Forty years ago, mathematician Marek Kac asked the theoretical question, "Can one hear the shape of a drum?". Hari Manoharan from Stanford Physics Faculty investigated with his students the drum question in the quantum realm, where it could have an effect on real nano-electronic systems.

Physical Review Letters celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this year. A number of famous PRL papers from the past half century are being made available on the following website.

D-Wave Systems has attracted a lot of criticism from computer scientists over claims it has developed a way to create a marketable quantum computer. But whether its technology will ever be viable outside of a laboratory setting or not, investors seem to be eating it up.

Researchers from the University of Heidelberg in Germany, the University of Science and Technology of China, and the Atomic Institute of the Austrian Universities in Austria created an experiment in which a quantum bit of information is transported across a distance of seven meters and briefly stored in memory. This is the first time that both quantum memory and teleportation, as the information transfer is known, have been demonstrated in a single experiment.