Disregarding an ever-increasing number of modalities and approaches and indifferent to the intense competition from savvy startups and techno giants, Lego could enter the race to build a quantum computer.
Well, at least one Lego fan designer is readying the Denmark-based toy company for the quantum era.
In a product suggestion, a Lego user pitched creating IBM Quantum Computer System in Lego Ideas, a site that allows users to submit suggestions for future logo sets.
There’s some potentially big news on the hunt for dark matter. Astronomers may have a handle on what makes this mysterious cosmic stuff: strange particles called “axions.”
Rather than search directly for axions, however, a multinational team of researchers led by Keir Rogers from the University of Toronto looked for something else. They focused on the “clumpiness” of the Universe and found that cosmic matter is more evenly distributed than expected.
So, what role do axions play here? Quantum mechanics explains these ultra-light particles as “fuzzy” because they exhibit wave-like behavior. It turns out their wavelengths can be bigger than entire galaxies. Apparently, that fuzziness plays a role in smoothing out the Universe by influencing the formation and distribution of dark matter. If that’s true, then it goes a long way toward explaining why the matter in the cosmos is more evenly spread out. It implies that axions play a part in the distribution of matter in the cosmos.
The new 12-qubit “Tunnel Falls” chip announced by Intel packs important features into its tiny form factor that could help accelerate research in quantum computing.
Intel has announced a new 12-qubit “silicon spin” chip, Tunnel Falls, and is making it available to the research community. In addition, Intel is collaborating with the Laboratory for Physical Sciences (LPS) at the University of Maryland’s Qubit Collaboratory (LQC), to advance quantum computing research.
The process that powers much of life on Earth, photosynthesis, is so finely tuned that just one photon is enough to kick it off.
Scientists have long suspected that photosynthesis must be sensitive to individual photons, or particles of light, because despite the way it dominates our days, the sun’s light is surprisingly sparse at the level of individual plant cells. But only now, with the help of quantum physics, have researchers been able to watch a single packet of light begin the process in an experiment described on June 14 in the journal Nature.
“It makes sense that photosynthesis only requires a single photon, but to actually be able to measure that … is really groundbreaking,” says Sara Massey, a physical chemist at Southwestern University in Texas, who was not involved with the new research. “Being able to actually see that hands-on with the data from these experiments is very valuable.”
A team of physicists, including University of Massachusetts assistant professor Tigran Sedrakyan, recently announced in the journal Nature that they have discovered a new phase of matter. Called the “chiral bose-liquid state,” the discovery opens a new path in the age-old effort to understand the nature of the physical world.
Under everyday conditions, matter can be a solid, liquid, or gas. But once you venture beyond the everyday—into temperatures approaching absolute zero.
Absolute zero is the theoretical lowest temperature on the thermodynamic temperature scale. At this temperature, all atoms of an object are at rest and the object does not emit or absorb energy. The internationally agreed-upon value for this temperature is −273.15 °C (−459.67 °F; 0.00 K).
The compelling feature of this new breed of quasiparticle, says Pedram Roushan of Google Quantum AI, is the combination of their accessibility to quantum logic operations and their relative invulnerability to thermal and environmental noise. This combination, he says, was recognized in the very first proposal of topological quantum computing, in 1997 by the Russian-born physicist Alexei Kitaev.
At the time, Kitaev realized that non-Abelian anyons could run any quantum computer algorithm. And now that two separate groups have created the quasi-particles in the wild, each team is eager to develop their own suite of quantum computational tools around these new quasiparticles.
The concept of a mirror universe has often been studied in theoretical cosmology, and as a new study shows, it might help us solve problems with the cosmological constant.
IBM announced a new breakthrough, published on the cover of the scientific journal Nature, demonstrating for the first time that quantum computers can produce accurate results at a scale of 100+ qubits reaching beyond leading classical approaches.
Blog with more info.
https://research.ibm.com/blog/utility-toward-useful-quantum
By using error mitigation, IBM scientists believe they’ve worked around the quantum noise that plagues quantum processors.
