Quantum Campus shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,900 researchers, we publish on Fridays and are always looking for news from across the country. Want to see your work featured? Submit your ideas to the editor.

An international team led by the University of Pittsburgh’s Sergey Frolov published an analytical review of four highly touted publications in experimental topological physics that seemed to confirm theory on given topics. In each of the cases, they performed replication studies that offered alternative explanations of similar data — disputing the original publications’ claims that they had identified “smoking gun” signatures of new topological regimes.

The paper argues that future studies should explore a broader parameter space rather than narrowing to the range where a signature is expected. They also recommend sharing more data so that alternative explanations can be explored with colleagues earlier in the process, and they discuss the difficulties they faced in getting their replication studies published, which took more than two years.

This work was published in Science. An editor at Science also wrote a brief reflection on the findings and recommendations.

Engineers at the University of Colorado, University of Arizona, and Sandia National Lab demonstrated a surface acoustic wave phonon laser. Other surface acoustic wave devices today require two different chips and a power source. The team’s, however, works using a single chip and can potentially produce waves at 10 to 100s of times higher frequencies using only a battery, according to an announcement from CU Boulder.

This work was published earlier this week in Nature.

Scientists at the University of Waterloo and Kyushu University proposed a method of encrypted cloning of unknown quantum states, offering a “work around” of the no-cloning theorem of quantum information established nearly 45 years ago.

“It turns out that if we encrypt the quantum information as we copy it, we can make as many copies as we like. This method is able to bypass the no-cloning theorem because after one picks and decrypts one of the encrypted copies, the decryption key automatically expires, that is the decryption key is a one-time-use key. But even a one-time key enables important applications, such as redundant and encrypted quantum cloud services,” Kyushu University’s Koji Yamaguchi said.

This work was published in Physics Review Letters.

Quantum Campus is edited by Bill Bell, a science writer and marketing consultant who has covered physics and high-performance computing for more than 25 years. Disclosure statement.