Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: computing – Page 535

Nuclear Fusion: Why the Race to Harness the Power of the Sun Just Sped Up

A nervous excitement hangs in the air. Half a dozen scientists sit behind computer screens, flicking between panels as they make last-minute checks. “Go and make the gun dangerous,” one of them tells a technician, who slips into an adjacent chamber. A low beep sounds. “Ready,” says the person running the test. The control room falls silent. Then, boom.

Next door, 3 kilograms of gunpowder has compressed 1,500 liters of hydrogen to 10,000 times atmospheric pressure, launching a projectile down the 9-meter barrel of a two-stage light gas gun at a speed of 6.5 kilometers per second, about 10 times faster than a bullet from a rifle.

On the monitors the scientists are checking the next stage, when the projectile slams into the target—a small transparent block carefully designed to amplify the force of the collision. The projectile needs to hit its mark perfectly flush. The slightest rotation risks derailing the carefully calibrated physics.

Towards quantum 2.0 technology: where the best opportunities for business lie

James McKenzie is excited about the prospects of firms that are developing technology based on seemingly esoteric fundamental quantum phenomena.

Physicists have long boasted of their success in what’s known as “quantum 1.0” technology – semiconductor junctions, transistors, lasers and so on. Thanks to their efforts over the last 75 years, we have smart phones, computers, laptops and other quantum-enabled devices that have transformed our lives. But the future will increasingly depend on “quantum 2.0” technology, which taps into phenomena like superposition and entanglement to permit everything from quantum computing and cryptography to quantum sensing, timing and imaging.

The incredible possibilities of quantum 2.0 were brought home to me when I attended the UK’s National Quantum Technologies Showcase in central London last month. The event featured more than 60 exhibitors and I was amazed how far things have progressed. In fact, it coincided with two positive developments. One was an announcement by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) of a further £50m to support quantum industrial projects. The other was the UK and US signing a joint “statement of intent” to boost collaboration on quantum science and technologies.

A laser shot through a keyhole can expose everything inside a closed room

Over the past few years, different techniques have made it possible to improve the viewing angles of the cameras, taking advantage of extra functionalities such as lasers. This technology allows the device to track objects moving around corners, even when they are completely obscured from view. The device could be used for search-and-rescue missions or installed on cars to detect incoming vehicles.

Now, researchers at the Stanford Computational Imaging Lab have developed a novel method called non-line-of-sight imaging, or keyhole imaging, that allows you to scan an entire room by simply pointing a laser through the keyhole. A single point of laser light entering a room can be used to see what physical objects might be inside.

Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) technique has been refined by continuous research with it in the lead role, aimed at creating cameras that image objects lying behind corners beyond the field of view. In the past, this technique used flat surfaces, such as walls or floors, that happened to be in the line of sight with a hidden object and a camera. A series of light pulses originating from the camera, usually from lasers, bounce off these surfaces and then bounce off the hidden object before eventually making their way back to the camera’s sensors.

The US wants to ban the Chinese chip maker SMIC

China is now making every effort to gain silicon independence. According to the plan of the ruling party, by 2025 at least 70% of chips in Chinese products should be local production. A special role in achieving this goal is assigned to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), which is actively developing advanced technologies in the production of semiconductor products.

New IBM and Samsung transistors could be key to sub-1nm chips

IBM and Samsung claim they’ve made a breakthrough in semiconductor design. On day one of the IEDM conference in San Francisco, the two companies unveiled a new design for stacking transistors vertically on a chip. With current processors and SoCs, transistors lie flat on the surface of the silicon, and then electric current flows from side-to-side. By contrast, Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors (VTFET) sit perpendicular to one another and current flows vertically.

According to IBM and Samsung, this design has two advantages. First, it will allow them to bypass many performance limitations to extend Moore’s Law beyond the 1-nanometer threshold. More importantly, the design leads to less wasted energy thanks to greater current flow. They estimate VTFET will lead to processors that are twice as fast and use 85 percent less power than chips designed with FinFET transistors. IBM and Samsung claim the process may one day allow for phones that go a full week on a single charge. They say it could also make certain energy-intensive tasks, including cryptomining, more power-efficient and therefore less impactful on the environment.

IBM and Samsung haven’t said when they plan to commercialize the design. They’re not the only companies attempting to push beyond the 1-nanometer barrier., Intel said it aims to finalize the design for angstrom-scale chips by 2024. The company plans to accomplish the feat using its new “Intel 20A” node and RibbonFET transistors.

A new super-cooled microwave source boosts the scale-up of quantum computers

Researchers in Finland have developed a circuit that produces the high-quality microwave signals required to control quantum computers while operating at temperatures near absolute zero. This is a key step towards moving the control system closer to the quantum processor, which may make it possible to greatly increase the number of qubits in the processor.

One of the factors limiting the size of quantum computers is the mechanism used to control the qubits in quantum processors. This is normally accomplished using a series of pulses, and because quantum processors operate at temperatures near absolute zero, the control pulses are normally brought into the cooled environment via broadband cables from room temperature.

As the number of qubits grows, so does the number of cables needed. This limits the potential size of a quantum , because the refrigerators cooling the qubits would have to become larger to accommodate more and more cables while also working harder to cool them down—ultimately a losing proposition.

A tool to speed development of new solar cells

A new computational simulator can help predict whether changes to materials or design will improve performance in new photovoltaic cells.

In the ongoing race to develop ever-better materials and configurations for solar cells, there are many variables that can be adjusted to try to improve performance, including material type, thickness, and geometric arrangement. Developing new solar cells has generally been a tedious process of making small changes to one of these parameters at a time. While computational simulators have made it possible to evaluate such changes without having to actually build each new variation for testing, the process remains slow.

Now, researchers at MIT and Google Brain have developed a system that makes it possible not just to evaluate one proposed design at a time, but to provide information about which changes will provide the desired improvements. This could greatly increase the rate for the discovery of new, improved configurations.

The US is worried that hackers are stealing data today so quantum computers can crack it in a decade

While they wrestle with the immediate danger posed by hackers today, US government officials are preparing for another, longer-term threat: attackers who are collecting sensitive, encrypted data now in the hope that they’ll be able to unlock it at some point in the future.

The threat comes from quantum computers, which work very differently from the classical computers we use today. Instead of the traditional bits made of 1s and 0s, they use quantum bits that can represent different values at the same time. The complexity of quantum computers could make them much faster at certain tasks, allowing them to solve problems that remain practically impossible for modern machines—including breaking many of the encryption algorithms currently used to protect sensitive data such as personal, trade, and state secrets.

While quantum computers are still in their infancy, incredibly expensive and fraught with problems, officials say efforts to protect the country from this long-term danger need to begin right now.