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Category: quantum physics – Page 250

Magnets, those everyday objects we stick to our fridges, all share a unique characteristic: they always have both a north and a south pole. Even if you tried breaking a magnet in half, the poles would not separate—you would only get two smaller dipole magnets. But what if a particle could have a single pole with a magnetic charge?

For over a century, physicists have been searching for such . A new study on the preprint server arXiv from the ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) places new limits on these hypothetical particles, adding new clues for the continuing search.

In 1931, physicist Paul Dirac proved that the existence of magnetic monopoles would be consistent with quantum mechanics and require—as has been observed—the quantization of the electric charge. In the 1970s, magnetic monopoles were also predicted by new theories attempting to unify all the fundamental forces of nature, inspiring physicist Joseph Polchinski to claim that their existence was “one of the safest bets that one can make about physics not yet seen.” Magnetic monopoles might have been present in the but diluted to an unnoticeably tiny density during the early exponential expansion phase known as cosmic inflation.

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The Association for Computing Machinery has just put out the finalists for the Gordon Bell Prize award that will be given out at the SC23 supercomputing conference in Denver, and as you might expect, some of the biggest iron assembled in the world are driving the advanced applications that have their eyes on the prize.

The ACM warns that the final system sizes and final results of the simulations and models run are not yet completed, but we have a look at one of them because the researchers in China’s National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi actually published a paper they will formally released in November ahead of the SC23 conference. That paper, Towards Exascale Computation for Turbomachinery Flows, was run on the “Oceanlite” supercomputing system, which we first wrote about way back in February 2021, that won a Gorden Bell prize in November 2021 for a quantum simulation across 41.9 million cores, and that we speculated the configuration of back in March 2022 when Alibaba Group, Tsinghua University, DAMO Academy, Zhejiang Lab, and Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence ran a pretrained machine learning model called BaGuaLu, across more than 37 million cores and 14.5 trillion parameters in the Oceanlite machine.

NASA tossed down a grand challenge nearly a decade ago to do a time-dependent simulation of a complete jet engine, with aerodynamic and heat transfer simulated, and the Wuxi team, with the help of engineering researchers at a number of universities in China, the United States, m and the United Kingdom have picked up the gauntlet. What we found interesting about the paper is that it confirmed many of our speculations about the Oceanlite machine.

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Any physical object, alive or inanimate, is composed of atoms and subatomic particles that interact in different ways governed by the principles of quantum mechanics. Some particles are in a pure state—they remain fixed and unchanged. Others are in a quantum state—a concept that can be difficult to understand because it involves having a particle occupy multiple states simultaneously. For instance, an electron in a pure state spins up or down; in a quantum state, also referred to as superposition, it spins up and down simultaneously. Another quantum principle states that particles can be in a state of entanglement in which changes in one directly affect the other. The principles of superposition and entanglement are fundamental to quantum computing.

Quantum bits, or qubits, are the smallest units of data that a quantum computer can process and store. In a pure state, qubits have a value of 1 or 0, similar to the bits used in computing today. In superposition, they can be both of these values simultaneously, and that enables parallel computations on a massive scale. While classical computers must conduct a new calculation any time a variable changes, quantum computers can explore a problem with many possible variables simultaneously.

Existing computers, although sufficient for many applications, can’t fully support all of the changes required to create a connected and intelligent-mobility ecosystem. Quantum computing (QC) could potentially provide faster and better solutions by leveraging the principles of quantum mechanics—the rules that govern how atoms and subatomic particles act and interact. (See sidebar, “Principles of quantum computing,” for more information). Over the short term, QC may be most applicable to solving complex problems involving small data sets; as its performance improves, QC will be applied to extremely large datasets.

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China Mobile on Saturday launched the largest quantum cloud computing platform in China along with China Electronics Technology Group Corp (CETGC), vowing to take quantum computing to a new level of practical use.

As the country’s most recent computing platform, it achieved hybrid computing of both quantum and general computing power for the first time in the industry, China Mobile said in a statement.

The platform was unveiled at the 2023 China Computational Conference in Yinchuan, Northwest China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.

With CETGC’s ability to self-design and build 20-qubit quantum computing chips, the platform is linked with advanced 20-qubit quantum computers, giving its users an open quantum fusion computing power testing environment.

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Scientists propose a spray that will make the most aggressive brain cancer tumors commit suicide. This spray contains bio-nanoantennae, special molecules that can alter cells at the quantum level.

Scientists at the University of Nottingham have devised a unique spray treatment method to cure glioblastoma, a highly aggressive brain cancer that annually kills over 10,000 people in the US.

They also claim this is the first-ever quantum therapeutic approach that shows cancer can be eliminated via quantum signaling, i.e., by making changes in the biology of cells at a quantum level.

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