Lifeboat Foundation

What is time? What is humankind’s role in the universe? What is the meaning of life? For much of human history, these questions have been the province of religion and philosophy. What answers can science provide?

In this talk, Sean Carroll will share what physicists know, and don’t yet know, about the nature of time. He’ll argue that while the universe might not have purpose, we can create meaning and purpose through how we approach reality, and how we live our lives.

Continue reading “The Passage of Time and the Meaning of Life | Sean Carroll” »

JÜLICH, Germany, May 28, 2021 — Quantum systems are considered extremely fragile. Even the smallest interactions with the environment can result in the loss of sensitive quantum effects. In the renowned journal Science, however, researchers from TU Delft, RWTH Aachen University and Forschungszentrum Jülich now present an experiment in which a quantum system consisting of two coupled atoms behaves surprisingly stable under electron bombardment. The experiment provide an indication that special quantum states might be realised in a quantum computer more easily than previously thought.

The so-called decoherence is one of the greatest enemies of the quantum physicist. Experts understand by this the decay of quantum states. This inevitably occurs when the system interacts with its environment. In the macroscopic world, this exchange is unavoidable, which is why quantum effects rarely occur in daily life. The quantum systems used in research, such as individual atoms, electrons or photons, are better shielded, but are fundamentally similarly sensitive.

“Systems subject to quantum physics, unlike classical objects, are not sharply defined in all their properties. Instead, they can occupy several states at once. This is called superposition,” Markus Ternes explains. “A famous example is Schrödinger’s thought experiment with the cat, which is temporarily dead and alive at the same time. However, the superposition breaks down as soon as the system is disturbed or measured. What is left then is only a single state, which is the measured value,” says the quantum physicist from Forschungszentrum Jülich and RWTH Aachen University.

Scientists from the Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat—Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter have developed a new understanding of how electrons behave in strong magnetic fields. Their results explain measurements of electric currents in three-dimensional materials that signal a quantum Hall effect—a phenomenon thus far only associated with two-dimensional metals. This new 3D effect can be the foundation for topological quantum phenomena, which are believed to be particularly robust and therefore promising candidates for extremely powerful quantum technologies. These results have just been published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

Dr. Tobias Meng and Dr. Johannes Gooth are early career researchers in the Würzburg-Dresdner Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat that researches topological quantum materials since 2019. They could hardly believe the findings of a recent publication in Nature claiming that electrons in the topological metal zirconium pentatelluride (ZrTe5) move only in two-dimensional planes, despite the fact that the material is three-dimensional. Meng and Gooth therefore started their own research and experiments on the material ZrTe5. Meng from the Technische Universität Dresden (TUD) developed the theoretical model, Gooth from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids designed the experiments. Seven measurements with different techniques always lead to the same conclusion.

How materials behave depends on the interactions between countless atoms. You could see this as a giant group chat in which atoms are continuously exchanging quantum information. Researchers from Delft University of Technology in collaboration with RWTH Aachen University and the Research Center Jülich have now been able to intercept a chat between two atoms. They present their findings in Science on May 28, 2021.

Atoms, of course, don’t really talk. But they can feel each other. This is particularly the case for magnetic atoms. “Each atom carries a small magnetic moment called spin. These spins influence each other, like compass needles do when you bring them close together. If you give one of them a push, they will start moving together in a very specific way,” explains Sander Otte, leader of the team that performed the research. “But according to the laws of quantum mechanics, each spin can be simultaneously point in various directions, forming a superposition. This means that actual transfer of quantum information takes place between the atoms, like some sort of conversation.”

## SCIENCE ADVANCES • MAY 24, 2021 # *by Vienna University of Technology*

In everyday life, phase transitions usually have to do with temperature changes--for example, when an ice cube gets warmer and melts. But there are also different kinds of phase transitions, depending on other parameters such as magnetic field. In order to understand the quantum properties of materials, phase transitions are particularly interesting when they occur directly at the absolute zero point of temperature. These transitions are called "quantum phase transitions" or a "quantum critical points."

Such a quantum critical point has now been discovered by an Austrian-American research team in a novel material, and in an unusually pristine form. The properties of this material are now being further investigated.

