Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

New relay architecture based on a quantum dot single-photon source enables secure communication across 300 km

Quantum technologies are systems that can compute data, sense their surrounding environment or perform other functions leveraging quantum mechanical effects. Connecting these technologies over long distances has so far proved challenging, as quantum information can easily become scrambled or destroyed following decoherence resulting from the systems’ interactions with their surrounding environment.

Over the past few years, and engineers have been trying to devise effective techniques to reliably establish , infrastructures that allow to travel between different devices.

The realization of these networks requires so-called quantum relays, intermediate stations that can forward and redistribute entangled states, extending the distances across which devices can communicate.

Analog computing platform uses synthetic frequency domain to boost scalability

Analog computers, computing systems that represent data as continuous physical quantities, such as voltage, frequency or vibrations, can be significantly more energy-efficient than digital computers, which represent data as binary states (i.e., 0s and 1s). However, upscaling analog computing platforms is often difficult, as their underlying components can behave differently in larger systems.

Researchers at Virginia Tech, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Texas at Dallas have developed a new synthetic domain approach, a technique to encode information at different frequencies in a single device that could enable upscaling analog computers without the need to add more physical components.

Their proposed approach, outlined in a paper published in Nature Electronics, was used to develop a compact and highly efficient analog computing platform based on lithium niobate integrated nonlinear phononics.

Cathode overcomes key challenges in water electrolysis for clean energy

A new kind of cathode that is more resistant to power fluctuations can render (sea)water electrolysis more sustainable, cost-effective, and more suited for coupling with intermittent renewable energy in real-world applications, according to scientists at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK).

Hybridization of interlayer excitons in bilayer semiconductor hints at many-body state

Excitons, bound states between an electron (i.e., a negatively charged particle) and a hole (i.e., the absence of an electron) in materials, are a key focus of condensed matter physics studies. These bound states can give rise to interesting and uncommon quantum physical effects, which could be leveraged to develop optoelectronic and quantum technologies.

Over the past few years, physicists have observed a particular type of excitons, known as interlayer excitons, in various materials with two layers (i.e., bilayer materials). An interlayer is a bound state between an electron and a hole that reside in two different layers of a material.

Researchers at Harvard University and other institutes recently observed an unconventional hybridization between interlayer excitons in a bilayer semiconductor, comprised of two layers of molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂).

Scientists find proof that an asteroid hit the North Sea more than 43 million years ago

A decades-long scientific debate over the origins of the Silverpit Crater in the southern North Sea has been resolved. New evidence confirms that it was caused by an asteroid or comet impact about 43–46 million years ago.

A team led by Dr. Uisdean Nicholson from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh used , microscopic analysis of rock cuttings and numerical models to provide the strongest evidence yet that Silverpit is one of Earth’s rare impact craters. Their findings are published in Nature Communications.

The Silverpit Crater sits 700 meters below the seabed in the North Sea, about 80 miles off the coast of Yorkshire.

New, improved 3,000-qubit neutral atom array system reloads atoms continuously for more than two hours

The neutral atom array architecture for quantum computing has been rapidly advancing over the last several years, and a recent study published in Nature has just revealed another step forward for this technology. The team of Harvard researchers involved in this study have engineered a 3,000-qubit neutral atom array system capable of operating continuously for more than two hours, which goes far beyond typical trap lifetimes of only about 60 seconds.

Typically, neutral atom array systems arrange , like rubidium, in an array using highly focused , called optical tweezers. The are arranged and held under vacuum conditions and then used as qubits to perform and other operations. However, the procedure results in the loss of some atoms.

“An outstanding challenge associated with these systems involves atom loss, originating from errors in entangling operations, state-readout, and finite trap lifetime. Atom losses necessitate pulsed operation which limits the performance of these quantum systems, including the circuit depth of quantum computation, accuracy of , and the rate of entanglement generation in quantum networking protocols,” the study authors explain.

The gravitino: A new candidate for dark matter

Dark matter remains one of the biggest mysteries in fundamental physics. Many theoretical proposals (axions, WIMPs) and 40 years of extensive experimental searches have failed to provide any explanation of the nature of dark matter.

Several years ago, in a theory unifying and gravity, new, radically different candidates were proposed: superheavy charged gravitinos.

Now, a paper published in Physical Review Research by scientists from the University of Warsaw and Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics shows how new underground detectors, in particular the JUNO detector starting soon to take data, even though designed for neutrino physics, are also extremely well suited to eventually detect charged dark matter gravitinos.

/* */