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Category: quantum physics – Page 28

Cancer is quantum: Studies show cancer cells may occupy limited, shared states like quantized energy levels

Andrea Califano began his career as a physicist. But that’s not why he’s now calling cancer a quantum disease. “We’re really just following the data,” says Califano, the Clyde ‘56 and Helen Wu Professor of Chemical Biology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and head of Biohub, New York.

“What we’ve seen over and over again is that each type of cancer has a limited number of cellular states. Just as electrons are restricted to a limited number of quantized energy states in an atom, cancer cells can only occupy one of these stable states or be in rapid transit between them. More critically, these states are conserved across virtually all patients with a specific type of cancer.”

The newest findings from the Califano lab—published recently in two papers in Nature Genetics —add critical evidence in support of the concept, which has enormous potential to transform and simplify the treatment of almost all cancers.

Two Opposing Quantum Particles Could Form a Bizarre New Kind of Matter

Researchers predict that strongly interacting bosons and fermions can form stable quantum droplets that may be testable with current experiments.

Two very different kinds of quantum particles may be able to join together in a stable form of matter that physicists once considered unlikely. Researchers at Monash University predict that ultracold bosons and fermions can combine under the right conditions to create self-bound “quantum droplets.”

Bosons and fermions follow fundamentally different quantum rules, yet the new theoretical work indicates that strongly interacting mixtures of the two can remain bound together. The result challenges the long-held expectation that stable droplets would be difficult to form in strongly interacting Bose-Fermi systems.

The Agentic AI and Quantum Convergence: Innovation and Cybersecurity Imperatives for US Government Agencies and Contractors$

GovCon Expert Chuck Brooks outlines the governance, cryptographic inventory and resilience steps agencies and contractors need now.

Physicists Just Directly Imaged The Quantum Fluctuations of Empty Space

Empty space is never actually truly empty.

Even a quantum field in its lowest-energy state, the vacuum, has unavoidable fluctuations that arise from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: Certain pairs of properties cannot both have precisely defined values at the same time.

In real-world terms, this means that a quantum field should resemble a staticky TV, and plenty of indirect evidence suggests this is the case.

Cybersecurity for the CSuite and Shareholders: Cyber Risk Is Business Risk

Chuck Brooks argues that cybersecurity has fully shifted from an IT function to a core business, governance, and fiduciary responsibility. In an era defined by AI, quantum computing, connected infrastructure, and expanding digital dependencies, cyber risk is now enterprise risk — directly tied to bu

New quantum computing method broadens spectroscopy of hard-to-model matter

Scientists could have a new way to explore the hidden behavior of matter, thanks to research involving Queen Mary University of London that uses a quantum computer to carry out a new form of computational spectroscopy.

Spectroscopy is an important scientific technique used to understand the properties of matter. By analyzing how materials and molecules respond to energy or light, researchers can gain insights into their structure and behavior. Computational approaches can complement these experiments by allowing scientists to investigate and predict properties using theoretical models and simulations.

However, quantum systems can be exceptionally difficult to model using conventional computers. The new research, published in Nature Communications, develops a generalized approach to quantum computational spectroscopy that allows researchers to study a much broader range of quantum systems.

Ramped fields create more robust entanglement between trapped-ion qubits

While quantum computing could be the future, it is currently plagued by finicky hardware. To make the technology practical, researchers must demonstrate that it consistently and continuously works and performs at scale. In a new study, published in Physical Review Letters, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the Ion Storage Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, created a robust process for entangling trapped-ion qubits. The result means better building blocks for ion-based quantum computers.

The approach creates a physical link between two trapped ions. Those ions are held in place with an electric field, although they do vibrate naturally. Because they have the same charge, they also repel each other. If one ion moves, it nudges its neighbor.

That shared motion can be used as a messenger between the qubits. In this experiment, the team used radio-frequency and microwave electromagnetic fields to apply a force to the ions. In different quantum states—say, when the qubit is pointing up versus down—the force pushes the shared-ion motion in a slightly different way.

Sound waves do double duty, carrying and protecting quantum information

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have demonstrated a promising new way to protect fragile quantum information using nothing but mechanical vibrations—essentially extremely small sound waves. The breakthrough, which comes from the lab of Marko Lončar, Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering, paves a path toward compact, sound-based quantum networks on chips, as well as hybrid quantum systems that combine many different types of quantum bits, or qubits.

The research is published in Nature Physics. Experiments were led by Eliza Cornell, a recent Ph.D. graduate from the Lončar lab and current postdoctoral researcher at Boston University, and Zhujing Xu, a former postdoctoral scholar in Lončar’s group.

Chemical physicists quantitatively model electron interactions in real quantum materials

A team of scientists from Caltech and Yale University has shown for the first time how to accurately quantify an important quantum phenomenon in metals, called the Kondo effect, for specific real materials. Unlike previous approaches, which for decades have relied on simplified models to qualitatively describe the effect, the new work uses the actual atomic and electronic structures of materials to solve the problem directly.

The work represents a step toward simulations of important quantum materials such as high-temperature superconductors, in which the motions of individual electrons depend so sensitively on what other electrons are doing at any moment that they cannot be averaged together.

The team describes the new technique and results in a paper published in Science. The lead authors are Linqing Peng (Ph. D.) and Tianyu Zhu of Yale University. Both Peng and Zhu started working on the project in the lab of Garnet Chan, Bren Professor of Chemistry and director of the Rudolph A. Marcus Center for Theoretical Chemistry at Caltech.