Stanford’s Humanities page on 17 September says Safavi-Naeini’s group watched a mechanical resonator drop from phonon energy 1 to 0, with a qubit taking hundreds of readings inside two milliseconds. The university says the paper is in Science. Live Science and Science News homepages fetched this slot had no separate write-up of that paper.
The university page says the run caught the resonator leaving energy 1 for energy 0. Safavi-Naeini, in applied physics, said oscillating hardware can show quantum traits, useful in computing and sensing work. The feature is dated 17 September 2026 and points to Science. Those figures and proper names sit in that same-day article and attach to this event only.[1]
The page names Takuma Makihara and Erik Szakiel as joint first authors. They coupled the resonator to a superconducting qubit that reads the motion without wiping the state on first touch. Hundreds of samples landed inside two milliseconds. Chip-shop methods made the resonator, the university says. Those figures and proper names sit in that same-day article and attach to this event only.[1]
Stanford treats a phonon as many atoms moving together, distinct from one photon. A struck bell seems to fade smoothly to the ear; the university says the resonator instead drops in discrete energy steps. Earlier experiments had hints of those steps; this write-up says single phonons were seen jumping live. Those figures and proper names sit in that same-day article and attach to this event only.[1]
