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Category: computing – Page 134

A recent study by scientists from the University of California, Irvine and Los Alamos National Laboratory, published in Nature Communications, reveals a breakthrough method for transforming everyday materials, such as glass, into materials scientists can use to make quantum computers.

“The materials we made are substances that exhibit unique electrical or quantum properties because of their specific atomic shapes or structures,” said Luis A. Jauregui, professor of physics & astronomy at UCI and lead author of the new paper. “Imagine if we could transform glass, typically considered an insulating material, and convert it into efficient conductors akin to copper. That’s what we’ve done.”

Conventional computers use silicon as a conductor, but silicon has limits. Quantum computers stand to help bypass these limits, and methods like those described in the new study will help quantum computers become an everyday reality.

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The first person with Neuralink’s computer-linked chip implanted in the surface of their brain showed off their “telekinetic” online chess-playing skills while discussing the “life-changing” procedure for the first time in a surprise livestream.

Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old with quadriplegia (or paralysis that affects the body from the neck down), volunteered to have the device implanted as part of Neuralink’s ongoing trial of the technology. Until now, his identity had remained a closely guarded secret.

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The first patient of Elon Musk’s Neuralink has been presented to the public. Noland Arbaugh had all but given up playing Civilization VI ever since a diving accident dislocated two vertebrae in his cervical spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed from the shoulders down.

When confined to his wheel chair, the 29-year-old American is totally dependent on the care of his parents, who need to shift his weight ever few hours to avoid pressure sores from sitting too long in the same position.

Moving a cursor on a display furthermore required the use of a mouth stick, a specialized assistive device used by quadriplegics.

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From NVIDIA efficient video diffusion models via content-frame motion-latent decomposition.

From NVIDIA

Efficient video diffusion models via content-frame motion-latent decomposition.

Video diffusion models have recently made great progress in generation quality, but are still limited by the high memory and computational requirements.

Continue reading “Paper page — Efficient Video Diffusion Models via Content-Frame Motion-Latent Decomposition” | >

Loop-shaped structures called vortex rings are remarkably stable and are seen throughout nature, appearing as bubble rings blown by dolphins and smoke rings emitted by erupting volcanoes. Recently, scientists observed vortex rings made from electron spins in magnetic materials. These structures have properties that make them attractive for use in energy-efficient data storage and processing. Now Yizhou Liu and Naoto Nagaosa at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan have proposed a way to create such magnetic vortex rings on demand [1].

Liu and Nagaosa considered a nanometer-scale cylinder made of a “chiral” magnetic material, one whose magnetic structure differs from that of its mirror image. The magnetic vortex rings that form in such a system have more diverse topologies and greater stability than those that form in other systems. In numerical simulations, the researchers injected a pulse of electric current into their chiral magnetic cylinder through a circular trench etched into the cylinder’s top surface. They then studied how the current pulse affected the material’s spin configurations.

Liu and Nagaosa observed a chain of interconnected magnetic vortex rings form along the length of the cylinder. Varying the duration and amplitude of the injected current pulse, they were able to control the topology of the vortex rings and their connections. The researchers say that the next step is for experimentalists to replicate these findings in the lab. They also suggest that their technique could be adapted to produce magnetic vortex rings in other physical systems, such as liquid crystals and Bose-Einstein condensates.

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To operate reliably a quantum computer needs to correct the errors introduced into the system by noise in its hardware. Error-correction approaches typically use “logical” qubits, which are qubits made up of as many as a few thousand “physical” qubits. Logical qubits are much less error prone than physical qubits, but the hardware overhead complicates the realization of fault-tolerant quantum computers based on this approach. Now a team led by Harry Levine and Oskar Painter of the Amazon Web Services Center for Quantum Computing in California has demonstrated a new qubit design with built-in error-detection ability [1]. Painter says this qubit could serve as an alternative building block for error-correcting schemes, substantially reducing complexity.

The demonstrated qubit is an “erasure” qubit, one in which the most likely error type involves the loss, or erasure, of the qubit’s state [2]. This error is easier to spot and correct for than other qubit errors, such as those that flip the qubit’s state. Researchers have previously demonstrated erasure qubits made from single atoms. The new study makes the leap to transmons, the superconducting qubit used in the quantum processors developed by Google and IBM.

The erasure qubit of Levine, Painter, and colleagues contains three transmons. Two of the transmons are coupled together and store a qubit’s worth of information in a single, shared microwave photon. The third transmon reveals the loss of the photon—the erasure—through a shift in its operating frequency. The researchers show that in this qubit erasure errors are the dominant error type and can be detected in real time. The researchers now plan to use their new qubit to build logic gates and error-correcting circuits.

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