Lifeboat Foundation

Imagine you sit down and pick up your favorite book. You look at the image on the front cover, run your fingers across the smooth book sleeve, and smell that familiar book smell as you flick through the pages. To you, the book is made up of a range of sensory appearances.

But you also expect the book has its own independent existence behind those appearances. So when you put the book down on the coffee table and walk into the kitchen, or leave your house to go to work, you expect the book still looks, feels, and smells just as it did when you were holding it.

Two important factors limiting Moore’s Law are power consumption and Coulomb interactions are interactions between electric charges that follow Coloumb’s law, an electrodynamics theory.

These interactions can be a major challenge for the development of nanoelectronic circuits. Quantum spin Hall (QSH) insulators are particularly promising materials for the development of low-power electronics, yet so far the impact of Coulomb interactions on nanocircuits made by these materials have only been examined theoretically, rather than experimentally.

Researchers at Nanjing University and Peking University have recently observed one-dimensional (1D) Coulomb drag between adjacent QSH edges separated by an air gap. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, highlights the potential of QSH effects for suppressing the adverse effects of Coulomb interactions on the performance of nanocircuits.

“Because nothing can protect hardware, software, applications or data from a quantum-enabled adversary, encryption keys and data will require re-encrypting with a quantum-resistant algorithm and deleting or physically securing copies and backups.” v/@preskil… See More.

To ease the disruption caused by moving away from quantum-vulnerable cryptographic code, NIST has released a draft document describing the first steps of that journey.

New research shows that there are problems even quantum computers might never be able to solve.

Physics-informed machine learning might help verify microchips.

Physicists love recreating the world in software. A simulation lets you explore many versions of reality to find patterns or to test possibilities. But if you want one that’s realistic down to individual atoms and electrons, you run out of computing juice pretty quickly.

Machine-learning models can approximate detailed simulations, but often require lots of expensive training data. A new method shows that physicists can lend their expertise to machine-learning algorithms, helping them train on a few small simulations consisting of a few atoms, then predict the behavior of system with hundreds of atoms. In the future, similar techniques might even characterize microchips with billions of atoms, predicting failures before they occur.

Continue reading “Physicists Teach AI to Simulate Atomic Clusters” »

Researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded in observing a crystal that consists only of electrons. Such Wigner crystals were already predicted almost ninety years ago but could only now be observed directly in a semiconductor material.

Crystals have fascinated people through the ages. Who hasn’t admired the complex patterns of a snowflake at some point, or the perfectly symmetrical surfaces of a rock crystal? The magic doesn’t stop even if one knows that all this results from a simple interplay of attraction and repulsion between atoms and electrons. A team of researchers led by Ataç Imamoğlu, professor at the Institute for Quantum Electronics at ETH Zurich, have now produced a very special crystal. Unlike normal crystals, it consists exclusively of electrons. In doing so, they have confirmed a theoretical prediction that was made almost ninety years ago and which has since been regarded as a kind of holy grail of condensed matter physics. Their results were recently published in the scientific journal Nature.

Nothing now obstructing development of revolutionary computers, key figure says.

Researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded in observing a crystal that consists only of electrons. Such Wigner crystals were already predicted almost ninety years ago but could only now be observed directly in a semiconductor material.

Crystals have fascinated people through the ages. Who hasn’t admired the complex patterns of a snowflake at some point, or the perfectly symmetrical surfaces of a rock crystal? The magic doesn’t stop even if one knows that all this results from a simple interplay of attraction and repulsion between atoms and electrons. A team of researchers led by Ataç Imamoğlu, professor at the Institute for Quantum Electronics at ETH Zurich, have now produced a very special crystal. Unlike normal crystals, it consists exclusively of electrons. In doing so, they have confirmed a theoretical prediction that was made almost ninety years ago and which has since been regarded as a kind of holy grail of condensed matter physics. Their results were recently published in the scientific journal Nature.

A decades-old prediction

Continue reading “A Crystal Made Exclusively of Electrons – ‘Holy Grail’ Wigner Crystals Observed for First Time” »

Protocol for performing two-qubit entangling gates trades laser power for speed with little loss of fidelity.