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Category: quantum physics – Page 399

Researchers from Linköping University and the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden have proposed a new device concept that can efficiently transfer the information carried by electron spin to light at room temperature—a stepping stone toward future information technology. They present their approach in an article in Nature Communications.

Light and electron charge are the main media for information processing and transfer. In the search for information technology that is even faster, smaller and more energy-efficient, scientists around the globe are exploring another property of —their spin. Electronics that exploit both the spin and the charge of the electron are called “spintronics.”

Like the Earth, an electron spins around its own axis, either clockwise or counterclockwise. The handedness of the rotation is referred to as spin-up and spin-down states. In spintronics, the two states represent the binary bits and thus carry information. The information encoded by these can be converted by a -emitting device into light, which then carries the information over a long distance through fiber optics. The transfer of quantum information opens the possibility to exploit both and light, and the interaction between them, a technology known as “opto-spintronics.”

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so-called qubits, to perform computations much faster than any classical computer ever could.

While multiple frontrunner startups have explored various technology platforms, from superconducting qubits and ion trap systems to diamond-based quantum accelerators, scaling the number of qubits from a few dozen to hundreds, thousands, and eventually millions of qubits has remained notoriously difficult. But this might change with photonic quantum computing.

The startup ORCA Computing builds photonic quantum computers that use photons, the fundamental particles of light, as qubits. Using quantum memories and established telecommunications technology, it can scale its devices more easily and integrate with existing computing infrastructure e.g. in data centers. Based on the core memory technology developed by Kris Kaczmarek, ORCA was officially co-founded by Ian Walmsley, Richard Murray, Josh Nunn, and Cristina Escoda in Oxford in the fall of 2019. This summer 2022, it has raised a $15M Series A led by Octopus Ventures and joined by Oxford Science Enterprises, Quantonation, and Verve Ventures, with additional, project-based funding provided by Innovate UK. Previous investors also include Atmos Ventures and Creative Destruction Lab.

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Dr. Joscha Bach is VP of Research at AI Foundation and Author of Principles of Synthetic Intelligence, focused on how our minds work, and how to build machines that can perceive, think, and learn.

http://bach.ai.
Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Plinz.
LinkedIn ► https://linkedin.com/in/joschabach.

SHOW NOTES 📝
0:00 Open.
0:17 Hello & welcome.
0:37 Dr. Joscha Bach bio and introduction.
0:56 “It’s an insane world; an amazing time to be alive“
3:46 Conversation on the S-curve; current instability based on not handling aftermath of collapse of Industrial Revolution society with the advent of the Internet.
8:22 “Either kids or long-term civilization”; carbon sequestration involves not burning any carbon at all.
10:08 Organizing principles conflict with systems bent on infinite growth.
14:30 More on Dr. Bach at Cambridge; entrepreneurial journey leads to MIT and then AI Foundation.
16:23 Relationship between the physical world and our minds; pattern generation; types of computers.
18:10 Mathematics vs. Computation.
19:20 Accidental question-Dr. Bach’s thoughts on psychedelics.
20:27 Turing, “something is true if you can prove it“
23:14 Quantum computing discussion; Minecraft CPU example; “is our universe efficiently implemented or inefficiently implemented?“
23:50 Relationship between mind and universe; observational interface.
27:28 Materialism and idealism may complement each other.
29:08 Dream space neural architecture; “you and me are characters in a multimedia novel being authored by the brain”; the collective is part of your dream.
31:51 Necessity of ability to change the way you perceive vs. changing a physical world; perception upgrade is really a will or desire upgrade.
34:12 What is a model? Perspectives of variables and their relationship; probabilities.
35:58 Model convergence to truth aided by probabilities; motivations guide preferences.
38:00 People are born with ideas and then acquire preferences; motivation is how you regulate and push against reality; feedback loop from brain regulating body, awareness and unawareness of loops.
41:28 Needs don’t form a hierarchy; they coexist and compete.
43:00 “the shape of your soul is the hierarchy of your purposes“
45:26 Neurons; dopamine and other brain chemicals speak many languages; “neurons get fed if you regulate what you want to regulate“
48:50 Social interaction and brain chemistry; neurons work through pattern recognition, then patterns in the patterns.
51:43 Auditory (and all) senses build layers until we get a unified model of the world/universe.
53:24 Question-who’s in charge of the super-intelligence; single mind; which kind of system; sane/insane implementation.
59:50 Precepts; spatial intelligence; pattern to perception to worldview; intentional self.
1:02:36 Self controls simulations in the brain; “only a simulation can be conscious“
1:05:05 “The reason why you perceive the world as meaningful is because it’s generated in your mind to model your meaning.“
1:07:10 Everything you can perceive is generated by your mind; model of architecture.
1:11:45 Use of the DLPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex); “hippocampus has a script”; neurons individually not that important, somewhat interchangeable, just a signal processor.
1:14:52 “Are we individually intelligent?” Not generally so; generations of specialized people talked to each other; rebuilding efforts usually get foundations wrong; “it’s hard to wake a sleeping person; it’s impossible to wake a person pretending to sleep“
1:17:52 “The family of good people” is a human condition; morals need to guide our decisions but not our model-making.
1:19:00 Human-centric social media; scientists and philosophers are mostly confused people, humble but without answers; Dunning-Kruger Effect.
1:20:40 More on social media; understanding the nature of reality; “which way can I be useful to other people?”; why are we drawn to things that don’t have utility, like politics on current social media.
1:24:20 Social media done right are individual thoughts in the same mind, “Gaia doesn’t exist but it would be very useful to have one”; endgame of social media is a global brain.
1:26:15 Current society optimized for short games; “tumors“
1:29:02 Lebowski Theorem — “No super-intelligent system is going to do anything that is harder than hacking its own reward function“
1:31:12 “Imagine you build an AI that is way smarter, why SHOULD it serve us?“
1:32:20 “Maybe our motivational function is wrapped up in a big ball of stupid so we don’t debug it;” opting out of reality; how can we balance super-intelligence, will, and evolution or conditions of existence.
1:34:08 Philosophical remarks; reiteration that things are just happening, making it very difficult to predict outcomes; there isn’t a running simulation of a better society so it’s difficult to make changes.
1:36:15 Life is about cells, and cells are very rare.
1:38:08 Would have to be a larger, more imperceptible pattern around us and how would we know; Minecraft example.

