Lifeboat Foundation

The human eye is a surprisingly good photon detector. What can it spy of the line between the quantum and classical worlds?

I spent a lot of time in the dark in graduate school. Not just because I was learning the field of quantum optics – where we usually deal with one particle of light or photon at a time – but because my research used my own eyes as a measurement tool. I was studying how humans perceive the smallest amounts of light, and I was the first test subject every time.

I conducted these experiments in a closet-sized room on the eighth floor of the psychology department at the University of Illinois, working alongside my graduate advisor, Paul Kwiat, and psychologist Ranxiao Frances Wang. The space was equipped with special blackout curtains and a sealed door to achieve total darkness. For six years, I spent countless hours in that room, sitting in an uncomfortable chair with my head supported in a chin rest, focusing on dim, red crosshairs, and waiting for tiny flashes delivered by the most precise light source ever built for human vision research. My goal was to quantify how I (and other volunteer observers) perceived flashes of light from a few hundred photons down to just one photon.

Continue reading “An eye on experiments that make quantum mechanics visible” »

A membrane between what is inside the solar system and the outside. 😃

NASA‘s New Horizons spacecraft has helped scientists study a mysterious phenomenon at the edge of the Solar System, where particles from the Sun and interstellar space interact.

This region, about 100 times further from the Sun than Earth, is where uncharged hydrogen atoms from interstellar space meet charged particles from our Sun. The latter extend out from our Sun in a bubble called the heliosphere.

Continue reading “A NASA Spacecraft May Have Detected A Giant Wall At The Edge Of The Solar System” »

Silicon has proved to be a highly valuable and reliable material for fabricating a variety of technologies, including quantum devices. In recent years, researchers have also been investigating the possible advantages of using individual artificial atoms to enhance the performance of silicon-based integrated quantum circuits. So far, however, single qubits with an optical interface have proved difficult to isolate in silicon.

Researchers at Université de Montpellier and CNRS, University Leipzig and other universities in Europe have recently successfully isolated single, optically active artificial atoms in silicon for the first time. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, could have important implications for the development of new silicon-based quantum optics devices.

“Our study was born from the will to isolate new individual artificial atoms with a telecom optical interface in a material suitable for large-scale industrial processes,” Anaïs Dr.éau, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “We are used to investigating these quantum systems, but in wide-bandgap semiconductors, such as diamond or hexagonal boron nitride. Although silicon is the most widespread material within the microelectronics industry, so far no light emitter has been reported in this small-bandgap semiconductor.”

Just say no to cat murder.

One of the first times quantum mechanics entered popular culture, “Schrödinger’s Cat” remains a puzzling thought experiment in which a poor cat’s fate remains unknown inside a box. But scientists now say that the paradox at the heart of the puzzle could be determined ahead of time, or even reversed.

First, a recap of Schrodinger’s Cat. Created by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, it looks at a theory of quantum mechanics known as the Copenhagen interpretation. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, a quantum system will exist in superposition up until the moment it interacts with the real observable world in any way. When discussing quantum theory, the Institute of Physics says that a superposition is the idea that a particle can be in two places at once.

Nearly 75 years after the puzzling first detection of the kaon, scientists are still looking to the particle for hints of physics beyond their current understanding.

Extremely massive fundamental particles could exist, but they would seriously mess with our understanding of quantum mechanics.

O,.o kaons in action for interstellar travel: D.

Interstellar probes and future interstellar travel will require relativistic rockets. The problem is that such a rocket drive requires that the rocket exhaust velocity from the fuel also is relativistic, since otherwise the rocket thrust is much too small: the total mass of the fuel will be so large that relativistic speeds cannot be reached in a reasonable time and the total mass of the rocket will be extremely large. Until now, no technology was known that would be able to give rocket exhaust at relativistic speed and a high enough momentum for relativistic travel. Here, a useful method for relativistic interstellar propulsion is described for the first time. This method gives exhaust at relativistic speeds and is a factor of at least one hundred better than normal fusion due to its increased energy output from the annihilation-like meson formation processes. It uses ordinary hydrogen as fuel so a return travel is possible after refuelling almost anywhere in space. The central nuclear processes have been studied in around 20 publications, which is considered to be sufficient evidence for the general properties. The nuclear processes give relativistic particles (kaons, pions and muons) by laser-induced annihilation-like processes in ultra-dense hydrogen H. The kinetic energy of the mesons is 1300 times larger than the energy of the laser pulse. This method is superior to the laser-sail method by several orders of magnitude and is suitable for large spaceships.

Scientists at Freie Universität Berlin develop a deep learning method to solve a fundamental problem in quantum chemistry.

A team of scientists at Freie Universität Berlin has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) method for calculating the ground state of the Schrödinger equation in quantum chemistry. The goal of quantum chemistry is to predict chemical and physical properties of molecules based solely on the arrangement of their atoms in space, avoiding the need for resource-intensive and time-consuming laboratory experiments. In principle, this can be achieved by solving the Schrödinger equation, but in practice this is extremely difficult.

Up to now, it has been impossible to find an exact solution for arbitrary molecules that can be efficiently computed. But the team at Freie Universität has developed a deep learning method that can achieve an unprecedented combination of accuracy and computational efficiency. AI has transformed many technological and scientific areas, from computer vision to materials science. “We believe that our approach may significantly impact the future of quantum chemistry,” says Professor Frank Noé, who led the team effort. The results were published in the reputed journal Nature Chemistry.

Researchers recently resolved a long-standing question in quantum physics, about how long it takes a single atom to tunnel through a barrier.

While many institutions are developing quantum computers, making a quantum internet requires a way to transfer the information between computers. This is accomplished by a phenomenon called quantum teleportation, in which two atoms separated by large distances are made to act as if they are identical.

Don Lincoln writes about recent research that has brought us closer to actualizing the goal of a quantum internet, giving us both hope and fear about what it could mean for the future.