Lifeboat Foundation

In high-end 21st century communications, information travels in the form of a stream of light pulses typically traveling through fiber optic cables. Each pulse can be as faint as a single photon, the smallest possible unit (quantum) of light. The speed at which such systems can operate depends critically on how fast and how accurately detectors on the receiving end can discriminate and process those photons.

Now scientists at the National institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have devised a method that can detect individual photons at a rate 10 times faster than the best existing technology, with lower error rates, higher detection efficiency, and less noise.

“While classical communication and detection can operate at blazing speeds, quantum systems, which need that ultimate sensitivity for those faintest of pulses, are limited to much lower speeds,” said group leader Alan Migdall. “Combining that ultimate sensitivity with the ability to achieve the counting of photons at high rates has been a long-standing challenge. Here we are pushing both performance limits all in the same device.”

Circa 2014 essentially this could make endless computer chips from light.

Princeton researchers have managed to cause light to behave like a crystal within a specialized computer chip, according to a recent paper. This is the first time anyone has accomplished this effect in a lab.

Here’s why it’s so hard: Atoms can easily form solids, liquids, and gasses, because when they come into contact they push and pull on each other. That push and pull forms the underlying structure of all matter. Light particles, or photons, do not typically interact with one another, according to Dr. Andrew Houck, a professor of electrical engineering at Princeton and an author on the study. The trick of this research was forcing them to do just that.

Continue reading “Light Forms Crystal-Like Structure On Computer Chip” »

Design could allow large numbers of qubits to be integrated in one device.

Superconductivity – the ability of a material to transmit an electric current without loss – is a quantum effect that, despite years of research, is still limited to very low temperatures. Now a team of scientists at the MPSD has succeeded in creating a metastable state with vanishing electrical resistance in a molecular solid by exposing it to finely tuned pulses of intense laser light. This effect had already been demonstrated in 2016 for only a very short time, but in a new study the authors of the paper have shown a far longer lifetime, nearly 10000 times longer than before. The long lifetimes for light-induced superconductivity hold promise for applications in integrated electronics. The research by Budden et al. has been published in Nature Physics.

Superconductivity is one of the most fascinating and mysterious phenomena of modern physics. It describes the sudden loss of electrical resistance in certain materials when they are cooled below a critical temperature. However, the need for such cooling still limits the technological usability of these materials.

In recent years, research by Andrea Cavalleri’s group at the MPSD has revealed that intense pulses of infrared light are a viable tool to induce superconducting properties in a variety of different materials at much higher temperatures than would be possible without photo-stimulation. However, these exotic states have so far persisted for only a few picoseconds (trillionths of a second), thus limiting the experimental methods for studying them to ultrafast optics.

Diamond-Based Quantum Accelerator Puts #Qubits in a Server Rack.

The startup Quantum Brilliance recently announced that they have developed a market-ready, diam… See More.

Its makers envision this device growing to 50+ qubits and fitting aboard satellites, autonomous vehicles.

Continue reading “Diamond-Based Quantum Accelerator Puts Qubits in a Server Rack” »

Although universal fault-tolerant quantum computers – with millions of physical quantum bits (or qubits) – may be a decade or two away, quantum computing research continues apace. It has been hypothesized that quantum computers will one day revolutionize information processing across a host of military and civilian applications from pharmaceuticals discovery, to advanced batteries, to machine learning, to cryptography. A key missing element in the race toward fault-tolerant quantum systems, however, is meaningful metrics to quantify how useful or transformative large quantum computers will actually be once they exist.

To provide standards against which to measure quantum computing progress and drive current research toward specific goals, DARPA announced its Quantum Benchmarking program. Its aim is to re-invent key quantum computing metrics, make those metrics testable, and estimate the required quantum and classical resources needed to reach critical performance thresholds.

“It’s really about developing quantum computing yardsticks that can accurately measure what’s important to focus on in the race toward large, fault-tolerant quantum computers,” said Joe Altepeter, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “Building a useful quantum computer is really hard, and it’s important to make sure we’re using the right metrics to guide our progress towards that goal. If building a useful quantum computer is like building the first rocket to the moon, we want to make sure we’re not quantifying progress toward that goal by measuring how high our planes can fly.”

Fueled by the need for faster life sciences and healthcare research, especially in the wake of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, IBM and the 100-year-old Cleveland Clinic are partnering to bolster the Clinic’s research capabilities by integrating a wide range of IBM’s advanced technologies in quantum computing, AI and the cloud.

Access to IBM’s quantum systems has so far been primarily cloud-based, but IBM is providing the Cleveland Clinic with IBM’s first private-sector, on-premises quantum computer in the U.S. Scheduled for delivery next year, the initial IBM Quantum System One will harness between 50 to 100 qubits, according to IBM, but the goal is to stand up a more powerful, more advanced, next-generation 1000+ qubit quantum system at the Clinic as the project matures.

For the Cleveland Clinic, the 10-year partnership with IBM will add huge research capabilities and power as part of an all-new Discovery Center being created at the Clinic’s campus in Cleveland, Ohio. The Accelerator will serve as the technology foundation for the Clinic’s new Global Center for Pathogen Research & Human Health, which is being developed to drive research in areas including genomics, single-cell transcriptomics, population health, clinical applications and chemical and drug discovery, according to the Clinic.

About a year ago, Honeywell announced that it had entered the quantum computing race with a technology that was different from anything else on the market. The company claimed that because the performance of its qubits was so superior to those of its competitors, its computer could do better on a key quantum computing benchmark than quantum computers with far more qubits.

Now, roughly a year later, the company finally released a paper describing the feat in detail. But in the meantime, the competitive landscape has shifted considerably.

A team of researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, has found that the human hand can be used as a powerless infrared radiation (IR) source in multiple kinds of applications. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group notes that the human hand naturally emits IR and they demonstrate that the radiation can be captured and used.

The human body emits light in the invisible IR range, including the hands. This source of radiation, the researchers noted, could potentially be captured and used in applications ranging from signal generation to encryption systems. They further noted that because the hand has multiple fingers, the IR that it emits could be considered to be multiplexed.

IR is a form of electromagnetic radiation —its wavelengths are longer than those of visible light, which is why humans cannot see them. Prior research has shown that the human body emits such radiation due to body heat. Electromagnetic radiation carries with it radiant energy, and its behavior is classified as both a quantum particle and a wave. Prior research has also shown that electromagnetic radiation can be used in a variety of applications, including microwaves, radios and medical imaging devices. And infrared light, in particular, enables night vision goggles, spectroscopy devices and medical devices used to treat burn victims. In this new effort, the researchers have found that the very small amount of IR emitted by the human hand is sufficient to use in various devices.