The work is spread across three publications: one paper already published in The Alberta Law Review and two forthcoming articles in The Canadian Bar Review and The Dalhousie Law Journal. Together, they trace a persistent lag between what scientists have learned about the limits of certain forensic methods and what courts continue to allow as evidence. Gordon’s central argument is straightforward: when someone’s liberty is at stake in a criminal trial, a technique that has been used for decades should not be taken for granted, especially where the underlying science has never been rigorously validated. Her stated hope is that the research will help judges and lawyers understand what these techniques can and cannot actually tell them, so that forensic evidence is presented in a way that accurately reflects its scientific support.

The most familiar of the three techniques is forensic ballistics, in which bullets and cartridge cases recovered from crime scenes are compared with test firings from suspect firearms. Examiners look for matching striations and impressions transferred from the weapon’s barrel and breech mechanism, and they routinely testify that a bullet came from a specific gun to the practical exclusion of all others. Ballistics evidence has been accepted in Canadian courts for more than a century, and it has played an important role in securing convictions across North America. Yet Gordon found that the scientific research does not support the level of confidence with which ballistics experts often testify. In practical testing, examiners misidentified bullets 37 per cent of the time — an error rate that, if replicated in casework, would represent a serious threat to the integrity of convictions built on such testimony.

The legal landscape around firearms identification may be beginning to shift. In 2023, a Chicago court became the first in the United States to bar the use of ballistics-matching evidence in a criminal case, a decision that signaled growing judicial willingness to question methods once considered untouchable. In Canada, however, Gordon’s forensic firearms article documents that the evidence continues to be routinely admitted, largely on the strength of precedent rather than fresh validation studies. Her papers call on judges to exercise their gatekeeping role more actively, ensuring that experts do not stray beyond what the underlying science can support and that claims of certainty are tempered by the documented error rates now emerging from the research literature.

The second technique under scrutiny is the use of drug-detection dogs, commonly known as sniffer dogs. In Canada, police may deploy such dogs to conduct a search where they have reasonable suspicion that the search will reveal evidence of a drug offence — a deliberately lower threshold than what is ordinarily required for a warrantless search. The Supreme Court of Canada has justified this exception on the grounds that sniffer-dog searches are minimally intrusive, narrowly targeted and highly accurate. Gordon’s review of the scientific evidence that has accumulated since the Court’s most recent rulings in 2013 indicates that these assumptions no longer hold up. In her assessment, the dogs are not nearly as reliable as many courts appear to believe, and the searches that follow their alerts can in fact be quite invasive.

The empirical record on detection dogs is sobering. One Australian study found that drugs were not discovered following nearly 75 per cent of police dog alerts, meaning that three out of four alerts led to searches that turned up nothing. Dogs may alert in the absence of drugs for a variety of reasons, including poor training, residual odours left behind from earlier contact with narcotics, and even odours associated with some common baking ingredients. Handler influence adds another layer of unreliability: a dog can be unintentionally cued by its handler, for example when the handler slows down or behaves differently near a person they already suspect. In such cases, the alert may reflect the officer’s expectations rather than the dog’s independent detection of contraband, undermining the very premise of using the animal as an objective investigative tool.

The consequences of unreliable alerts extend beyond wasted police time. The searches that follow a dog alert can cause fear, anxiety, anger and humiliation for the people subjected to them, and Gordon notes that they may have a particularly negative impact on racialized people, who are disproportionately stopped and searched. Among the reforms she proposes are clearer standards for the training, certification and performance monitoring of detection dogs, so that their real-world accuracy can be measured and audited rather than assumed. She also argues that the same legal standard that generally applies to other warrantless searches should apply to sniffer-dog searches, removing the special exemption that currently allows them to proceed on mere reasonable suspicion.

The third discipline examined is bloodstain pattern analysis, which involves examining the shapes, sizes and locations of bloodstains at a crime scene in order to reconstruct the physical events that produced them — the direction of a blow, the position of a victim, the type of force involved. Canadian courts have long accepted the technique as a physical science, but Gordon’s historical digging reveals an origin story that bears little resemblance to laboratory science. The discipline grew out of the work of a chemist experimenting in his basement, who later helped establish the field’s scientific journal and its early textbooks. Those institutional trappings gave the emerging field many of the outward markers of a scientific discipline, even as its foundational claims went largely untested. Practitioners today often invoke concepts from fluid dynamics when explaining their conclusions, despite frequently having little or no formal training in physics.

The rigorous studies that have begun to emerge paint a troubling picture of the discipline’s accuracy. One study found that analysts correctly classified bloodstain patterns only about 70 per cent of the time on rigid surfaces, and just 62 per cent of the time on fabrics — performance levels that fall well short of what one would expect from a settled physical science. Another study found that different analysts frequently reached different conclusions when examining the very same evidence, raising questions about the consistency and reproducibility of the method. Additional research showed that contextual information could bias examiners: what analysts were told about the case or the crime scene could influence the conclusions they drew, a form of cognitive contamination that is well documented in other forensic disciplines but particularly damaging in a field that claims to read physical evidence objectively.

