In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, I chat with the winners of the Physics World 2021 Breakthrough of the Year award.

Earlier this week, this year’s award was given to two independent teams for entangling two macroscopic vibrating drumheads, thereby advancing our understanding of the divide between quantum and classical systems.

Appearing in this podcast are Mika Sillanpää and Laure Mercier de Lepinay representing the team from Finland’s Aalto University and the University of New South Wales, Australia. Also on hand are John Teufel and Shlomi Kotler, who led the team at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

This quartet of applied physicists explain the motivation behind their experiments and talk about the challenges of entangling objects that are about ten microns across. They also chat about possible applications for vibrating drumheads such as quantum sensing and quantum networks.

• In last week’s podcast Physics World editors chatted about our Top Ten Breakthroughs of 2021, which served as the shortlist for the Breakthrough of the Year award
  

Physics World‘s Breakthrough of the Year coverage is supported by Bluefors, a leading supplier of cryogen-free dilution refrigerator measurement systems with a strong focus on the quantum computing and information community. Our aim is to deliver the most reliable and easy to operate systems on the market which are of the highest possible quality.