Lifeboat Foundation

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.

Experiment opens a window on gravity’s effect on quantum objects.

Rigetti Computing, a California-based developer of quantum integrated circuits, has announced it is launching the world’s first multi-chip quantum processor.

The processor incorporates a proprietary modular architecture that accelerates the path to commercialization and solves key scaling challenges toward fault-tolerant quantum computers.

“We’ve developed a fundamentally new approach to scaling quantum computers,” says Chad Rigetti, founder and CEO of Rigetti Computing. “Our proprietary innovations in chip design and manufacturing have unlocked what we believe is the fastest path to building the systems needed to run practical applications and error correction.”

Quantum computing is coming on leaps and bounds. Now there’s an operating system available on a chip thanks to a Cambridge University-led consortia with a vision is make quantum computers as transparent and well known as RaspberryPi.

This “sensational breakthrough” is likened by the Cambridge Independent Press to the moment during the 1960s when computers shrunk from being room-sized to being sat on top of a desk.

Around 50 quantum computers have been built to date, and they all use different software – there is no quantum equivalent of Windows, IOS or Linux. The new project will deliver an OS that allows the same quantum software to run on different types of quantum computing hardware.

This is only the Beginning.

Quantum physicist Mario Krenn remembers sitting in a café in Vienna in early 2016, poring over computer printouts, trying to make sense of what MELVIN had found. MELVIN was a machine-learning algorithm Krenn had built, a kind of artificial intelligence. Its job was to mix and match the building blocks of standard quantum experiments and find solutions to new problems. And it did find many interesting ones. But there was one that made no sense.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘My program has a bug, because the solution cannot exist,’” Krenn says. MELVIN had seemingly solved the problem of creating highly complex entangled states involving multiple photons (entangled states being those that once made Albert Einstein invoke the specter of “spooky action at a distance”). Krenn and his colleagues had not explicitly provided MELVIN the rules needed to generate such complex states, yet it had found a way. Eventually, he realized that the algorithm had rediscovered a type of experimental arrangement that had been devised in the early 1990s. But those experiments had been much simpler. MELVIN had cracked a far more complex puzzle.

Continue reading “AI Designs Quantum Physics Experiments Beyond What Any Human Has Conceived” »

Nathan Seiberg, 64, still does a lot of the electrical work and even some of the plumbing around his house in Princeton, New Jersey. It’s an interest he developed as a kid growing up in Israel, where he tinkered with his car and built a radio.

“I was always fascinated by solving problems and understanding how things work,” he said.

Seiberg’s professional career has been about problem solving, too, though nothing as straightforward as fixing radios. He’s a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, and over the course of a long and decorated career he has made many contributions to the development of quantum field theory, or QFT.

A new theory explains the seemingly irreversible arrow of time while yielding insights into entropy, quantum computers, black holes, and the past-future divide.

A quantum microscope obtains signal-to-noise beyond the photodamage limits of conventional microscopy, revealing biological structures within cells that would not otherwise be resolved.