapes and places.

This situation changed only around 1970 when the physicist Heinz-Dieter Zeh in Germany discovered a process known as decoherence, which is important to virtually any branch of modern physics. Decoherence protects our daily-life experience from too much quantum weirdness. And it realises the last part of Heraclitus tenet: from all things One.

It is as if decoherence opens a zipper between parallel universes

Decoherence happens when a quantum object interacts with its environment for instance, when a particle like an electron, a human observer or measurement device, and the environment get entangled. If the quantum object is a particle existing in two different locations (possible if it takes the form of a wave) each of them is linked to a corresponding state of the measurement device recording the particle in the respective position.

While these possible realities are superposed in the entangled whole, they unravel from the perspective of the observer who doesnt know the exact state of the environment, which arguably is the entire rest of the Universe. It is as if you observe your garden through a partitioned window: nature looks divided into separate pieces, but this is an artefact of your perspective.

From the observers perspective immersed in their own reality (called the frog perspective by the cosmologist Max Tegmark) the measurement device might describe two realities based on mathematical probabilities in the wave function the particle could be located at position A with a measurement device observing this location, or the particle could be found at position B with another device recording this position.

Zehs discovery endorsed a controversial view of quantum mechanics, proposed by the physicist Hugh Everett, that became famous under the misleading label many-worlds interpretation. According to Everett, quantum measurements dont have only a single outcome. Instead, all outcomes allowed in quantum mechanics are realised, albeit in parallel realities. It is as if decoherence opens a zipper between parallel universes. On a more fundamental level though, Everetts interpretation doesnt describe many classical worlds but rather a single quantum universe, governed by a universal wave function. If a hypothetical observer could see the entire Universe from the outside with all its possibilities revealed, the cosmos would manifest as a single quantum object. That, metaphorically speaking, would be the bird perspective, Tegmark says.

As remarkable as Everetts and Zehs conclusions were, they werent appreciated by their physicist peers. Instead, for decades any deeper enquiry in the foundations of quantum mechanics was discouraged, and anyone who dared to question Bohrs orthodox interpretation encountered a toxic blend of hostility and dogmatic pragmatism. The attitude was fittingly summarised in 1989 by the physicist David Mermin as Shut up and calculate! The motto reflected the pressure on 20th-century students to adopt QM as a tool instead of wasting their time with metaphysical pondering or any effort to find its expression in reality.

John Clauser, one of the recipients of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum entanglement, described how a very powerful stigma began to develop within the physics community towards anyone who sacrilegiously was critical of quantum theorys fundamentals. Lon Rosenfeld, a close collaborator of Bohrs, characterised Everett as undescribably [sic!] stupid and claimed he could not understand the simplest things in quantum mechanics. Around the same time, Zeh who discovered decoherence was informed by his advisor, a Nobel Prize winner, that any further activities on this subject would end [his] academic career! Zeh stressed the parallels between the Inquisitions conservative stance and the dogmatic antirealism of many physicists today:

Thus, even after decoherence had explained how our everyday experience can follow from a monistic quantum reality, the idea remained the outsider view of a small group of renegade physicists. And, in fact, for most of us, the notion of an all-encompassing One doesnt feel like proper science. It comes with a scent of New Age bullshit.

But why does this idea sound so bizarre to us? To understand this bias, we have to leave quantum mechanics for a moment and look back to how monism evolved in Europe over the past 800 years. It turns out, the controversy about how to interpret QM is part of the larger story the conflict about who was entitled to define the foundation of reality: religion, or science?

According to Everett and Zeh, the fundamental description of the Universe is a single entangled state, described by a universal wave function. Everything we experience in our daily lives emerges from this fundamental quantum reality.

If this is correct, it implies that the traditional approach of physics to understand things in terms of constituents doesnt work anymore. If physicists explain how everyday objects such as chairs, tables and books are made of atoms, atoms are composed of atomic nuclei and electrons, atomic nuclei contain protons and neutrons, and protons and neutrons consist of quarks, they ignore that these particles arent fundamental but just abstractions from the fundamental whole.

If there exists but a single thing in the Universe, then space doesnt make sense any more

Instead, the most fundamental description of the Universe has to start with the Universe itself, understood as an entangled quantum object. Indeed, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for experiments that probe correlations between particles separated by large distances yet connected to each other based on entanglement.

This view also requires us to rethink our notion of space and time. If there exists but a single thing in the Universe, then space, often understood as the relative order of things, doesnt make sense any more. Nor is it easy to imagine this single object evolving in time. Accordingly, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, describing the quantum mechanical wave function of the Universe and the starting point for much of Stephen Hawkings work on cosmology, describes a timeless universe.

