Robust navigation is both critical for survival and dauntingly complex: Think of the speed and agility of an airborne fly. A multidisciplinary team of researchers led by Itai Cohen, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, will use the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to study how the brain forms a coherent representation from multisensory information, corrects for errors from perturbations and generates robust behaviors.

“Measuring the position of a quantum particle changes its momentum and vice versa. Similarly, for qubits there are quantities which change one another when they are measured. We find that certain random sequences of these incompatible measurements lead to the formation of a quantum spin-glass,” said Erich Mueller, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). “One implication of our work is that some types of information are automatically protected in quantum algorithms which share the features of our model.”

In numerous strange metals, the characteristic time between electron collisions, with each other and against anything that they encounter in their path, is set by the Planck’s constant and the temperature, said Debanjan Chowdhury, assistant professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences and a co-author of the paper. A vast majority of the known high-temperature superconductors, when heated above their superconducting temperature, exhibit this property. This is why it has been believed for a while that the clue to understanding the origin of high-temperature superconductivity lies in understanding the common thread across these materials that leads to this universal Planckian time scale.