Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: quantum physics – Page 1,079

Upper limit found for quantum world

The quantum world and our world of perception obey different natural laws. Leiden physicists search for the border between both worlds. Now they suggest an upper limit in a study reported in Physical Review Letters.

The laws of the quantum domain do not apply to our everyday lives. We are used to assigning an exact location and time to objects. But fundamental particles can only be described by probability distributions—imagine receiving a traffic ticket for speeding 30 to 250 km/h somewhere between Paris and Berlin, with a probability peak for 140 km/h in Frankfurt.

Boundary

Because the laws are completely different in both worlds, a clear boundary might exist between them. Size and mass could then be used to determine whether an object obeys quantum or macroscopic laws, but the edge of this boundary is elusive. Leiden physicist Tjerk Oosterkamp and his research group have now established established an upper limit for quantum phenomena, closing in on the answer.

Prove the Multiverse or Die Trying

Quantum mechanics is littered with different interpretations, but at the core of the entire school of thought is the question of whether there are multiple universes of not. At the core of this idea is the thought, explicated by quantum mechanics, that everything we observe is simply the collapse of all probable scenarios into one specific outcome. Reality, viewed from that perspective, has a very cluttered cutting room floor. But are the things removed from the reel scraps or alternative narratives? There’s the big question.

To answer that question, we need to dive a bit into the mechanisms of the thing. Quantum mechanics says that all particles in the universe can be represented by what are called “wave functions.” A single wave function basically illustrates all the information about a specific system (i.e. a particle), detailing everything from position to velocity. The wave function itself also outlines all the probable outcomes of that system as well.

In other words, the wave function says what a particle is, and — more importantly — what it might being doing any any given time. It represents all possible futures of that particle.

Quantum physicists turn to the dark state

“Suppose you want to travel from Helsinki to New York and you have to change your flight in London,” explains Sorin Paraoanu. “Normally you would first fly on a plane from Helsinki to London, then wait for some time in the airport in London, then board the flight London-New York. But in the quantum world, you would be better off boarding a plane from Helsinki to London sometime after the flight London-New York took off. You will not spend any time in London and you will arrive in New York right at the time when the plane from Hesinki lands in London.” This is mind-boggling but the experiment shows that it is indeed happening.

Besides the relevance for quantum computing, the result also has deep conceptual implications. Much of our understanding of the reality is based on the so-called continuity principle: the idea that influences propagate from here to there by going through all the places in-between. Real objects don’t just appear somewhere from nothing. But the experiment seems to defy this. Like in a great show of magic, quantum physics allows things to materialize here and there, apparently out of nowhere.

The team would like to acknowledge the excellent scientific environment created in the Low Temperature Laboratory (part of OtaNano) at the Department of Applied Physics.

Quantum dot solids: This generation’s silicon wafer?

Just as the single-crystal silicon wafer forever changed the nature of electronics 60 years ago, a group of Cornell researchers is hoping its work with quantum dot solids – crystals made out of crystals – can help usher in a new era in electronics.

The multidisciplinary team, led by Tobias Hanrath, associate professor in the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and graduate student Kevin Whitham, has fashioned two-dimensional superstructures out of single-crystal building blocks. Through directed assembly and attachment processes, the lead selenide quantum dots are synthesized into larger crystals, then fused together to form atomically coherent square superlattices.

The difference between these and previous crystalline structures is the atomic coherence of each 5-nanometer crystal (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter). They’re not connected by a substance between each crystal – they’re connected directly to each other. The electrical properties of these superstructures potentially are superior to existing semiconductor quantum dots, with anticipated applications in solar cells and other electronic devices.

Calif.‘s Harris Outlines ‘Reasonable’Data Security

I wish the CA AG a lot of luck; however, her approach is very questionable when you think about downstream access and feed type scenarios. Example, Business in Boston MA has an agreement with a cloud host company in CA, and Boston also has data that it pulls in from Italy, DE, etc. plus has a service that it offers to all of users and partners in the US and Europe that is hosted in CA.

How is the CA AG going to impose a policy on Boston? It can’t; in fact the business in Boston will change providers and choose to use someone in another state that will not impact their costs and business.

BTW — I didn’t even mention the whole recent announcement from China on deploying out a fully Quantum “secured” infrastructure. If this is true; everyone is exposed and this means there is no way companies can be held accountable because US didn’t have access to the more advance Quantum infrastructure technology.

https://lnkd.in/b9xXVAN

Feb. 17 — California Attorney General Kamala Harris (D) has released the state’s data breach report, laying out the legal and ethical responsibilities of businesses to keep information safe and perhaps most importantly outlining what the state believes is “reasonable security” that companies must employ to avoid possible enforcement actions.

Under the state’s information security statute, businesses must use “reasonable security procedures and practices” that “protect personal information from unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification, or disclosure,” the report said.

Under the guidelines in the report released Feb. 16, failing to implement all 20 of the Center for Internet Security’s Critical Security Controls that apply to an organization’s environment constitutes a lack of reasonable security. The controls define a minimum level of information security all organizations that collect or maintain personal information should meet.

Quantum processes control accurately to several attoseconds

Russia is getting closer in perfecting Quantum Processors.

A team of physicists including Russian researchers succeeded in conducting an experiment in which, for the first time in history, control over ultrafast motion of electrons down to three attoseconds (one attosecond refers to a second as one second refers to the lifetime of the Universe) was proved possible (“Coherent control with a short-wavelength free-electron laser”). This fact paves a way to new directions of research that seemed improbable before. The experiment was conducted with the help of the free-electron laser FERMI located at the “Elettra Sincrotrone” research center in Trieste, Italy.

The speed of chemical, physical and biological processes is extremely high, atomic bonds are broken and restored within femtoseconds (one millionth of one billionth of a second). The Egyptian-American chemist Ahmed Zewail was the first to succeed in observing the dynamics of chemical processes, which made him a winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Nevertheless, nature can operate even faster. While atomic motions within a molecule can be measured with femtosecond resolution, the dynamics of electrons, which define the nature of chemical bonds, happens a thousand times faster — within tens and hundreds of attoseconds.

The only tools appropriate for studying such processes are so-called x-ray free-electron lasers. In “conventional” gas, liquid and solid-state lasers, excitation of electrons in the bound atomic state serves as the source of photons. In contrast, free-electron lasers operate with the help of a high-quality electron beam wiggling along a sinusoidal path under the effect of a ray of magnets. During that process electrons lose energy by producing radiation.

Quantum Phase Transition Underpins Superconductivity in Copper Oxides

Physicists have zoomed in on the transition that could explain why copper-oxides have such impressive superconducting powers.

Settling a 20-year debate in the field, they found that a mysterious quantum phase transition associated with the termination of a regime called the “pseudogap” causes a sharp drop in the number of conducting electrons available to pair up for superconductivity. The team hypothesizes that whatever is happening at this point is probably the reason that cuprates support superconductivity at much higher temperatures than other materials—about half way to .

“It’s very likely that the reason superconductivity grows in the first place, and the reason it grows so strongly, is because of that ,” CIFAR Senior Fellow Louis Taillefer (Université de Sherbrooke) says. The new findings are published in Nature.

/* */