The Tierras Observatory: Ultra-Precise Photometry for Characterizing Exoplanets and Their Host Stars

Posted by klaurent Harvard

Kavli Affiliate: David Charbonneau | Summary:The Tierras Observatory is a fully robotic 1.3-m telescope at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in southern Arizona. Tierras achieves sub-part-per-thousand (ppt) photometric precision on two timescales: intra-night, to detect and characterize transits of planets around nearby mid-to-late M dwarfs, and night-to-night across an observing season, to characterize the long-term […]


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Direct imaging of vortex lattices across fractional fillings in two-dimensional Josephson junction arrays

Posted by klaurent Cornell

Kavli Affiliate: Katja C. Nowack | Summary:Josephson junction arrays are predicted to host a rich sequence of commensurate vortex lattices. However, direct imaging of these configurations remains limited, while transport measurements cannot resolve the underlying vortex arrangements or how order breaks down. Using scanning superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) microscopy, we resolve individual vortices and […]


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ALMA detection of continuum emission from GQ Lup B

Posted by klaurent Peking

Kavli Affiliate: Ruobing Dong | Summary:GQ Lup B is a massive (10-40 M$_textJup$) companion orbiting the young T-Tauri star GQ Lup A at a projected distance of $sim$110 au (0.7”). It is outside the circumprimary disk in the submm continuum, but its $sim,63^circ$ inclined orbit intersects the primary’s gas disk twice per period. We report […]


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Symplectic Reck: In-Situ Learning of Gaussian Quantum Operations

Posted by klaurent Chicago

Kavli Affiliate: David W. Miller | Summary:Programmable photonic circuits are a natural platform for physical learning, where hardware parameters are trained directly from measured feedback. We propose a physical learning algorithm and architecture for continuous-variable quantum systems where a photonic circuit is trained in situ to invert an unknown lossless Gaussian quantum operation. We prove […]


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WorldMind: Test-Time Scaling for Visual Spatial Reasoning through Latent World Simulation

Posted by klaurent Caltech

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have continuous deficiency in spatial reasoning tasks that require emphmental spatial transformation, such as reasoning under hypothetical changes in viewpoint or position, known as perspective-taking tasks. Existing approaches either scale linguistic reasoning or augment VLMs with static geometric representations, but neither directly enables active transformation of the represented […]


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The deuterium-rich atmosphere of a mature super-Jupiter

Posted by klaurent Caltech

Kavli Affiliate: Dimitri Mawet| Summary:The deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio (D/H) has provided key insights into the origin and evolution of the Solar System. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, we detected deuterated methane at $48σ$ in a mature giant exoplanet, $ε$ Ind Ab. We measure the planet’s D/H ratio to be $(4.4 pm 0.7) times 10^-5$, which […]


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Trajectory-Dependent Decoherence and Leakage During Shuttling of Multi-Spin Qubits

Posted by klaurent Delft, This Week: Nanoscience

Kavli Affiliate: Viatcheslav Dobrovitski | Summary:Logical qubits encoded in collective states of multiple spins are promising building blocks for large-scale semiconductor quantum processors. As novel fault-tolerant architectures increasingly rely on qubit shuttling, understanding decoherence of the shuttled multi-spin qubits becomes crucial. We analyze fidelity and leakage of the logical qubits dephased by the spatio-temporally correlated […]


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Flow-Guided Target-Space Alignment via Path Consistency

Posted by klaurent Caltech, This Week: Nanoscience

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao| Summary:Many multimodal alignment problems require mapping a source modality into a fixed space defined by a target modality, where the target space is not merely an intermediate embedding but is used directly for downstream analysis. In this setting, successful alignment should preserve both the global structure of the target distribution and […]


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The AIDA-TNG project: Galactic bar pattern speeds in self-interacting dark matter

Posted by klaurent MIT, This Week: Astrophysics

Kavli Affiliate: Mark Vogelsberger | Summary:Cosmological simulations within the standard cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm systematically predict higher values of the dimensionless bar-speed parameter, $boldsymbolR equiv R_mathrmcr/R_mathrmbar$ (where $R_mathrmcr$ and $R_mathrmbar$ denote the corotation radius and the bar radius, respectively), than those inferred from observations of local galaxies, a discrepancy known as the fast-bar tension. […]


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DMAJOR: A JWST Legacy Survey of Protoplanetary Disks

Posted by klaurent Peking

Kavli Affiliate: Ruobing Dong | Summary:We propose an infrared imaging survey of resolved protoplanetary disks spanning a range of galactic environments, directly mapping the 3D structure of planet-forming disks across the IR. DMAJOR (Disk Motions and Architectures JWST Observational Reference survey), our legacy survey, will deliver a benchmark sample to reveal structure and connection to […]


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