Taken together, the three papers deliver a coordinated call for reform rather than a blanket rejection of forensic practice. Gordon’s argument is not that these techniques are worthless, but that their reliability has been overstated and their limitations under-communicated to the juries and judges who depend on them. The research urges courts to more actively exercise their gatekeeping role by ensuring that forensic evidence is genuinely reliable before it reaches a jury, and it calls for greater scientific literacy among lawyers and judges so that cross-examinations and admissibility hearings can probe expert claims with the depth they deserve. The broader lesson resonates well beyond the three disciplines studied: courtroom longevity is not a measure of scientific validity, and techniques that have gone unchallenged for a century deserve the same empirical scrutiny as any new method entering the witness box. As the gap between forensic practice and forensic science continues to close, the cases that hinge on a dog’s alert, a bloodstain’s shape or a bullet’s striations may look very different in the years ahead.

Subject of Research: Scientific reliability of sniffer dogs, bloodstain pattern analysis and ballistics evidence in criminal courts

Article Title: Sniffer dogs, bloodstain patterns and ballistics evidence under the microscope in new studies

Article References: Sniffer dogs, bloodstain patterns and ballistics evidence under the microscope in new studies. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: forensic science, sniffer dogs, ballistics, bloodstain pattern analysis, criminal law, evidence reliability, courtroom admissibility, police searches, error rates, expert testimony, University of British Columbia, judicial gatekeeping

The dominant technology in the current generation of quantum computers relies on superconducting circuits, tiny electrical oscillators that, when cooled sufficiently, carry current without resistance. These devices have enabled impressive demonstrations of quantum computation, but they come with a fundamental weakness. Superconducting qubits are exquisitely sensitive to electromagnetic noise and to stray electrical charges, the kind of static electricity that makes hair cling to a balloon on a dry day. Even minuscule perturbations of this sort can scramble the delicate quantum states that encode information, introducing errors that must be corrected through elaborate overhead. As engineers attempt to pack more and more qubits onto a chip, keeping these error rates under control becomes one of the central bottlenecks to scaling the machines up.

The Surrey team, drawn from the university’s Quantum Sciences Group, has proposed a radically different approach to quantum hardware. Their proposed device, named the Superfluid Helium Oscillator Quantum, or SHOQ, would store and manipulate quantum information in quantized oscillations within superfluid helium-3. Because the medium is electrically charge-neutral, the qubit is naturally immune to many of the electromagnetic disturbances and stray charges that torment conventional superconducting devices. According to the team’s theoretical analysis, this intrinsic protection could translate into error rates roughly 100 times lower than those of standard superconducting qubits, a margin that would substantially ease the burden of quantum error correction in a large-scale machine.

The concept is, the researchers note, the first reported design for a qubit based on superfluid helium. While the individual physical ingredients have long been studied in isolation, the Surrey group is the first to assemble them into a coherent microfluidic device architecture and to work out the specific parameters and specifications needed for the device to function as a qubit. Dr Priya Sharma, Daphne Jackson Fellow in Hybrid Quantum Systems at the University of Surrey’s School of Mathematics and Physics and lead author of the study, emphasized that the work is an educated design grounded in established physics rather than a speculative sketch. The mathematics, she explained, indicates that the device should work as intended, and the crucial next step is to fabricate a prototype and test the predictions experimentally.

The underlying physics is as fascinating as the engineering ambition. Helium-3, the lighter isotope of helium, becomes a superfluid at temperatures only a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. In this state, the liquid flows with zero viscosity and exhibits quantum behavior on a macroscopic scale, with collective oscillations whose energy levels are quantized just like those of atoms. The SHOQ proposal taps into these quantized mechanical vibrations as the carrier of quantum information. Because these oscillations involve neutral atoms rather than moving charges, they do not couple strongly to the electric fields and charge fluctuations that are ubiquitous in solid-state environments, offering what physicists call a quieter platform for preserving delicate quantum states.

An especially significant feature of the proposal is that the SHOQ device is not intended to replace existing quantum technology outright. The paper outlines how the superfluid-based qubit could be coupled with current superconducting quantum hardware, raising the possibility that the two technologies might operate side by side within a single larger quantum system. Dr Eran Ginossar, Associate Professor at the University of Surrey’s Department of Physics and Advanced Technology Institute and co-author of the study, argued that no single qubit technology needs to do everything. Combining different quantum platforms, he suggested, could allow engineers to exploit the particular strengths of each, and superfluid helium offers a fundamentally new type of quantum hardware to explore. If the predicted performance can be demonstrated in the laboratory, such devices could eventually work alongside superconducting systems as components of hybrid architectures.

