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Category: quantum physics – Page 286

Here’s my new article for Aporia Magazine. A lot of wild ideas in it. Give it a read:

Regardless of the ethics and whether the science can even one day be worked out for Quantum Archaeology, the philosophical dilemma it presents to Pascal’s Wager is glaring. If humans really could eradicate the essence of death as we know it—including even the ability to ever permanently die—Pascal’s Wager becomes unworkable. Frankly, so does my Transhumanist Wager. After all, why should I dedicate my life and energy to living indefinitely through science when, by the next century, technology could bring me back exactly as I was—or even as an improved version of myself?

Outside of philosophical discourse, billions of dollars are pouring into the anti-aging and technology fields—much of it from Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area where I live. Everyone from entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerburg to nonprofits like XPRIZE to giants like Google is spending money on ways to try to end all diseases and overcome death. Bank of America recently reported that they expect the extreme longevity field to be worth over $600 billion dollars by 2025.

Continue reading “How to bring back the dead” | >

Researchers have reached a significant milestone in the field of quantum gravity research, finding preliminary statistical support for quantum gravity.

In a study published in Nature Astronomy on June 12, a team of researchers from the University of Naples “Federico II,” the University of Wroclaw, and the University of Bergen examined a quantum-gravity model of particle propagation in which the speed of ultrarelativistic particles decreases with rising energy. This effect is expected to be extremely small, proportional to the ratio between particle energy and the Planck scale, but when observing very distant astrophysical sources, it can accumulate to observable levels. The investigation used gamma-ray bursts observed by the Fermi telescope and ultra-high-energy neutrinos detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, testing the hypothesis that some neutrinos and some gamma-ray bursts might have a common origin but are observed at different times as a result of the energy-dependent reduction in speed.

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Daniel Lidar, the Viterbi Professor of Engineering at USC and Director of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology, and first author Dr. Bibek Pokharel, a Research Scientist at IBM Quantum, achieved this quantum speedup advantage in the context of a “bitstring guessing game.”

By effectively mitigating the errors often encountered at this level, they have successfully managed bitstrings of up to 26 bits long, significantly larger than previously possible. (For context, a bit refers to a binary number that can either be a zero or a one).

Quantum computers promise to solve certain problems with an advantage that increases as the problems increase in complexity. However, they are also highly prone to errors, or noise. The challenge, says Lidar, is “to obtain an advantage in the real world where today’s quantum computers are still ‘noisy.’”.

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Photosynthesis. The maps elucidate the complex energy transfer process in photosynthesizing bacteria, providing a clear picture of how sunlight energy is channeled from the outer to the inner molecular ring of the light-harvesting complex.

Systems obeying quantum mechanics are notoriously difficult to visualize, but researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed an illustration technique that displays quantum features in an easy-to-read diagram called a coherence map. The researchers used these maps to study the quantum mechanisms that underlay photosynthesis, the process by which plants and some bacteria use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into food.

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A group of physicists at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, has found via experimentation that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox still holds even when scaled up. Paolo Colciaghi, Yifan Li, Philipp Treutlein and Tilman Zibold describe their experiment in Physical Review X.

In 1935, Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen published a paper outlining a that suggested that did not give a complete description of reality. They argued for the existence of “elements of reality” that were not part of quantum theory—and then went further by speculating that it should be possible to come up with a new theory that would contain such hidden variables.

Their experiment has since come to be known as the EPR paradox because of the contradictions it reveals, such as one particle in a system influencing other particles due to entanglement, and also that it can become possible to know more about the particles in a given system than should be allowed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

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In the most massive test to date, physicists have probed a major paradox in quantum mechanics and found it still holds even for clouds of hundreds of atoms.

Using two entangled Bose-Einstein condensates, each consisting of 700 atoms, a team of physicists co-led by Paolo Colciaghi and Yifan Li of the University of Basel in Switzerland has shown that the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox scales up.

The researchers say this has important implications for quantum metrology – the study of measuring things under quantum theory.

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The experiments are the first of their kind and could lead to new advances in computing.

A team at the University of Chicago.

Founded in 1,890, the University of Chicago (UChicago, U of C, or Chicago) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Located on a 217-acre campus in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, near Lake Michigan, the school holds top-ten positions in various national and international rankings. UChicago is also well known for its professional schools: Pritzker School of Medicine, Booth School of Business, Law School, School of Social Service Administration, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, Divinity School and the Graham School of Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies, and Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

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One thing all quantum computers have in common is the fact that they manipulate information encoded in quantum states. But that’s where the similarities end, because those quantum states can be induced in everything from superconducting circuits to trapped ions, ultra-cooled atoms, photons, and even silicon chips.

While some of these approaches have attracted more investment than others, we’re still a long way from the industry settling on a common platform. And in the world of academic research, experimentation still abounds.

Now, a team from the University of Chicago has taken crucial first steps towards building a quantum computer that can encode information in phonons, the fundamental quantum units that make up sound waves in much the same way that photons make up light beams.

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Scientists have demonstrated entanglement and two-particle interference with phonon using an acoustic beam splitter.

Phonons are to sound what photons are to light. Photons are tiny packets of energy for light or electromagnetic waves. Similarly, phonons are packets of energy for sound waves. Each phonon represents the vibration of millions of atoms within a material.

Both photons and phonons are of central interest to quantum computing research, which exploits the properties of these quantum particles. However, phonons have proven challenging to study due to their susceptibility to noise and issues with scalability and detection.

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