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Category: computing – Page 487

Facebook has just announced it’s going to hire 10,000 people in Europe to develop the “metaverse”.

This is a concept which is being talked up by some as the future of the internet. But what exactly is it?

**What is the metaverse?
**
To the outsider, it may look like a souped-up version of Virtual Reality (VR) — but some people think the metaverse could be the future of the internet.

In fact, the belief is that it could be to VR what the modern smartphone is to the first clunky mobile phones of the 1980s.

Instead of being on a computer, in the metaverse you might use a headset to enter a virtual world connecting all sorts of digital environments.

Unlike current VR, which is mostly used for gaming, this virtual world could be used for practically anything — work, play, concerts, cinema trips — or just hanging out.

Most people envision that you would have a 3D avatar — a representation of yourself — as you use it.

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Estimate measures information encoded in particles, opens door to practical experiments.

Researchers have long suspected a connection between information and the physical universe, with various paradoxes and thought experiments used to explore how or why information could be encoded in physical matter. The digital age propelled this field of study, suggesting that solving these research questions could have tangible applications across multiple branches of physics and computing.

In AIP Advances, from AIP Publishing, a University of Portsmouth researcher attempts to shed light on exactly how much of this information is out there and presents a numerical estimate for the amount of encoded information in all the visible matter in the universe — approximately 6 times 10 to the power of 80 bits of information. While not the first estimate of its kind, this study’s approach relies on information theory.

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The ATLAS collaboration is breathing new life into its LHC Run 2 dataset, recorded from 2015 to 2018. Physicists will be reprocessing the entire dataset – nearly 18 PB of collision data – using an updated version of the ATLAS offline analysis software (Athena). Not only will this improve ATLAS physics measurements and searches, it will also position the collaboration well for the upcoming challenges of Run 3 and beyond.

Athena converts raw signals recorded by the ATLAS experiment into more simplified datasets for physicists to study. Its new-and-improved version has been in development for several years and includes multi-threading capabilities, more complex physics-analysis functions and improved memory consumption.

“Our aim was to significantly reduce the amount of memory needed to run the software, widen the types of physics analyses it could do and – most critically – allow current and future ATLAS datasets to be analysed together,” says Zach Marshall, ATLAS Computing Coordinator. “These improvements are a key part of our preparations for future high-intensity operations of the LHC – in particular the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) run beginning around 2,028 which will see ATLAS’s computing resources in extremely high demand.”

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Earlier this month D-Wave Systems, the quantum computing pioneer that has long championed quantum annealing-based quantum computing (and sometimes taken heat for that approach), announced it was expanding into gate-based quantum computing.

Surprised? Perhaps we shouldn’t be. Spun out of the University of British Columbia in 1,999 D-Wave initially targeted gate-based quantum computing and discovered how hard it would be to develop. The company strategy morphed early on.

“I joined in 2005 when the company was first transitioning from a gate-model focus to quantum annealing focus,” recalled Mark Johnson, now vice president of quantum technologies and systems products. “There was still this picture that we wanted to find the most direct path to providing valuable quantum applications and we felt that quantum annealing was the was the way to do that. We felt the gate model was maybe 20 years away.”

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Most of us control light all the time without even thinking about it, usually in mundane ways: we don a pair of sunglasses and put on sunscreen, and close—or open—our window blinds.

But the control of can also come in high-tech forms. The screen of the computer, tablet, or phone on which you are reading this is one example. Another is telecommunications, which controls light to create signals that carry data along .

Scientists also use high-tech methods to control light in the laboratory, and now, thanks to a new breakthrough that uses a specialized material only three atoms thick, they can control light more precisely than ever before.

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Rome is drawing up an offer to try to convince Intel to invest billions of euros in an advanced chipmaking plant in Italy, as Germany emerges as frontrunner to land an even bigger megafactory planned by the U.S. company, three sources said.

The plants would be part of a drive by the U.S. group to build cutting-edge manufacturing capacity in Europe to help avoid future supply shortages of the kind currently crippling the automotive industry in particular.

Rome is already in talks with Intel about the potential investment, which according to preliminary estimates would be worth more than 4 billion euro ($4.7 billion), the sources who are involved in the discussions said.

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When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down experiments at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory early last year, Shambhu Ghimire’s research group was forced to find another way to study an intriguing research target: quantum materials known as topological insulators, or TIs, which conduct electric current on their surfaces but not through their interiors.

Denitsa Baykusheva, a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow, had joined his group at the Stanford PULSE Institute two years earlier with the goal of finding a way to generate high harmonic generation, or HHG, in these materials as a tool for probing their behavior. In HHG, shining through a material shifts to higher energies and higher frequencies, called harmonics, much like pressing on a guitar string produces higher notes. If this could be done in TIs, which are promising building blocks for technologies like spintronics, quantum sensing and quantum computing, it would give scientists a new tool for investigating these and other quantum materials.

With the experiment shut down midway, she and her colleagues turned to theory and computer simulations to come up with a new recipe for generating HHG in topological insulators. The results suggested that circularly polarized light, which spirals along the direction of the laser beam, would produce clear, unique signals from both the conductive surfaces and the interior of the TI they were studying, bismuth selenide—and would in fact enhance the signal coming from the surfaces.

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Light offers an irreplaceable way to interact with our universe. It can travel across galactic distances and collide with our atmosphere, creating a shower of particles that tell a story of past astronomical events. Here on earth, controlling light lets us send data from one side of the planet to the other.

Given its broad utility, it’s no surprise that light plays a critical role in enabling 21st century quantum information applications. For example, scientists use to precisely control atoms, turning them into ultra-sensitive measures of time, acceleration, and even gravity. Currently, such early quantum technology is limited by size—state-of-the-art systems would not fit on a dining room table, let alone a chip. For practical use, scientists and engineers need to miniaturize , which requires re-thinking certain components for harnessing light.

Now IQUIST member Gaurav Bahl and his research group have designed a simple, compact photonic circuit that uses to rein in light. The new study, published in the October 21 issue of the journal Nature Photonics, demonstrates a powerful way to isolate, or control the directionality of light. The team’s measurements show that their approach to isolation currently outperforms all previous on-chip alternatives and is optimized for compatibility with atom-based sensors.

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