One potential application highlighted by the team is quantum memory. In a future hybrid computer, a version of the SHOQ device could serve as a long-lived repository for quantum information, storing fragile states while a separate processor built from different hardware performs calculations. This division of labor mirrors the separation between memory and processing units in classical computers and could prove decisive in the quest for machines that are both powerful and reliable. The low sensitivity of charge-neutral superfluid helium to environmental noise makes it a natural candidate for the memory role, where preservation of quantum coherence over time is the paramount requirement.

The Surrey effort is not proceeding in isolation. The work was carried out in collaboration with Professor Jens Koch of Northwestern University in the United States, a physicist who was among the researchers behind the development of the transmon, the superconducting qubit design that has become the workhorse of much of today’s quantum computing industry. That pedigree gives the new proposal considerable weight, since the transmon itself succeeded by engineering away sensitivity to charge noise, and the SHOQ concept extends the same philosophy into an entirely different physical medium. The involvement of researchers with hands-on experience in bringing a qubit design from theory to widespread laboratory use may help the new idea avoid some of the pitfalls that accompany novel hardware concepts.

The team is now turning its attention to building a prototype to determine whether the theoretical predictions survive contact with reality, an effort supported by an IAA Commercialisation Fellowship awarded to Dr Sharma. The cryogenic challenge is formidable but not unprecedented: although the SHOQ device would need to operate at extremely low temperatures, conditions of exactly this kind have already been achieved experimentally in superfluid helium-3 research laboratories around the world. That existing experimental infrastructure means the path from concept to prototype does not require inventing entirely new cryogenic techniques, only adapting well-established ones to a new microfluidic device. If the prototype confirms the predicted hundredfold reduction in error rates, superfluid helium could move from the margins of low-temperature physics to the center of the conversation about how to scale quantum computers, adding a genuinely new and remarkably quiet material platform to the engineer’s toolkit.

The choice of helium-3 rather than the more common helium-4 is central to the proposal. Helium-4 atoms are bosons and form a superfluid at around two kelvin, but helium-3 atoms are fermions, which means they cannot condense directly. Instead, at temperatures a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, pairs of helium-3 atoms bind together in a manner analogous to the Cooper pairs of electrons in a superconductor, and it is these paired atoms that flow without viscosity. This pairing mechanism gives superfluid helium-3 a rich internal structure, including multiple distinct superfluid phases, and endows the liquid with collective modes whose quantum properties are exceptionally well characterized by decades of low-temperature research.

The quantized vibrations that the SHOQ design would exploit belong to a broader family of mechanical quantum systems that physicists have been developing for years. Researchers have previously succeeded in cooling micromechanical drums and membranes to their quantum ground states and entangling them with light, establishing that mechanical oscillators can genuinely store and process quantum information. What has been missing is a mechanical oscillator whose intrinsic noise performance rivals that of the best electronic qubits, and the Surrey team argues that a charge-neutral superfluid medium could supply exactly that, since acoustic modes in helium couple only weakly to the solid-state defects and two-level fluctuators that degrade fabricated resonators on chips.

The significance of a hundredfold reduction in error rates becomes clearer when viewed through the lens of quantum error correction. Theoretical studies of fault-tolerant computation indicate that below a critical error threshold, adding more physical qubits suppresses logical errors exponentially, but the overhead involved is enormous when physical error rates sit near the threshold. Lowering the physical error rate by two orders of magnitude would reduce the number of physical qubits needed per logical qubit by a comparable factor, potentially shrinking the machine required for useful fault-tolerant computation from millions of qubits to a far more manageable scale.

The hybrid vision also echoes patterns from other parts of the quantum technology landscape. Trapped-ion systems already combine different species of ions, using one type for memory and another for logic, while superconducting processors have been coupled to spin defects in diamond and to atomic ensembles acting as quantum memories. The SHOQ concept would extend this modular philosophy to a liquid platform, connecting a microfluidic cell through microwave circuitry to conventional superconducting control electronics. The paper’s authors suggest that such interfaces, rather than any single monolithic technology, may ultimately define how large quantum computers are assembled.

Considerable uncertainty remains, as is inevitable for a purely theoretical design. Real devices must contend with damping of acoustic modes at their boundaries, thermal excitations that must be filtered out, and the practical difficulty of coupling a liquid oscillator strongly enough to microwave circuits to allow fast quantum gates. The prototype planned under the fellowship is intended to probe precisely these questions, and the coming experimental results will determine whether the elegant mathematics translates into working hardware.

Subject of Research: A conceptual superfluid helium-3 based qubit design for fault-tolerant quantum computing

Article Title: Superfluid-based qubit design could be key to scaling up quantum computers

Article References: Superfluid-based qubit design could be key to scaling up quantum computers. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: superfluid helium, qubit, quantum computing, error rates, superconducting qubits, SHOQ device, quantum memory, hybrid quantum systems, npj Quantum Information, University of Surrey, helium-3, microfluidics