In a groundbreaking experiment, physicists observed a classic liquid phenomenon—capillary instability—in a quantum gas for the first time. By cooling a mix of potassium and rubidium atoms near absolute zero, researchers created tiny self-bound droplets that behave like liquid despite remaining in
In a new experiment, physicists have replicated the famous Schrödinger’s cat experiment at hotter temperatures than ever before. The breakthrough is a small but significant step toward quantum computers that can work at normal temperatures.
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VIDEO NOTES
Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, director of its centre for theoretical physics, and the chairman of the World Science Festival. He is best known for his work on string theory, especially in his book “The Elegant Universe”, which turns 25 this year.
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Parul Sehgal of The New York Times stated “In these pieces, plucked from the last 20 years, Holt takes on infinity and the infinitesimal, the illusion of time, the birth of eugenics, the so-called new atheism, smartphones and distraction. It is an elegant history of recent ideas. There are a few historical correctives — he dismantles the notion that Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, was the first computer programmer. But he generally prefers to perch in the middle of a muddle — say, the string theory wars — and hear evidence from both sides without rushing to adjudication. The essays orbit around three chief concerns: How do we conceive of the world (metaphysics), how do we know what we know (epistemology) and how do we conduct ourselves (ethics)”. [ 6 ]
Steven Poole of The Wall Street Journal commented “…this collection of previously published essays by Jim Holt, who is one of the very best modern science writers”. [ 7 ]
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Useful quantum networks are hobbled by the problem of decoherence from environmental “noise.” But a new breakthrough could change that.
Recent physics studies have discovered that quarks and gluons inside protons, which are subatomic positively charged particles, exhibit maximal quantum entanglement at high energies. Entanglement is a physical phenomenon that entails correlations between distant particles that cannot be explained by classical physics theories, resulting in the state of one particle influencing that of another.
Researchers at Stony Brook University and the Brookhaven National Laboratory recently set out to better understand what this recent finding could mean for hadronization, the process by which quarks and gluons form hadrons, which are particles that can be detected experimentally. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, introduces a new approach to probe and study hadronization by leveraging quantum entanglement.
“Our study originated from the intriguing observation that the internal structure of protons at high energies exhibits maximal quantum entanglement,” Charles Joseph Naim, corresponding author for the paper, told Phys.org.
Quantum computers promise to outperform today’s traditional computers in many areas of science, including chemistry, physics, and cryptography, but proving they will be superior has been challenging. The most well-known problem in which quantum computers are expected to have the edge, a trait physicists call “quantum advantage,” involves factoring large numbers, a hard math problem that lies at the root of securing digital information.
In 1994, Caltech alumnus Peter Shor (BS ‘81), then at Bell Labs, developed a quantum algorithm that would easily factor a large number in just seconds, whereas this type of problem could take a classical computer millions of years. Ultimately, when quantum computers are ready and working—a goal that researchers say may still be a decade or more away—these machines will be able to quickly factor large numbers behind cryptography schemes.
But, besides Shor’s algorithm, researchers have had a hard time coming up with problems where quantum computers will have a proven advantage. Now, reporting in a recent Nature Physics study titled “Local minima in quantum systems,” a Caltech-led team of researchers has identified a common physics problem that these futuristic machines would excel at solving. The problem has to do with simulating how materials cool down to their lowest-energy states.
Chinese scientists recently made history after fine-tuning a billion-parameter artificial intelligence large model on their independently developed quantum computer named Origin Wukong.
According to a report by Global Times, this quantum computer is powered by Wukong, a 72-qubit superconducting quantum chip.
The experiment was conducted at the Anhui Quantum Computing Engineering Research Center, where this computer is operated.
A single molecule provides a controllable connection between a normal metal and a superconductor.
Researchers have caused a material’s superconductivity to permeate into a nearby normal metal via a single molecule [1]. They showed that this effect could be controlled and say that this control could allow the creation of so-called Majorana quasiparticles, which many research teams are exploring as future quantum bits (qubits) for quantum computers.
The spread of superconductivity into a normal metal in contact with a superconductor has been studied for decades. These experiments are typically done with thin films of the materials. However, the microscopic mechanism underpinning the effect—a normal-to-super-current conversion known as Andreev reflection—can be hard to control, and control is essential for applications of the effect.
Superconductivity—the ability of some materials to conduct electricity with no energy loss—holds immense promise for new technologies from lossless power grids to advanced quantum devices.
A publication in Physical Review Letters by researchers at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory sheds light on an outstanding mystery in the study of superconductivity: high-temperature superconductivity in cuprates.
Doubling down on results from a previous SLAC study, the paper provides further evidence that the Hubbard model—the leading theory for describing strong correlations between electrons in quantum materials—fails to explain electron dynamics in cuprates, even in simplified, one-dimensional systems.