Entanglement also plays a crucial role in the most advanced approaches to quantum computing and the search for a theory of quantum gravity, in which entanglement creates connections between distant regions of space-time. Just a few weeks before the new Nobel laureates were honoured in Stockholm in 2022, a different team of distinguished scientists had a paper published in Nature that described a process on Googles quantum computer that could be interpreted as some kind of wormhole, a tunnel connecting far-away regions in space. Although the wormhole realised in this recent experiment exists only in a two-dimensional toy universe, it hints at an intimate relationship between quantum entanglement and proximity in space, and thus could constitute a breakthrough for future research at the forefront of physics.

The 3,000-year-old concept of monism may actually help modern physicists in their struggle to find a theory of quantum gravity and make sense out of black holes, the Higgs boson, and the early Universe. Chances are high that we witness the beginning of a new era where science is informed by monism and the Universe is perceived as a unified whole.

This Essay was made possible through the support of a grant to Aeon+Psyche from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. Funders to Aeon+Psyche are not involved in editorial decision-making.

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One of the most important tools in the theoretical physicists toolkit is the thought experiment. If you study relativity, quantum mechanics, or any area of physics applying to environments or situations in which you cannot (or should not) place yourself, youll find that you spend a lot more time working through imaginary scenarios than setting up instruments or taking measurements.

Unlike physical experiments, thought experiments are not about collecting data, but rather about posing an imaginary question and working through an if/then logical sequence to explore what the theory really means.

Asking what has to happen if the theory is true? is invaluable for developing intuition and anticipating new applications. In some cases, a thought experiment can reveal the deep philosophical implications of a theory, or even present what appears to be an unsolvable paradox.

Probably the most famous of all physics thought experiments is that of Schrdingers Cat both because it involves (purely hypothetical!) carnage, and because its implications for the nature of reality in a quantum world continue to challenge students and theorists everywhere.

The basic again, purely hypothetical experimental setup is this. Imagine you have a radioactive material in which there is a 50 per cent chance of a nuclear decay in some specified amount of time (lets say, one hour).

You put this material in a box along with a small glass vial of poison and a device that will break the vial if a radioactive decay is detected. Then, you put a live cat in the box, close the lid, wait an hour, and then open the box once again.

Based on this setup, its straightforward to deduce that since the chance the atom decays and triggers the poison is 50 per cent, half the time you do the experiment, you should find a living cat, and half the time, you should find a dead one, assuming youre not re-using the same cat each time.

But when Erwin Schrdinger described the thought experiment to Albert Einstein in 1935, he did so to highlight an apparent consequence of quantum theory that seemed to both scientists to be complete nonsense: the idea that before you open the box, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time.

Ultimately, it comes down to the principle of uncertainty in quantum mechanics. Unlike classical mechanics (the kind of physics that applies to our everyday experiences), in quantum mechanics, there seems to be a fundamental uncertainty built into the nature of reality.

When you flip a coin (a classical event), its only random because youre not keeping careful enough track of all the motions and forces involved. If you could measure absolutely everything, you could predict the outcome every time its deterministic.

But in the quantum mechanical version of a coin flip, the radioactive decay, nothing you measure can possibly tell you the outcome before it occurs. As far as an outside observer is concerned, until the measurement of the quantum coin flip occurs, the system will act like its in both states at once: the atom is both decayed and not decayed, in what we call a superposition.

Superposition is a real phenomenon in quantum mechanics, and sometimes we can even use it to our advantage. Quantum computing is built on the idea that a quantum computer bit (or qubit), instead of being just one or zero, can be in a superposition of one and zero, massively increasing the computers ability to do many complex calculations at once.

In the case of Schrdingers Cat, the apparently absurd conclusion that the cat is both alive and dead comes from considering the whole apparatus the atom, the trigger device, and the poison vial, and the cat to be a single quantum system, each element of which exists in a superposition.

The atom is decayed and not, the device is triggered and dormant, the vial is broken and intact, and the cat is therefore simultaneously dead and alive, until the moment the box is opened.

Whether this conclusion is actually absurd is an open question. What both Schrdinger and Einstein concluded was that true, fundamental uncertainty simply cannot apply to the real, macroscopic, world. These days, most physicists accept that uncertainty is real, at least for subatomic particles, but how that uncertainty 'collapses' when a measurement is made remains up for debate.

