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Category: quantum physics – Page 298

Just as carbon makes up both the brittle core of a No. 2 pencil and the harder-than-steel diamond in a cutting tool, boron nitride gives rise to compounds that can be soft or hard. Yet, unlike carbon, far less is known about boron nitride’s forms and their responses to changing temperatures and pressures.

Rice University scientists mixed —a soft variety also known as “white graphite”—with cubic boron nitride—a material second to diamond in hardness—and found that the resulting nanocomposite interacted with light and heat in unexpected ways that could be useful in next-generation microchips, quantum devices and other advanced technology applications.

“Hexagonal boron nitride is widely used in a variety of products, such as coatings, lubricants and cosmetics,” said Abhijit Biswas, a research scientist who is the lead author of a study about the research published in Nano Letters. “It’s quite soft and it is a great lubricant, and very lightweight. It’s also cheap and very stable at room temperature and under atmospheric pressure.

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The write in their paper on the invention: “The LK-99 has many possibilities for various applications such as magnet, motor, cable, levitation train, power cable, qubit for a quantum computer, THz Antennas, etc. We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind.”

It’s important to note that while room-temperature superconducting advances may clear some of the scalability hurdles, warm temperatures still impact quantum errors.

That being said, and while scientists are still trying to verify this work, how will it affect quantum computing? If at all?

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Collaboration yields new solutions that tackle complex challenges in defense and aerospace sectors

Companies to showcase live demonstration of quantum-hybrid application at Space & Missile Defense Symposium

BURNABY, British Columbia, PALO ALTO, Calif. & HUNTSVILLE, Ala., August 7, 2023 —(BUSINESS WIRE)— D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS), a leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services, and Davidson Technologies, Inc., a technology services company that provides innovative engineering, technical and management solutions for the Department of Defense, aerospace and commercial customers, today announced progress in their collaboration to create solutions that advance national defense efforts. In support of the companies’ joint presence at this week’s Space and Missile Defense Symposium, D-Wave and Davidson Technologies revealed that together they have built two applications, focused on interceptor assignment and optimized radar scheduling.

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“I view string theory as the most promising way to quantize matter and gravity in a unified way. We need both quantum gravity and we need unification and a quantization of gravity. One of the reasons why string theory is promising is that there are no singularities associated with those singularities are the same type that they offer point particles.” — Robert Brandenberger.

In this thought-provoking conversation, my grad school mentor, Robert Brandenberger shares his unique perspective on various cosmological concepts. He challenges the notion of the fundamental nature of the Planck length, questioning its significance and delving into intriguing debates surrounding its importance in our understanding of the universe. He also addresses some eyebrow-raising claims made by Elon Musk about the limitations imposed by the Planck scale on the number of digits of pi.

Moving on to the topic of inflation and its potential detectability, Robert sheds light on the elusive B mode fluctuations and the role they play in understanding the flaws of general relativity. He explains why detecting these perturbations at the required scale may be beyond our current technological capabilities. The discussion further explores the motivations behind the search for cosmic strings in the microwave sky and the implications they hold for particle physics models beyond the standard model.

With his expertise in gravity and the quantization of mass, Robert Brandenberger emphasizes the need for a quantum mechanical approach to gravity. He discusses the emergence of time, space, and a metric from matrix models, offering new insights into the foundations of our understanding of the universe. The speaker’s work challenges conventional notions of inflation and proposes alternative models, such as string gas cosmology, as potential solutions.

Continue reading “Unseen Fluctuations: Challenging Inflation | Robert Brandenberger” | >

Electronic devices typically use the charge of electrons, but spin — their other degree of freedom — is starting to be exploited. Spin defects make crystalline materials highly useful for quantum-based devices such as ultrasensitive quantum sensors, quantum memory devices, or systems for simulating the physics of quantum effects. Varying the spin density in semiconductors can lead to new properties in a material — something researchers have long wanted to explore — but this density is usually fleeting and elusive, thus hard to measure and control locally.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere has found a way to tune the spin density in diamond, changing it by a factor of two, by… More.

MIT researchers found a way to tune the spin density in diamond by applying an external laser or microwave beam. The finding could open new possibilities for advanced quantum devices.

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The recent Ant-Man movie did a great job of putting quantum up in lights, but the future of quantum science shines even brighter than fiction. One application, quantum sensors, is already the basis of some of the most important systems and technologies in our world — global positioning systems (GPS) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners are prime examples.

Quantum sensors and quantum AI are just the beginning: Robots are now getting the quantum sensor treatment too. Quantum sensors will supercharge the way robots work and how we apply them to important 21st-century challenges.

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Turtles migrate thousands of miles out in the open ocean, charting epic courses in search of food, mates, and nesting grounds. Exactly how they find where they’re going has long puzzled scientists who suspected magnetic fields were involved, but were unsure of the exact mechanism through which turtles were sensing it.

We’ve since learned that turtles appear to recognize magnetic signatures of locations, such as the beach on which they hatched where females will later return to lay their own eggs. We know the magnetosphere is in constant flux, and turtle nesting sites have been found to shift in tandem, so how is it that they’re able to make sense of this invisible force?

Some answers to this question were revealed in a study that looked at the way snapping turtles can tell north from south, in a phenomenon known as spontaneous magnetic alignment. It was once thought to be a rare trait in the animal kingdom, but as Professor John Phillips from the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech told IFLScience, this is no longer the case.

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