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Category: quantum physics – Page 283

Most of us don’t think of atoms as having their own unique vibrations, but they do. In fact, it’s a feature so fundamental to nature’s building blocks that a team of University of Washington researchers recently observed and used this phenomenon in their research study. By studying the light atoms emitted when stimulated by a laser, they were able to detect vibrations sometimes referred to as atomic “breathing.”

The result is a breakthrough that may one day allow us to build better tools for many kinds of quantum technologies.

Led by Mo Li, a professor of photonics and nano devices in both the UW Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the UW Physics Department, the researchers set out to build a better quantum emitter, or QE, one that could be incorporated into optical circuits.

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Water and carbon make a quantum couple: the flow of water on a carbon surface is governed by an unusual phenomenon dubbed quantum friction. A new work published in Nature Nanotechnology experimentally demonstrates this phenomenon—which was predicted in a previous theoretical study—at the interface between liquid water and graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms. Advanced ultrafast techniques were used to perform this study. These results could lead to applications in water purification and desalination processes and maybe even to liquid-based computers.

For the last 20 years, scientists have been puzzled by how water behaves near carbon surfaces. It may flow much faster than expected from conventional flow theories or form strange arrangements such as square ice. Now, an international team of researchers from the Max Plank Institute for Polymer Research of Mainz (Germany), the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2, Spain), and the University of Manchester (England), reports in the study published in Nature Nanotechnology on June 22, 2023, that water can interact directly with the carbon’s electrons—a quantum phenomenon that is very unusual in .

A liquid, such as water, is made up of that randomly move and constantly collide with each other. A solid, in contrast, is made of neatly arranged atoms that bathe in a cloud of electrons. The solid and the liquid worlds are assumed to interact only through collisions of the liquid molecules with the solid’s atoms—the liquid molecules do not “see” the solid’s electrons. Nevertheless, just over a year ago, a paradigm-shifting theoretical study proposed that at the water-carbon interface, the liquid’s molecules and the solid’s electrons push and pull on each other, slowing down the liquid flow: this new effect was called quantum friction. However, the theoretical proposal lacked experimental verification.

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Maryland-based IonQ is expanding the commercial availability of its next-generation Forte quantum computer — and ramping up its research and production facility in the Seattle area to work on the next, next generation.

Forte is expected to bring the quantum frontier closer to the point that customers can start running real-world applications rather than merely experimenting with quantum capabilities, said Chris Monroe, co-founder and chief scientist at IonQ.

“We’re not talking a decade away here anymore,” he told GeekWire.

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Quantum computing, just like traditional computing, needs a way to store the information it uses and processes. On the computer you’re using right now, information, whether it be photos of your dog, a reminder about a friend’s birthday, or the words you’re typing into browser’s address bar, must be stored somewhere. Quantum computing, being a new field, is still working out where and how to store quantum information.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Physics, Mohammad Mirhosseini, assistant professor of electrical engineering and applied physics, shows a new method his lab has developed for efficiently translating electrical quantum states into sound and vice versa. This type of translation may allow for storing prepared by future quantum computers, which are likely to made from electrical circuits.

This method makes use of what are known as , the sound equivalent of a light particle called a photon. (Remember that in quantum mechanics, all waves are particles and vice versa). The experiment investigates phonons for storing quantum information because it’s relatively easy to build small devices that can store these mechanical waves.

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O.o!!!! Year 2022

A new photonic quantum computer takes just 36 microseconds to perform a task that would take a conventional supercomputer more than 9,000 years to complete. The new device, named Borealis, is the first quantum computer from a startup to display such “quantum advantage” over regular computers. Borealis is also the first machine capable of quantum advantage to be made available to the public over the cloud.

Quantum computers can theoretically achieve a quantum advantage that enables them to find the answers to problems no classical computers could ever solve. The more components known as qubits that a quantum computer has, the greater its computational power can grow, in an exponential fashion.

Many companies, including giants such as Google, IBM, and Amazon as well as startups such as IonQ, rely on qubits based on superconducting circuits or trapped ions. One drawback with these approaches is that they both demand temperatures colder than those found in deep space, because heat can disrupt the qubits. The expensive, bulky cryogenic systems required to hold qubits at such frigid temperatures can also make it a major challenge to scale these platforms up to high numbers of qubits—or to smaller and more portable form factors.

Continue reading “Photonic Quantum Computer Claims Speedup “Advantage”” | >

The discovery of the quantum Hall effects in the 1980s revealed the existence of novel states of matter called “Laughlin states,” in honor of the American Nobel prize winner who successfully characterized them theoretically. These exotic states specifically emerge in 2D materials, at very low temperature and in the presence of an extremely strong magnetic field.

In a Laughlin state, electrons form a peculiar liquid, where each electron dances around its congeners while avoiding them as much as possible. Exciting such a generates collective states that physicists associate with fictitious particles, whose properties drastically differ from : these “anyons” carry a fractional charge (a fraction of the elementary charge) and they surprisingly defy the standard classification of particles in terms of bosons or fermions.

For many years, physicists have explored the possibility of realizing Laughlin states in other types of systems than those offered by solid-state materials, in view of further analyzing their peculiar properties. However, the required ingredients (the 2D nature of the system, the intense magnetic field, the strong correlations among the particles) has proved extremely challenging.

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Microsoft today announced its roadmap for building its own quantum supercomputer, using the topological qubits the company’s researchers have been working on for quite a few years now. There are still plenty of intermediary milestones to be reached, but Krysta Svore, Microsoft’s VP of advanced quantum development, told us that the company believes that it will take fewer than 10 years to build a quantum supercomputer using these qubits that will be able to perform a reliable one million quantum operations per second. That’s a new measurement Microsoft is introducing as the overall industry aims to move beyond the current era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing.

We think… More.

At its Ignite conference, Microsoft today put its stake in the ground and discussed its progress in building a quantum computer and giving developers tools to experiment with this new computing paradigm on their existing machines.

There’s a lot to untangle here, and few people will claim that they understand the details of quantum computing. What Microsoft has done, though, is focus on a different aspect of how quantum computing can work — and that may just allow it to get a jump on IBM, Google and other competitors that are also looking at this space. The main difference between what Microsoft is doing is that its system is based on advances in topology that the company previously discussed. Most of the theoretical work behind this comes from Fields Medal-recipient Michael Freedman, who joined Microsoft Research in 1997, and his team.

Continue reading “Microsoft places its bets on quantum computing” | >

A new kind of resonator has the ability to transmit quantum information using single photons from a silicon device tipped with a few dozen erbium atoms.

The quantum internet just got one step closer to reality thanks to a new breakthrough that allows the encoded quantum information to be transmitted over distance.

The quantum internet offers the promise of perfect information security on a quantum mechanical level in the transmission of information using qubits, which will decompose into random information if anyone were to try and intercept it.

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They created a quantum system with properties analogous to black holes.

A collaborative effort from research teams across multiple organizations in China was successful in using quantum computing technology to test Hawking Radiation, the theory proposed by renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, the South China Morning Post.

Quantum computing is a complex field that involves using mathematics, computer science, and physics to solve complex problems. Interesting Engineering recently reported how a quantum computer recently beat a conventional supercomputer at complex math.

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