Tenio Popmintchev

Professor of Physics, University of California San Diego, USA, and TU Wien, Austria | Founder at Quantheon Inc

[Tenio Popmintchev @ProfPopmintchev]

Quantum Regimes of Coherent X-ray Generation and Quantum Sensing: a symphony of paired-electron correlations extends coherent EUV and X-ray generation beyond the single-electron limit and the textbook cutoff. The resulting attosecond-to-femtosecond quantum sensor resolves correlated electron dynamics in atoms, molecules, and potentially solids — physics fundamentally important for quantum computing and the design of advanced strongly correlated quantum materials.

Excited to share our latest work in Nature Photonics.

[Tenio Popmintchev @ProfPopmintchev]

@UCSDPhySci @tu_wien @UCSDPhysics Thanks to Dimitar Popmintchev and the teams at @tu_wien × @UCSanDiego who helped to hit the note exactly.

[Tenio Popmintchev @ProfPopmintchev]

Laser-made X-rays have come like guitar notes on fixed frets. Our Springer Nature Communications Physics work turns them into a slide guitar: tune a UV-VIS laser, and the X-rays glide across the full gaps between harmonics - sharp and bright.

#EUV #Xray #Chips #Masks #PopmintchevLABS

[UC San Diego School of Physical Sciences @UCSDPhySci]

New research from @tu_wien and @UCSDPhysics researcher @ProfPopmintchev pave the way for X-ray light on demand. For the first time, they show X-ray frequencies can be tuned continuously, much like producing any desired pitch on a fretless guitar. https://t.co/8tUNGa0d5e

[Tenio Popmintchev @ProfPopmintchev]

X-ray light is like guitar music

Story by: Florian Aigner

For decades, laser-made X-rays have arrived like notes from a guitar with fixed frets: bright and clear, but only at the pitches the instrument allows. Our new paper in Springer Nature Communications Physics turns that guitar into a slide guitar. The key is to tune the laser that gives rise to the X-rays, and to tune it far using simpler physics. That is the real challenge, since a powerful laser rarely lets its color be moved very much without losing control of the light. Once we found a way, every shift of the laser became a far longer stride in the X-rays, toward the red or toward the blue, closing for the first time the entire gap between adjacent harmonics in either direction, while the light stays sharp and bright. Scalable to lasers of high peak and average power.

Nature does not place its resonances where our notes happen to fall. Sliding freely between them brings precise spectroscopy, nuclear clocks, and EUV and X-ray chip metrology onto a laboratory table and in the fab, rather than into a photon machine the scale of a city block.

Collaboration: Technische Universität Wien × UC San Diego

📄 https://t.co/nhAviUOlFZ

#EUV #Xray #Metrology #Semiconductors #Chips #Masks

[Tenio Popmintchev @ProfPopmintchev]

A New Frontier in X-Rays and Quantum Sensing https://t.co/7W743iLoCG

[U.S. National Science Foundation @NSF]

Today, NSF released 12 new notices of funding opportunity providing over $1.5 billion for foundational research across the sciences and engineering. https://t.co/dFbK0iRm7K

[Tesla Recruiting @TeslaRecruiting]

Tesla internships are defined by impact rather than title

From day 1, you’re trusted with meaningful work & are given the opportunity to ship things that reach millions of people

Nearly 4,000 interns join us every year – apply via https://t.co/EJMKqnG80m

[U.S. National Science Foundation @NSF]

Welcome to the quantum era. ⚛️

Check how decades of #NSFfunded research into quantum materials are expanding the understanding of matter and helping build the scientific foundation for future quantum technologies. https://t.co/VDMjKeXdqF

[Tenio Popmintchev @ProfPopmintchev]

Quantum Regimes of Coherent X-ray Generation and Quantum Sensing: electron-electron correlations and entanglement extend EUV high harmonic emission into the X-ray regime.

Highlight of our recent work in Nature Photonics.

https://t.co/ys6YpTgLBm

[Tenio Popmintchev @ProfPopmintchev]

LINK: https://t.co/BKbJJuct6b

[Tenio Popmintchev @ProfPopmintchev]

Quantum Regimes of Coherent X-ray Generation and Quantum Sensing: a symphony of paired-electron correlations extends coherent EUV and X-ray generation beyond the single-electron limit and the textbook cutoff. The resulting attosecond-to-femtosecond quantum sensor resolves correlated electron dynamics in atoms, molecules, and potentially solids — physics fundamentally important for quantum computing and the design of advanced strongly correlated quantum materials.

Excited to share our latest work in Nature Photonics.

[Tenio Popmintchev @ProfPopmintchev]

Popmintchev LABS

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

SpaceXAI + Tesla TERAFAB Project

Goal is a trillion watts of compute/year

Most must necessarily go to space, as US electricity is only 0.5TW

[Tenio Popmintchev @ProfPopmintchev]

Popmintchev LABS

[Tenio Popmintchev @ProfPopmintchev]

Popmintchev LABS

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

Have you heard of Cooper pairs?

In an ordinary conductive material, current flows because there are electrons that are free to move through the entire material. In some materials, the individual electrons that push their way through the conductor may become organised, forming a synchronised dance that flows without any resistance. The material has become a superconductor and the electrons are joined together as pairs. These are called Cooper pairs.

Cooper pairs behave completely differently to ordinary electrons. Electrons have a great deal of integrity and like to stay at a distance from each other – two electrons cannot be in the same place if they have the same properties. We can see this in an atom, for example, where the electrons divide themselves into different energy levels, called shells. However, when the electrons in a superconductor join up as pairs, they lose a bit of their individuality; while two separate electrons are always distinct, two Cooper pairs can be exactly the same. This means the Cooper pairs in a superconductor can be described as a single unit, one quantum mechanical system. In the language of quantum mechanics, they are then described as a single wave function. This wave function describes the probability of observing the system in a given state and with given properties.

The properties of this wave function play a leading role in the 2025 physics laureates’ experiments.

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

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

A quantum mechanical system behind a barrier can have varying amounts of energy, but it can only absorb or emit specific amounts of this energy. The system is quantised. Tunnelling occurs more easily at a higher energy level than at a lower one so, statistically, a system with more energy is held captive for less time than one with less energy.

This year’s #NobelPrize laureates in physics conducted experiments with an electrical circuit in which they demonstrated both quantum mechanical tunnelling and quantised energy levels in a system big enough to be held in the hand.

[Tenio Popmintchev @ProfPopmintchev]

!!!

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2025 #NobelPrize in Physics to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.”

[Tenio Popmintchev @ProfPopmintchev]

Did physicist John Atanasoff invent the digital binary computer?