Why Quantum Physics is Weird - and stunningly useful You are not a physicist, but always wanted to get a glimpse of what quantum mechanics actually means, and why it is useful? Then this article, recently published in Northwestern's Science in Society online magazine, could be just the right thing for you.

TED talk by Scott Aaronson Ready for what is easily the most entertaining 15-minute whirlwind tour of quantum computation? - Scott Aaronson (Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT) not only explains what it is, and why we are excited about it, but also makes the case that research in this direction could lead to substantial progress in understanding quantum mechanics itself.

How to break time-reversal symmetry in a photon lattice Imagine watching a movie of a planet orbiting its sun, or a close-up of the impact between two billiard balls. Generally, deciding whether the movie is running forward or backward can be impossible -- a manifestation of time-reversal symmetry, which is directly built into the majority of physics laws of physics. One convenient way to break this symmetry inside the lab (without invoking dissipation), is to switch on an external magnetic field. If the object of interest possesses electric charge, the Lorentz force will bend its trajectory into a circular path with sense of rotation fixed by the sign of the charge. Hence, one can tell if the movie runs backwards by observing whether the sense of rotation matches the charge sign -- time-reversal symmetry is broken. Condensed matter systems with broken time-reversal symmetry display some of the most astonishing properties, such as fractionalization of charge in the quantum Hall effect. Recently, ideas how to make photons interact with each other in qubit-resonator arrays have opened the door to strongly-correlated many-body systems composed of photons. Since photons are charge neutral, however, switching on a magnetic field is not sufficient for breaking time-reversal symmetry. In a recent paper, we show how superconducting circuits can provide photons with an artificial gauge charge, and thus allow breaking of time-reversal symmetry - a trick that may open the path to observe the fractional quantum Hall effect in a strongly correlated system of photons.
Read the full paper in Phys. Rev. A and the Viewpoint highlighting it in Physics.