Continue reading “New quantum material discovered” »

In the last few years, several technology companies including Google, Microsoft, and IBM, have massively invested in quantum computing systems based on microwave superconducting circuit platforms in an effort to scale them up from small research-oriented systems to commercialized computing platforms. But fulfilling the potential of quantum computers requires a significant increase in the number of qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers, which can store and manipulate quantum information.

But quantum signals can be contaminated by thermal noise generated by the movement of electrons. To prevent this, superconducting quantum systems must operate at ultra-low temperatures—less than 20 milli-Kelvin—which can be achieved with cryogenic helium-dilution refrigerators.

The output microwave signals from such systems are amplified by low-noise high-electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) at low temperatures. Signals are then routed outside the refrigerator by microwave coaxial cables, which are the easiest solutions to control and read superconducting devices but are poor heat isolators, and take up a lot of space; this becomes a problem when we need to scale up qubits in the thousands.

A research team from TU Wien together with US research institutes came across a surprising form of ‘quantum criticality’; this could lead to a design concept for new materials.

In everyday life, phase transitions usually have to do with temperature changes — for example, when an ice cube gets warmer and melts. But there are also different kinds of phase transitions, depending on other parameters such as magnetic field. In order to understand the quantum properties of materials, phase transitions are particularly interesting when they occur directly at the absolute zero point of temperature. These transitions are called “quantum phase transitions” or a “quantum critical points.”

Such a quantum critical point has now been discovered by an Austrian-American research team in a novel material, and in an unusually pristine form. The properties of this material are now being further investigated. It is suspected that the material could be a so-called Weyl-Kondo semimetal, which is considered to have great potential for quantum technology due to special quantum states (so-called topological states). If this proves to be true, a key for the targeted development of topological quantum materials would have been found. The results were found in a cooperation between TU Wien, Johns Hopkins University, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Rice University and has now been published in the journal Science Advances.

Physicists in Germany say they have found definitive evidence for the existence of superfluidity in an extremely cold 2D gas of fermions. Their experiment involved confining a few thousand lithium atoms inside a specially-designed trap, and they say that the finding could help shed light on the role of reduced dimensionality in high-temperature superconductors.

Understanding the mechanisms that allow electrical current to flow without resistance inside cuprate materials at ambient pressure and at temperatures of up to 133 K is one of the biggest outstanding challenges in condensed-matter physics. Although scientists can explain the process behind more conventional, lower-temperature superconductivity, they are still trying to work out how the phenomenon can take place at high temperatures in what are essentially 2D materials (cuprates being made up of layers of copper oxide). Such low-dimensional materials are prone to fluctuations that prevent the long-range coherence thought to be essential for superconductivity.

2D Fermi gases can serve as model systems to try and help clear up this mystery, having strong and tuneable correlations between their constituent fermions that can mimic interactions in superconductors. Macroscopic quantum phenomena such as Bose-Einstein condensation involve large numbers of bosons – particles with integer spin – co-existing in a single quantum state. Fermions, in contrast, have half-integer spin and are subject to the Pauli exclusion principle – which precludes multiple particles sharing quantum states. But fermions can get around this restriction by pairing up and combining their spins.

From a purely scientific frame of reference, many quantum phenomena like non-local correlations between distant entities and wave-particle duality, the wave function collapse and consistent histories, quantum entanglement and teleportation, the uncertainty principle and overall observer-dependence of reality pin down our conscious mind being intrinsic to reality. And this is the one thing the current physicalist paradigm fails to account for. Critical-mass anomalies will ultimately lead to the full paradigm shift in physics. It’s just a matter of time.

With consciousness as primary, everything remains the same and everything changes. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology are unchanged. What changes is our interpretation as to what they are describing. They are not describing the unfolding of an objective physical world, but transdimensional evolution of one’s conscious mind. There’s nothing “physical” about our physical reality except that we perceive it that way. By playing the “Game of Life” we evolved to survive not to see quantum mechanical reality. At our classical level of experiential reality we perceive ourselves as physical, at the quantum level we are a probabilistic wave function, which is pure information.

Continue reading “The Mental Universe Hypothesis: Reconnecting to Your Cosmic Self” »