http://simulationseries.com

Continue reading “Simulation #409 Dr. Joscha Bach — Conscious Machines” | >

What goes on inside planets like Neptune and Uranus? To find out, an international team headed by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the University of Rostock and France’s École Polytechnique conducted a novel experiment. They fired a laser at a thin film of simple PET plastic and investigated what happened using intensive laser flashes. One result was that the researchers were able to confirm their earlier thesis that it really does rain diamonds inside the ice giants at the periphery of our solar system. And another was that this method could establish a new way of producing nanodiamonds, which are needed, for example, for highly-sensitive quantum sensors. The group has presented its findings in the journal Science Advances.

The conditions in the interior of icy giant planets like Neptune and Uranus are extreme: temperatures reach several thousand degrees Celsius, and the pressure is millions of times greater than in the Earth’s atmosphere. Nonetheless, states like this can be simulated briefly in the lab: powerful laser flashes hit a film-like material sample, heat it up to 6,000 degrees Celsius for the blink of an eye and generate a shock wave that compresses the material for a few nanoseconds to a million times the atmospheric pressure.

“Up to now, we used hydrocarbon films for these kinds of experiment,” explains Dominik Kraus, physicist at HZDR and professor at the University of Rostock. “And we discovered that this produced tiny diamonds, known as nanodiamonds.”

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Some of us, when we hear the word quantum (plural quanta, from the German word Quanten), might think of health supplements, a sports car, or even the television show Quantum Leap. More recently, in Marvel Studios movies such as Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, and Avengers: Endgame, “the quantum realm” is presented where time flows differently from our ordinary reality and the Avengers may use the subatomic world “to go back in time”, a world that “is smaller than a single atom” (Woodward, 2019, para.20)

We might have also seen or known the meaning of words such as quantum mechanics, quantum computing, and quantum entanglement, but what is a quantum and how does it relate to our ordinary realm?

A quantum is a word that refers to “how much”; it is a specific amount. For example, if the speed of your car happens to be quantized in increments of 10 mph, then as you accelerate your car from 10 mph, the speed will jump to 20 mph, without passing through any speed between 10 mph and 20 mph. A speed of 12 mph or 19 mph is excluded because the speed of your car can only exist in those increments of 10 mph.

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Oxford quantum physicist Nikita Gourianov tore into the quantum computing industry this week, comparing the “fanfare” around the tech to a financial bubble in a searing commentary piece for the Financial Times.

In other words, he wrote, it’s far more hype than substance.

It’s a scathing, but also perhaps insightful, analysis of a burgeoning field that, at the very least, still has a lot to prove.

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The atoms arranged in lines and sheets reached about 1.2 nanokelvin, more than 2 billion times colder than interstellar space. For the atoms in three-dimensional arrangements, the situation is so complex that the researchers are still figuring out the best way to measure the temperature.

The atoms in the experiment belong to a larger group called fermions and were “the coldest fermions in the universe”, says Hazzard. “Thinking about experimenting on this 10 years ago, it looked like a theorist’s dream,” he says.

Physicists have long been interested in how atoms interact in exotic magnets like this because they suspect that similar interactions happen in high-temperature superconductors – materials that perfectly conduct electricity. By better understanding what happens, they could build better superconductors.

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A team of Japanese and US physicists has pushed thousands of Ytterbium atoms to just within a billionth of a degree above absolute zero to understand how matter behaves at these extreme temperatures. The approach treats the atoms as fermions, the type of particles like electrons and protons, that cannot end up in the so-called fifth state of matter at those extreme temperatures: a Bose-Einstein Condensate.

When fermions are actually cooled down, they do exhibit quantum properties in a way that we can’t simulate even with the most powerful supercomputer. These extremely cold atoms are placed in a lattice and they simulate a “Hubbard model” which is used to study the magnetic and superconductive behavior of materials, in particular the collective motion of electrons through them.

The symmetry of these models is known as the special unitary group, or, SU, and depends on the possible spin state. In the case of Ytterbium, that number is 6. Calculating the behavior of just 12 particles in a SU Hubbard model can’t be done with computers. However, as reported in Nature Physics, the team used laser cooling to reduce the temperature of 300,000 atoms to a value almost three billion times colder than the temperature of outer space.

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Be it magnets or superconductors, materials are known for their various properties. However, these properties may change spontaneously under extreme conditions. Researchers at the Technische Universität Dresden (TUD) and the Technische Universität München (TUM) have discovered an entirely new type of these phase transitions. They display the phenomenon of quantum entanglement involving many atoms, which previously has only been observed in the realm of a few atoms. The results were recently published in the scientific journal Nature.

New fur for the quantum cat

In physics, Schroedinger’s cat is an allegory for two of the most awe-inspiring effects of quantum mechanics: entanglement and superposition. Researchers from Dresden and Munich have now observed these behaviors on a much larger scale than that of the smallest of particles. Until now, materials that display properties, like magnetism, have been known to have so-called domains—islands in which the materials properties are homogeneously either of one or a different kind (imagine them being either black or white, for example).

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