Lifeboat Foundation

Nanoscale vortices known as skyrmions can be created in many magnetic materials. For the first time, researchers at PSI have managed to create and identify antiferromagnetic skyrmions with a unique property: critical elements inside them are arranged in opposing directions. Scientists have succeeded in visualizing this phenomenon using neutron scattering. Their discovery is a major step towards developing potential new applications, such as more efficient computers. The results of the research are published today in the journal Nature.

Whether a material is magnetic depends on the spins of its atoms. The best way to think of spins is as minute bar magnets. In a crystal structure where the atoms have fixed positions in a lattice, these spins can be arranged in criss-cross fashion or aligned all in parallel like the spears of a Roman legion, depending on the individual material and its state.

Under certain conditions it is possible to generate tiny vortices within the corps of spins. These are known as skyrmions. Scientists are particularly interested in skyrmions as a key component in future technologies, such as more efficient data storage and transfer. For example, they could be used as memory bits: a skyrmion could represent the digital one, and its absence a digital zero. As skyrmions are significantly smaller than the bits used in conventional storage media, data density is much higher and potentially also more energy efficient, while read and write operations would be faster as well. Skyrmions could therefore be useful both in classical data processing and in cutting-edge quantum computing.

A python framework for creating, editing, and invoking Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) circuits. — quantumlib/Cirq.

Physicists at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, together with colleagues in Russia and Poland, have managed to achieve ultra-strong coupling between light and matter at room temperature. The discovery is of importance for fundamental research and might pave the way for advances in light sources, nanomachinery and quantum technology.

A set of two coupled oscillators is one of the most fundamental and widely used systems in physics. It is a very general toy model that describes a plethora of systems including guitar strings, acoustic resonators, the physics of children’s swings, molecules and chemical reactions, gravitationally bound systems, and quantum cavity electrodynamics.

The degree of coupling between the two oscillators is an important parameter that mostly determines the behavior of the coupled system. However, not much is known about the upper limit by which two pendula can couple to each other—and what consequences such coupling can have.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and founder of Bioquark interviews Dr Vitaly Vanchurin, PhD, Associate Professor, Theoretical Physics and Cosmology, Swenson College of Science and Engineering, at the University of Minnesota (UMN).

Dr Vanchurin’s big questions and the tools we need to answer them:

Continue reading “Big Questions: The Multiverse, Cosmological Neural Networks and ‘Space Noodles’” »

Physicist Jim Al-Khalili routinely deals with the strangest subject in all of science — quantum physics, the astonishing and perplexing theory of sub-atomic particles. But now he’s turning his attention to the world of nature. Can quantum mechanics explain the greatest mysteries in biology?

His first encounter is with the robin. This familiar little bird turns out to navigate using one of the most bizarre effects in physics — quantum entanglement, a process which seems to defy common sense. Even Albert Einstein himself could not believe it.

Continue reading “The Secret Of Quantum Physics: Let There Be Life (Jim Al-Khalili) | Science Documentary | Science” »

In the sixties of the previous century, the science of Cybernetics emerged, which its founder Norbert Wiener defined as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.” Whereas the cyberneticists perhaps saw everything in the organic world too much as a machine type of regulatory network, the paradigm swapped to its mirror image, wherein everything in the natural world became seen as an organic neural network. Indeed, self-regulating networks appear to be ubiquitous: From the subatomic organization of atoms to the atomic organization of molecules, macromolecules, cells and organisms, everywhere the equivalent of neural networks appears to be present.

#EvolutionaryCybernetics #CyberneticTheoryofMind #PhilosophyofMind #QuantumTheory #cybernetics #evolution #consciousness

Continue reading “The Universal Mind Revealed as a Multi-Layered Quantum Neural Network” »

Researchers have created a molecule in a single, precisely characterized quantum state by merging two carefully prepared atoms.

Researchers have demonstrated a quantum molecular assembler—a device that takes individual atoms as inputs and merges them into a molecule in a desired quantum state. The team used lasers to trap and cool one sodium (Na) atom and one cesium (Cs) atom, bring them together, and merge them into an NaCs molecule in a specific quantum state. Such a quantum-controlled molecule is a promising building block for quantum computers and could help researchers study the quantum details of chemical reactions.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used quantum optics to advance state-of-the-art microscopy and illuminate a path to detecting material properties with greater sensitivity than is possible with traditional tools.

“We showed how to use squeezed light – a workhorse of quantum information science – as a practical resource for microscopy,” said Ben Lawrie of ORNL’s Materials Science and Technology Division, who led the research with Raphael Pooser of ORNL’s Computational Sciences and Engineering Division. “We measured the displacement of an atomic force microscope microcantilever with sensitivity better than the standard quantum limit.”

Unlike today’s classical microscopes, Pooser and Lawrie’s quantum microscope requires quantum theory to describe its sensitivity. The nonlinear amplifiers in ORNL’s microscope generate a special quantum light source known as squeezed light.

Continue reading “Quantum Enhanced Atomic Force Microscopy: Squeezed Light Reduces Noise” »

A new D-Theory of Time, or Digital Presentism, is predicated on reversible quantum computing at large, including the notion of ‘Anti-Time’ around which the present article revolves. If you think Anti-Time is nothing but fiction, and doesn’t apply to our reality, think again. As Dr. Antonin Tuynman writes in his Foreword to The Physics of Time: D-Theory of Time & Temporal Mechanics by Alex M. Vikoulov: “Whereas quantum physics and relativity theory have been solidly in place for over a century now, stubbornly and forcedly we still cling to atavistic interpretations, which are no longer in line with the well-established findings of our experiments in physics. Amidst the turmoil of this spinning convoluted dreamtime of our digital Cyberbardo, Vikoulov carves out a trajectory for understanding.”

#AntiTime #PhysicsofTime #DTheoryofTime #DigitalPresentism #TemporalMechanics

Many temporal concepts are undoubtedly extremely counterintuitive. Time directionality and time symmetry are especially notorious ones. Any of the possible pasts may have led to the present “digital” conscious instant. This is a strange idea if you are accustomed to looking at the world in a strictly linear, deterministic way, but it reflects the uncertain world described by quantum mechanics. A major counterargument to the multitude of pasts could be a combinatorial explosion of observer ‘anti-time’-lines, i.e., digital timelines extending in the opposite temporal direction from the present temporal singularity to the Alpha Point (Digital Big Bang). So, how in the quantum multiverse are those digital anti-timelines supposed to converge once again at the Alpha Point?

Continue reading “Anti-Time: A Twin of Time?” »