In one interpretation, any measurement thats performed fundamentally alters reality though it is usually argued that the trigger device, or, at least, the cat itself, provides a measurement for that purpose. In another interpretation, called Many Worlds, the entire Universe duplicates itself every time a quantum coin is flipped, and the measurement simply tells you whether youre in the dead-cat or alive-cat universe from now on.

While we cant say how long it will take before we fully understand whats really going on in the black box of quantum superposition, applications of quantum theory are already bringing us incredible technological advances, like quantum computers. And in the meantime, clever thought experiments allow us to follow our curiosity, without running the risk of killing any cats.

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A newly discovered phenomenon dubbed "collectively induced transparency" (CIT) causes groups of atoms to abruptly stop reflecting light at specific frequencies.

CIT was discovered by confining ytterbium atoms inside an optical cavityessentially, a tiny box for lightand blasting them with a laser. Although the laser's light will bounce off the atoms up to a point, as the frequency of the light is adjusted, a transparency window appears in which the light simply passes through the cavity unimpeded.

"We never knew this transparency window existed," says Caltech's Andrei Faraon (BS '04), William L. Valentine Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering, and co-corresponding author of a paper on the discovery that was published on April 26 in the journal Nature. "Our research has primarily become a journey to find out why."

An analysis of the transparency window points to it being the result of interactions in the cavity between groups of atoms and light. This phenomenon is akin to destructive interference, in which waves from two or more sources can cancel one another out. The groups of atoms continually absorb and re-emit light, which generally results in the reflection of the laser's light. However, at the CIT frequency, there is a balance created by the re-emitted light from each of the atoms in a group, resulting in a drop in reflection.

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"An ensemble of atoms strongly coupled to the same optical field can lead to unexpected results," says co-lead author Mi Lei, a graduate student at Caltech.

The optical resonator, which measures just 20 microns in length and includes features smaller than 1 micron, was fabricated at the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech.

"Through conventional quantum optics measurement techniques, we found that our system had reached an unexplored regime, revealing new physics," says graduate student Rikuto Fukumori, co-lead author of the paper.

Besides the transparency phenomenon, the researchers also observed that the collection of atoms can absorb and emit light from the laser either much faster or much slower compared to a single atom depending on the intensity of the laser. These processes, called superradiance and subradiance, and their underlying physics are still poorly understood because of the large number of interacting quantum particles.

"We were able to monitor and control quantum mechanical lightmatter interactions at nanoscale," says co-corresponding author Joonhee Choi, a former postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who is now an assistant professor at Stanford University.

Though the research is primarily fundamental and expands our understanding of the mysterious world of quantum effects, this discovery has the potential to one day help pave the way to more efficient quantum memories in which information is stored in an ensemble of strongly coupled atoms. Faraon has also worked on creating quantum storage by manipulating the interactions of multiple vanadium atoms.

"Besides memories, these experimental systems provide important insight about developing future connections between quantum computers," says Manuel Endres, professor of physics and Rosenberg Scholar, who is a co-author of the study.

Reference:Lei M, Fukumori R, Rochman J, et al. Many-body cavity quantum electrodynamics with driven inhomogeneous emitters. Nature. Published online April 26, 2023:1-6. doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05884-1

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Scientists at Forschungszentrum Jlich have fabricated a new type of transistor from a germaniumtin alloy that has several advantages over conventional switching elements. Charge carriers can move faster in the material than in silicon or germanium, which enables lower voltages in operation. The transistor thus appears to be a promising candidate for future low-power, high-performance chips, and possibly also for the development of future of quantum computers.

Over the past 70 years, the number of transistors on a chip has doubled approximately every two years according to Moores Law, which is still valid today. The circuits have become correspondingly smaller, but an end to this development appears to be in sight. We have now reached a stage where structures are only 2 to 3 nanometers in size. This is approximately equal to the diameter of 10 atoms, which takes us to the limits of what is feasible. It doesnt get much smaller than this, says Qing-Tai Zhao of the Peter Grnberg Institute (PGI-9) at Forschungszentrum Jlich.

For some time now, researchers have been looking for a substitute for silicon, the primary material used in the semiconductor industry. The idea is to find a material that has more favourable electronic properties and can be used to achieve the same performance with larger structures, the professor explains.

The research is in part focused on germanium, which was already being used in the early days of the computer era. Electrons can move much faster in germanium than in silicon, at least in theory. However, Qing-Tai Zhao and his colleagues have now gone one step further. To optimize the electronic properties even further, they incorporated tin atoms into the germanium crystal lattice. The method was developed several years ago at the Peter Grnberg Institute (PGI-9) of Forschungszentrum Jlich.

