Lifeboat Foundation

The ability to precisely control and change properties of a photon, including polarization, position in space, and arrival time, gave rise to a wide range of communication technologies we use today, including the Internet. The next generation of photonic technologies, such as photonic quantum networks and computers, will require even more control over the properties of a photon.

One of the hardest properties to change is a photon’s color, otherwise known as its frequency, because changing the frequency of a photon means changing its energy.

Today, most frequency shifters are either too inefficient, losing a lot of light in the conversion process, or they can’t convert light in the gigahertz range, which is where the most important frequencies for communications, computing, and other applications are found.

Scientists from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and collaborators have shown that they can manipulate single skyrmions—tiny magnetic vortices that could be used as computing bits in future ultra-dense information storage devices—using pulses of electric current, at room temperature.

Skyrmions—tiny particles that can be moved under small electric currents several orders lower than those used for driving magnetic domain walls—are being studied in the hope of developing promising applications in data storage devices with low energy consumption. The key to creating spintronics devices is the ability to effectively manipulate, and measure, a single tiny vortex.

Most research to date has focused on the dynamics for skyrmions a micrometer or more in size or skyrmion clusters stabilized below room temperature. For the current research, published in Nature Communications, the researchers used a thin magnetic plate made up of a compound of cobalt, zinc, and manganese, Co₉Zn₉Mn₂, which is known as a chiral-lattice magnet. They directly observed the dynamics of a single skyrmion, with a size of 100 nanometers, at room temperature using Lorentz transmission electron microscopy. They were able to track the motions of the skyrmion and control its Hall motion directions by flipping the magnetic field, when they subjected it to ultrafast pulses of electric current—on the scale of nanoseconds.

The first 256-qubit quantum computer has been announced by startup company QuEra, founded by MIT and Harvard scientists.

QuEra Computing Inc. – a new Boston, Massachusetts-based company – has emerged from stealth mode with $17 million in funding and has completed the assembly of a 256-qubit device. Its funders include Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, Day One Ventures, Frontiers Capital, and the leading tech investors Serguei Beloussov and Paul Maritz. The company recently received a DARPA award, and has already generated $11 million in revenue.

QuEra Computing recently achieved ground-breaking research on neutral atoms, developed at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is being used as the basis for a highly scalable, programmable quantum computer solution. The QuEra team is aiming to build the world’s most powerful quantum computers to take on computational tasks that are currently deemed impossibly hard.

Physicists have created a new ultra-thin, two-layer material with quantum properties that normally require rare earth compounds. This material, which is relatively easy to make and does not contain rare earth metals, could provide a new platform for quantum computing and advance research into unconventional superconductivity and quantum criticality.

The researchers showed that by starting from seemingly common materials, a radically new quantum state of matter can appear. The discovery emerged from their efforts to create a quantum spin liquid which they could use to investigate emergent quantum phenomena such as gauge theory. This involves fabricating a single layer of atomically thin tantalum disulphide, but the process also creates islands that consist of two layers.

Continue reading “A new artificial material mimics quantum-entangled rare earth compounds” »

Bringing global giants into the economic fight.

The world’s biggest chip-making nation is getting serious.

Continue reading “Japan Is Investing Over $5 Billion to Solve the World’s Chip Shortage” »

But, given the rapidly evolving quantum computing landscape, that may not matter.

TSMC getting half their factory paid for by the Japan government shows how concerned governments are getting about the fact that we are down to 3 companies in the world that can make high-end chips. Sony is also contributing $500 million to this factory in addition to the Japan government money.

Japan will provide 600 billion yen ($5.2 billion) as part of its fiscal 2021 supplementary budget to support advanced semiconductor manufacturers.

Samsung is building a new $17 billion factory in Taylor, Texas to produce its processors. While the company is a giant in producing memory chips, it’s currently lagging behind companies like TSMC when it comes to processors.

Circa 2021

By varying the presence of different building blocks in a computational model, Jackson et al. reverse-engineer the architecture for controlled semantic cognition and test this model against evidence from anatomy, neuropsychology and functional imaging.