Lifeboat Foundation

A new study shows that nickel oxide superconductors, which conduct electricity with no loss at higher temperatures than conventional superconductors do, contain a type of quantum matter called charge density waves, or CDWs, that can accompany superconductivity.

The presence of CDWs shows that these recently discovered materials, also known as nickelates, are capable of forming correlated states— electron soups that can host a variety of quantum phases, including superconductivity, researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University reported in Nature Physics today.

“Unlike in any other superconductor we know about, CDWs appear even before we dope the material by replacing some atoms with others to change the number of electrons that are free to move around,” said Wei-Sheng Lee, a SLAC lead scientist and investigator with the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science (SIMES) who led the study.

This week our guest academic philosopher, Susan Schneider, who is the founding director for the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University, as well as the author of the 2019 book, Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind. In this episode we focus heavily on Susan’s thoughts, hopes, and concerns surrounding the current conversations regarding artificial intelligence. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, the philosophical and ethical questions that AI presents in general, the feasibility of mind uploading and machine consciousness, the ways we may end up outsourcing our decision making to machines, how we might merge with machines, and how these potential tech futures might impact identity and sense of self. You can learn more about Susan at schneiderwebsite.com, and find out how to get involved with her work at fau.edu/future-mind ** Host: Steven Parton — LinkedIn / Twitter Music by: Amine el Filali.

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Nonlinear dielectric nanostructures could control the flow of light in next-generation devices for information processing and communications.

When Dong-Fang Deng and her students make feed for the fish they raise at UWM’s School of Freshwater Sciences, they often use ground fishmeal—dried fish parts from fisheries or wild catch—as the protein source.

It’s possible to find microplastics in commercial fish food, she said, because the wild fish that end up in fishmeal consume some of the microplastics that litter the waters they live in. But after Deng actually spotted tiny plastic beads in pre-ground fishmeal, it prompted a question.

“We wondered, ” If the fish eat the microplastics, could the particles accumulate inside their bodies?’” said Deng, professor of freshwater sciences who researches the role of diet in fish farming, or aquaculture.

Physicists demonstrated a way of storing quantum information that is less prone to errors by subjecting a quantum computer’s qubits to quasi-rhythmic laser pulses based on the Fibonacci sequence.

Physicists have created a remarkable, never-before-seen phase of matter by shining a laser pulse sequence inspired by the Fibonacci sequence at atoms inside a quantum computer. Despite there still being only one singular flow of time, the phase has the benefits of two time dimensions, the physicists reported on July 20 in the journal Nature.

This mind-bending property offers a highly desirable benefit: Information stored in the phase is far more protected against errors than with alternative setups currently used in quantum computers. As a result, the information can exist for far longer without getting garbled, an important milestone for making quantum computing.

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The Moon isn’t necessarily there if you don’t look at it. So says quantum mechanics, which states that what exists depends on what you measure. Proving reality is like that usually involves the comparison of arcane probabilities, but physicists in China have made the point in a clearer way. They performed a matching game in which two players leverage quantum effects to win every time—which they can’t if measurements merely reveal reality as it already exists.

“To my knowledge this is the simplest [scenario] in which this happens,” says Adan Cabello, a theoretical physicist at the University of Seville who spelled out the game in 2001. Such quantum pseudotelepathy depends on correlations among particles that only exist in the quantum realm, says Anne Broadbent, a quantum information scientist at the University of Ottawa. “We’re observing something that has no classical equivalent.”

Continue reading “Reality doesn’t exist until you measure it, quantum parlor trick confirms” »

A research partnership between Penn State and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) could enable an improved method to make a new type of semiconductor that is a few atoms thin and interacts with light in an unusual way. This new semiconductor could lead to new computing and communications technologies that use lower amounts of energy than current electronics.

The new type of semiconductor, tin selenide (SnSe), would be useful for developing a new type of electronics known as “photonics” that use particles of light, or photons, to store, manipulate and transmit information. Traditional electronics use electrons to do this, while photonics use photons. Tin selenide is a binary compound consisting of tin and selenium in a 1:1 ratio.

The material has a peculiar interaction with light that gives it great potential for use in electronics.

Scientists have developed a new machine-learning platform that makes the algorithms that control particle beams and lasers smarter than ever before. Their work could help lead to the development of new and improved particle accelerators that will help scientists unlock the secrets of the subatomic world.

Daniele Filippetto and colleagues at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) developed the setup to automatically compensate for real-time changes to accelerator beams and other components, such as magnets. Their machine learning approach is also better than contemporary beam control systems at both understanding why things fail, and then using physics to formulate a response. A paper describing the research was published late last year in Nature Scientific Reports.

“We are trying to teach physics to a chip, while at the same time providing it with the wisdom and experience of a senior scientist operating the machine,” said Filippetto, a staff scientist at the Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics Division (ATAP) at Berkeley Lab and deputy director of the Berkeley Accelerator Controls and Instrumentation Program (BACI) program.

Unless Europe’s Large Hadron Collider coughs up a surprise, the field of particle physics may wheeze to its end.

CELESTA, the first CERN-driven satellite, successfully entered orbit during the maiden flight of Europe’s Vega-C launch vehicle. Launched by the European Space Agency from the French Guiana Space Centre (CSG) at 13.13 UTC on 13 July 2022, the satellite deployed smoothly and transmitted its first signals in the afternoon. Weighing one kilogram and measuring 10 centimetres on each of its sides, CELESTA (CERN latchup and radmon experiment student satellite) is a 1U CubeSat designed to study the effects of cosmic radiation on electronics. The satellite carries a Space RadMon, a miniature version of a well-proven radiation monitoring device deployed in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). CELESTA has been sent into an Earth orbit of almost 6,000 kilometres.