The germaniumtin system we have been testing makes it possible to overcome the physical limitations of silicon technology, says Qing-Tai Zhao. In experiments, the germaniumtin transistor exhibits an electron mobility that is 2.5 times higher than a comparable transistor made of pure germanium.

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Another advantage of the new material alloy is that it is compatible with the existing CMOS process for chip fabrication. Germanium and tin come from the same main group in the periodic table as silicon. The germanium-tin transistors could therefore be integrated directly into conventional silicon chips with existing production lines.

Apart from classical digital computers, quantum computers could also benefit from the germaniumtin transistor. For some time, there have been efforts to integrate parts of the control electronics directly on the quantum chip, which is operated inside a quantum computer at temperatures close to absolute zero. Measurements suggest that a transistor made of germanium-tin will perform significantly better under these conditions than those made of silicon.

The challenge is to find a semiconductor whose switching can still be very fast with low voltages at very low temperatures, explains Qing-Tai Zhao. For silicon, this switching curve flattens out below 50 Kelvin. Then, the transistors need a high voltage and thus a high power, which ultimately leads to failures of the sensitive quantum bits because of the heating. Germaniumtin performs better at these temperatures in measurements down to 12 Kelvin, and there are hopes to use the material at even lower temperatures, says Qing-Tai Zhao.

In addition, the germaniumtin transistor is a further step towards optical on-chip data transmission. The transmission of information with light signals is already standard in many data networks because it is considerably faster and more energy-efficient than data transfer via electrical conductors. In the field of micro- and nanoelectronics, however, data is usually still sent electrically. Colleagues from the Jlich working group of Dr. Dan Buca have already developed a germanium-tin laser in the past that opens up the possibility to transmit data optically directly on a silicon chip. The germanium-tin transistor, along these lasers, provides a promising solution for the monolithic integration of nanoelectronics and photonics on a single chip.

Reference:Liu M, Junk Y, Han Y, et al. Vertical GeSn nanowire MOSFETs for CMOS beyond silicon. Commun Eng. 2023;2(1):1-9. doi:10.1038/s44172-023-00059-2

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Eight Yale seniors and a recent graduate have been awarded fellowships for graduate study at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

These fellowship recipients are in addition to the students previously announced in Yale News who have won Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships.

The fellowship winners and their awards are:

Danielle Castro has received a Paul Mellon Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in population health sciences at the University of Cambridge. Next month, she will graduate from Yale with a certificate in global health and a joint B.S./M.S. degree in molecular biochemistry. Her thesis is on the development of novel drug candidates for chordoma spine cancers in the laboratory of Craig Crews, the John C. MaloneProfessor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. She has a strong connection to her Peruvian and Indigenous heritage, and is passionate about social justice and reducing health inequities. She has worked toward this goal while interning in the New Haven Public Schools, serving on the board of the HAVEN Free Clinic, and conducting public health research in Connecticut and the Peruvian Amazon. She enjoys meeting and mentoring other first-generation immigrant and low-income students, especially in her role as co-president of Latina Women at Yale.

Aidan Evans has been awarded a Huawei Hisilicon Scholarship to earn a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Cambridge. He is majoring in computer science and philosophy at Yale and additionally is completing a B.S./M.S. in computer science. During his time at Yale he published research on quantum computing at the premier conference on software engineering. He has also served as a teaching assistant for seven courses, ranging from those on systems programming and computer organization to graduate courses on the interplay of computer science with law. Most recently he has taken on the project of writing a book on the history of Yales computer science department. At Cambridge, he will study the logic and the foundations of computer science under the supervision of Professor Anuj Dawar.

Beasie Goddu was awarded a Paul Mellon Fellowship for graduate study at the University of Cambridge, where she will pursue an M.Phil. in English literature. She will examine the portrayal of womens rights in early 20th-century British fiction. She is majoring in English at Yale with a concentration in creative writing. Her academic thesis explored womens agency over physical space in the works of Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. Her creative writing thesis is a collection of essays about vision. She serves as a writing partner at Yales Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, is a senior editor of The New Journal, a student-run magazine that features creative nonfiction, and is an undergraduate editorial fellow at The Yale Review. She is also president of St. Anthony Hall, an arts and literary society. She aspires to a career in editing, highlighting marginalized female voices.

