Lifeboat Foundation

#quantum #photonics

COPENHAGEN, April 3, 2020 — Using lasers, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen have developed a way to entangle electromagnetic fields from microwave radiation and optical beams. Creating entanglement between microwave and optical fields could help scientists solve the challenge of sharing entanglement between two distant quantum computers operating in the microwave regime.

PsiQuantum’s photon-based model is still years away, but the company says it’ll be more powerful than Google’s or IBM’s.

Under DARPA’s Photonics in the Package for Extreme Scalability (PIPES) program, researchers from Intel and Ayar Labs have demonstrated early progress towards improving chip connectivity with photons – or light. Signaling over optical fibers enables the internet today and optical transceivers are ubiquitous in data centers, yet digital systems still rely upon the movement of electrons over metal wires to push data between integrated circuits (ICs) on a board. Increasingly, the limitations of electrical signaling from the chip package restrict overall bandwidth and signaling efficiency, throttling the performance of advanced systems. The PIPES program is exploring ways to expand the use of optical components to address these constraints and enable digital microelectronics with new levels of performance.

Researchers from Intel and Ayar Labs working on PIPES have successfully replaced the traditional electrical input/output (I/O) of a state-of-the-art field programmable gate array (FPGA) with efficient optical signaling interfaces. The demonstration leverages an optical interface developed by Ayar Labs called TeraPHY, an optical I/O chiplet that replaces electrical serializer/deserializer (SERDES) chiplets. These SERDES chiplets traditionally compensate for limited I/O when there is a need for fast data movement, enabling high-speed communications and other capabilities. Using Intel’s advanced packaging and interconnect technology, the team integrated TeraPHY and the Intel FPGA core within a single package, creating a multi-chip module (MCM) with in-package optics. The integrated solution substantially improves interconnect reach, efficiency, and latency – enabling high-speed data links with single mode optical fibers coming directly from the FPGA.

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In novel concepts of magnetic data storage, it is intended to send small magnetic bits back and forth in a chip structure, store them densely packed and read them out later. The magnetic stray field generates problems when trying to generate particularly tiny bits. Now, researchers at the Max Born Institute (MBI), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and DESY were able to put an “invisibility cloak” over the magnetic structures. In this fashion, the magnetic stray field can be reduced in a fashion allowing for small yet mobile bits. The results were published in Nature Nanotechnology.

For physicists, magnetism is intimately coupled to rotating motion of electrons in atoms. Orbiting around the atomic nucleus as well as around their own axis, electrons generate the magnetic moment of the atom. The magnetic stray field associated with that magnetic moment is the property we know from e.g. a bar magnet we use to fix notes on pinboard. It is also the magnetic stray field that is used to read the information from a magnetic hard disk drive. In today’s hard disks, a single magnetic bit has a size of about 15 × 45 nanometer, about 1,000,000,000,000 of those would fit on a stamp.

One vision for a novel concept to store data magnetically is to send the magnetic bits back and forth in a memory chip via current pulses, in order to store them at a suitable place in the chip and retrieve them later. Here, the magnetic stray field is a bit of a curse, as it prevents that the bits can be made smaller for even denser packing of the information. On the other hand, the magnetic moment underlying the stray field is required to be able to move the structures around.

He is remembered for his ‘transformational’ and ‘immeasurable’ contributions to scientific research.

The interactions with the environment that cause it are what make quantum measurement possible.

It hopes to leapfrog rivals as it reenters the computing business.

It’s been said that quantum computing will be like going from candlelight to electric light in the way it will transform how we live. Quite a picture, but what exactly is quantum computing?

For the answer to that question, we’ll have to visit a scale of existence so small that the usual rules of physics are warped, stretched and broken, and there are few layperson terms to lean on. Strap yourself in.

Luckily, we have a world-leading researcher in quantum computing, Professor David Reilly, to guide us. “Most modern technologies are largely based on electromagnetism and Newtonian mechanics,” says Reilly in a meeting room at the University’s Nano Hub. “Quantum computing taps into an enormous new area of nano physics that we haven’t harnessed yet.”

Studies of hibernating animals suggest that the molecular and synaptic integrity of neurons in the cerebral cortex that underlie self and consciousness is maintained in many cases when from the outside the brain appears dead.

A striking feature of medicine over the past few centuries has been our growing ability to bring people back from the “dead.” For most of human history, patients who were unconscious and not breathing were treated as though they had died. But the concept of resuscitation emerged as doctors grew to understand the basic function of the lungs and airways. That led to new techniques and tools capable of restoring both breathing and heartbeat — and the realization that cardiac arrest was not always a death sentence. That, in turn, gave rise to a distinction between what’s now called clinical death versus brain death.

Continue reading “‘Rebooting the brain’: Our fight to bring people back from the dead” »