By Chuck Brooks
The quantum computing decryption threat will be here soon enough, and it is time for businesses, organizations and governments to protect their data for that inevitability.
Category: computing – Page 373
Researchers have developed an extremely thin chip with an integrated photonic circuit that could be used to exploit the so-called terahertz gap – lying between 0.3-30THz in the electromagnetic spectrum – for spectroscopy and imaging.
This gap is currently something of a technological dead zone, describing frequencies that are too fast for today’s electronics and telecommunications devices, but too slow for optics and imaging applications.
However, the scientists’ new chip now enables them to produce terahertz waves with tailored frequency, wavelength, amplitude and phase. Such precise control could enable terahertz radiation to be harnessed for next-generation applications in both the electronic and optical realms.
After the introduction of the fifth-generation technology standard for broadband cellular networks (5G), engineers worldwide are now working on systems that could further speed up communications. The next-generation wireless communication networks, from 6G onward, will require technologies that enable communications at sub-terahertz and terahertz frequency bands (i.e., from 100GHz to 10THz).
While several systems have been proposed for enabling communication at these frequency bands specifically for personal use and local area networks, some applications would benefit from longer communication distances. So far, generating high-power ultrabroadband signals that contain information and can travel long distances has been challenging.
Researchers at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Northeastern University and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) have recently developed a system that could enable multi-gigabit-per-second (Gbps) communications in the sub-terahertz frequency band over several kilometers. This system, presented in a paper in Nature Electronics, utilizes on-chip power-combining frequency multiplier designs based on Schottky diodes, semiconducting diodes formed by the junction of a semiconductor and a metal, developed at NASA JPL.
Why the recent surge in jaw-dropping announcements? Why are neutral atoms seeming to leapfrog other qubit modalities? Keep reading to find out.
The table below highlights the companies working to make Quantum Computers using neutral atoms as qubits:
And as an added feature I am writing this post to be “entangled” with the posts of Brian Siegelwax, a respected colleague and quantum algorithm designer. My focus will be on the hardware and corporate details about the companies involved, while Brian’s focus will be on actual implementation of the platforms and what it is like to program on their devices. Unfortunately, most of the systems created by the companies noted in this post are not yet available (other than QuEra’s), so I will update this post along with the applicable hot links to Brian’s companion articles, as they become available.
True to Moore’s Law, the number of transistors on a microchip has doubled every year since the 1960s. But this trajectory is predicted to soon plateau because silicon—the backbone of modern transistors—loses its electrical properties once devices made from this material dip below a certain size.
Enter 2D materials—delicate, two-dimensional sheets of perfect crystals that are as thin as a single atom. At the scale of nanometers, 2D materials can conduct electrons far more efficiently than silicon. The search for next-generation transistor materials therefore has focused on 2D materials as potential successors to silicon.
But before the electronics industry can transition to 2D materials, scientists have to first find a way to engineer the materials on industry-standard silicon wafers while preserving their perfect crystalline form. And MIT engineers may now have a solution.
Researchers from the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology have presented the first experimental observation of Cherenkov radiation confined in two dimensions. The results represent a new record in electron-radiation coupling strength, revealing the quantum properties of the radiation.
Cherenkov radiation is a unique physical phenomenon, which for many years has been used in medical imaging and in particle detection applications, as well as in laser-driven electron accelerators. The breakthrough achieved by the Technion researchers links this phenomenon to future photonic quantum computing applications and free-electron quantum light sources.
The study, which was published in Physical Review X, was headed by Ph.D. students Yuval Adiv and Shai Tsesses from the Technion, together with Hao Hu from the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (today professor at Nanjing university in China). It was supervised by Prof. Ido Kaminer and Prof. Guy Bartal of the Technion, in collaboration with colleagues from China: Prof. Hongsheng Chen, and Prof. Xiao Lin from Zhejiang University.
“This will change the paradigm of Moore’s Law.”
Moore’s Law predicted that the number of transistors on a microchip would double every year after 1960, though that rate would eventually hit a wall due to the fact silicone loses electrical properties past a certain size.
One possible solution comes in the form of 2D materials, also known as single-layer materials. These incredibly delicate two-dimensional sheets of perfect crystals are only a single atom thin. Crucially, at the nanometer scale, they can conduct electrons far more efficiently than silicon.
NOIRLab.
The image, taken by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the NSF’s NOIRLab’s Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, is viewable online. Anyone can zoom in on the ten terabytes of data made up of 21,400 individual exposures.
Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.
For years, encryption has played a core role in securing enterprise data. However, as quantum computers become more advanced, traditional encryption solutions and public-key cryptography (PKC) standards, which enterprise and consumer vendors rely on to secure their products, are at serious risk of decryption.
Today, IBM Institute for Business Value issued a new report titled Security in the Quantum Era, examining the reality of quantum risk and the need for enterprise adoption of quantum-safe capabilities to safeguard the integrity of critical applications and infrastructure as the risk of decryption increases.
One question for Paul Sutter, author of “The Remarkable Emptiness of Existence,” an article in Nautilus this month. Sutter is a theoretical cosmologist at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University, where he studies cosmic voids, maps the leftover light from the big bang, and develops new techniques for finding the first stars to appear in the cosmos.
What is our universe expanding into?
That’s a great question. The answer, though, is that it’s not a great question. It’s a little tricky, so let me walk you through it. Yes, our universe is expanding. Our universe has no center and no edge. The Big Bang didn’t happen in one location in space. The Big Bang happened everywhere in the cosmos simultaneously. The Big Bang was not a point in space. It was a point in time. It exists in all of our paths.