Tyler Jager was awarded a Kings-Yale Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in political thought and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge. He will focus on early 20th-century history and efforts to restrict migration and the freedom of movement, particularly in the British Empire. He will graduate from Yale with a joint B.A./M.A. degree in political science and a certificate in human rights. He was the 2022 winner of the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics for an essay he wrote on aid workers in the Mediterranean. He has also written about that topic, tenant organization, and lead poisoning in New Haven for a number of campus and national publications, and currently serves as co-editor of BRINK, Yales undergraduate book review. His senior thesis, an ethnographic study in Greece, explored how aid workers presence in host communities affects anti-refugee prejudice in European Union external border zones. Jager is a tour guide at the Yale University Art Gallery and was the coordinator of the Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project Fast, the universitys largest student fundraiser. He has interned at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and at the journal Foreign Affairs.

Hamzah Jhaveri has received a Keasbey Scholarship to pursue an M.Phil. in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. At Yale, he majored in anthropology, with a particular interest in the study of moral economics and the corporate form. He has been researching gun culture and commerce in America, and his senior thesis investigates the transformation of the gun-making trade in an early American settlement in Pennsylvania known for its pacifist religious values and socialist economy. Jhaveri served as the editor-in-chief of the Yale Herald, wrote and performed with sketch company groups including the Fifth Humor and Playspace, and has been an organizer with the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition, Sunrise New Haven (the local chapter of a national movement to stop the climate crisis and create millions of new jobs), and New Haven Rising (a community organization dedicated to achieving economic, racial, and social justice through collective action). He has spent summers teaching fifth-graders about climate organizing, interning at a First Amendment law firm, researching petrochemical companies, and harvesting micro greens at an urban hydroponics farm.

Elizabeth Hopkinson was awarded a Paul Mellon Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in health, medicine, and society at Clare College, Cambridge. She graduated from Yale in December 2022 with a B.A. in environmental studies. Her senior thesis explored end-of-life care using geographic concepts of place and place-making. At Cambridge, she will continue to study how places affect experiences of aging, dying, and disability. She was a leader of FOOT (First-year Orientation Trips), was a first-year counselor in Jonathan Edwards College, a Yale Daily News editor, and a research assistant at the Yale School of Nursing and in the Human Nature Lab. During the height of the COVID pandemic, she worked as an EMT near her home in Westborough, Massachusetts.

Shaezmina Khan has been awarded the Rotary Global Grant Scholarship to pursue an M.Sc. in global governance and diplomacy from the University of Oxford. She is majoring in global affairs at Yale and will obtain a certificate in human rights from Yale Law School. For her senior capstone, Khan worked for the Afghanistan War Commission and assessed U.S. diplomatic efforts to achieve political settlement in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2021. At Oxford, she hopes to focus her research on regional security dilemmas and conflict mediation in the Afghanistan-Pakistan-India region. She is passionate about American foreign policy, national security, diplomacy, and peacebuilding in the Middle East and North Africa region. She served as a policy trainee at the European Commission in Brussels and as a legislative intern for U.S. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro in Washington, D.C. She served as the executive director of the Yale International Relations Association and president of the Muslim Students Association, and was a research assistant at both the Yale Law School and Jackson School for Global Affairs.

Ethan Pesikoff received a Henry Fellowship to earn a Master of Advanced Studies (MASt) degree in pure mathematics at the University of Cambridge. At Yale, he is majoring in both mathematics and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC). He served on the board of the Yale Undergraduate Math Society, which organizes academic support and social activities for students, and he conducted original mathematical research at Williams College and the University of Minnesota during summer breaks. His senior thesis for NELC seeks to understand previously untranslated Akkadian texts from the early second millennium BCE. After completing his MASt at Cambridge, Pesikoff plans to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics.

Melissa Wang was awarded a Paul Mellon Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in U.S. history at the University of Cambridge, where she will study the consolidation of correctional officer power in late 20th-century America and its effect on mass incarceration policy and prisoners lives. Her research is intended to place correctional officers within a broader history of American law enforcement, militarism, and race. At Yale, she is majoring in history, and ethnicity, race, and migration, and is a scholar in the Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights. She has served on the board of the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project (YUPP) and Yale Womens Center, and captains the Yale club Wushu team. Her research interests were inspired by work with the Stop Solitary Connecticuts legislative campaign as a project leader at YUPP and as a research assistant at the Yale Law School Lowenstein Clinic. A painter, she is also a volunteer with Justice Arts Coalition, a national network and resource for those creating art in and around the criminal legal system.

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Fellowship winners will continue their studies in England - Yale News