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Category: computing – Page 180

“Even now, quantum systems can serve as scientific tools,” Oliver Dial, IBM Quantum CTO told IE in an interview. Quantum utility might already be here, but will we soon see a company achieve quantum advantage?

But what exactly does that mean?

Oliver Dial, IBM Fellow and CTO, IBM Quantum walked us through some of these updates. In doing so, he highlighted the fact that “even now, quantum systems can serve as scientific tools to explore utility-scale classes of problems in chemistry, physics, and materials beyond brute force classical simulation of quantum mechanics.”

Continue reading “IBM’s Quantum System Two will help it unlock the ‘full power of quantum computing’” | >

Growing old may come with more aches and pains attached, but new research suggests there’s a bigger picture to look at: by reaching our dotage, we might actually be helping the evolution of our species.

Once assumed to be an inevitable consequence of living in a rough-and-tumble world, aging is now considered something of a mystery. Some species barely age at all, for example. One of the big questions is whether aging is simply a by-product of biology, or something that comes with an evolutionary advantage.

The new research is based on a computer model developed by a team from the HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research in Hungary which suggests old age can be positively selected for in the same way as other traits.

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“Now, it is possible to teleport information so that it never physically travels across the connection — a “Star Trek” technology made real,” said researcher.

Scientists have been making discoveries in the quantum computing realm. In another leap, researchers successfully deployed the principles of quantum physics and transported information in the form of light patterns without physically moving the image itself.

According to a statement by the researchers, scientists demonstrated the quantum transport of the highest dimensionality of information to date. Particularly highlighting, the use of a teleportation-inspired configuration so that the information does not physically travel between the two communicating parties.

Entangling photons and nonlinear optical detector

Continue reading “Quantum-inspired tech teleports data with light, like ‘Star Trek’” | >

Much like the humans that created them, computers find physics hard, but quantum mechanics even harder. But a new technique created by three University of Chicago scientists allows computers to simulate certain challenging quantum mechanical effects in complex electronic materials with far less effort.

By making these simulations more accurate and efficient, the scientists hope the technique could help discover new molecules and materials, such as new types of solar cells or quantum computers.

“This advance holds immense potential for furthering our understanding of molecular phenomena, with significant implications for chemistry, , and related fields,” said scientist Daniel Gibney, a University of Chicago Ph.D. student in chemistry and first author on the paper, published Dec. 14 in Physical Review Letters.

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IBM introduces introducing two new metrics — error per layered gate (EPLG) and CLOPSh — to fully encapsulate the performance of 100+ qubit processors powering this utility-scale era.

Layer fidelity provides a benchmark that encapsulates the entire processor’s ability to run circuits while revealing information about individual qubits, gates, and crosstalk. It expands on a well-established way to benchmark quantum computers, called randomized benchmarking. With randomized benchmarking, we add a set of randomized Clifford group gates (that’s the basic set of gates we use: X, Y, Z, H, SX, CNOT, ECR, CZ, etc.) to the circuit, then run an operation that we know, mathematically, should represent the inverse of the sequence of operations that precede it.

If any of the qubits do not return to their original state by the inverse operation upon measurement, then we know there was an error. We extract a number from this experiment by repeating it multiple times with more and more random gates, plotting on a graph how the errors increase with more gates, fitting an exponential decay to the plot, and using that line to calculate a number between 0 and 1, called the fidelity.

So, layer fidelity gives us a way to combine randomized benchmarking data for larger circuits to tell us things about the whole processor and its subsets of qubits.

Continue reading “Updating how we measure quantum quality and speed” | >

Researchers in China have produced a phenomenon known as the giant skyrmion topological Hall effect in a two-dimensional material using only a small amount of current to manipulate the skyrmions responsible for it. The finding, which a team at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Hubei observed in a ferromagnetic crystal discovered in 2022, comes about thanks to an electronic spin interaction known to stabilize skyrmions. Since the effect was apparent at a wide range of temperatures, including room temperature, it could prove useful for developing two-dimensional topological and spintronic devices such as racetrack memory, logic gates and spin nano-oscillators.

Skyrmions are quasiparticles with a vortex-like structure, and they exist in many materials, notably magnetic thin films and multilayers. They are robust to external perturbations, and at just tens of nanometres across, they are much smaller than the magnetic domains used to encode data in today’s hard disks. That makes them ideal building blocks for future data storage technologies such as “racetrack” memories.

Skyrmions can generally be identified in a material by spotting unusual features (for example, abnormal resistivity) in the Hall effect, which occurs when electrons flow through a conductor in the presence of an applied magnetic field. The magnetic field exerts a sideways force on the electrons, leading to a voltage difference in the conductor that is proportional to the strength of the field. If the conductor has an internal magnetic field or magnetic spin texture, like a skyrmion does, this also affects the electrons. In these circumstances, the Hall effect is known as the skyrmion topological Hall effect (THE).

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Virtual reality, or VR, is not just for fun-filled video games and other visual entertainment. This technology, involving a computer-generated environment with objects that seem real, has found many scientific and educational applications as well.

Sean Preins, a doctoral student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, has created a VR application called VIRTUE, for “Virtual Interactive Reality Toolkit for Understanding the EIC,” that is a game changer in how particle and nuclear physics data can be seen.

Made publicly available on Christmas Day, VIRTUE can be used to visualize experiments and simulated data from the upcoming Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC, a planned major new nuclear physics research facility at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, New York. EIC will explore mysteries of the “strong force” that binds the atomic nucleus together. Electrons and ions, sped up to almost the speed of light, will collide with one another in the EIC.

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