Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: quantum physics – Page 5

Silicon qubits surpass 99.99% gate fidelity while operating three at once

Silicon spin qubits are a promising platform for building scalable quantum computers as they are compatible with the semiconductor manufacturing technologies used to produce today’s computer chips. However, they have an important weakness: silicon spin qubits typically lose accuracy when several qubits are under parallel control. To be useful, quantum computers will need to operate many qubits simultaneously without compromising the accuracy of their operations.

Now, in a study published in Nature Physics, researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and collaborators have addressed this challenge by achieving high-fidelity control of multiple silicon spin qubits operating in parallel. Using a five-qubit silicon array controlled through a single shared microwave line, they identified a key source of errors during the simultaneous operation of qubits and developed a way to mitigate its effects.

According to Leon Camenzind, a research scientist at RIKEN and co-first author who supervised the experiments, “This shows that high-fidelity control can be maintained even when several qubits are operated at the same time and represents an important step toward scaling up silicon-based quantum processors.”

Robotok: Mining Internet Videos for Dexterous Robot Learning

What if robots could learn dexterous skills by watching videos on the internet?

Teaching robots to manipulate objects is challenging because collecting training data is expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to scale across different tasks and environments. Humans, on the other hand, demonstrate countless everyday skills in videos uploaded online. The challenge is finding the right demonstrations that can help a robot learn how to perform a specific action.

A new system called RoboTok tackles this problem by turning internet videos into a searchable resource for robot learning. Given a reference video of a person performing a manipulation task, RoboTok searches for other videos showing similar hand movements and interactions with objects. Rather than relying mainly on visual similarities, it analyzes the motion trajectories of the hands in three-dimensional space, using a representation centered on the person performing the action.

This approach allows the system to recognize similar manipulation behaviors even when videos differ in camera angles, backgrounds, visual appearances, or when parts of the person’s body are obscured. Because the motion representation is compact, RoboTok can also index and search large collections of online videos efficiently.

The researchers evaluated the system using video-retrieval benchmarks and real-world robot experiments. Their results showed that RoboTok retrieved more relevant demonstrations than existing approaches and helped robots perform manipulation tasks more successfully. In real-world tests, RoboTok-guided robot policies achieved an average improvement of 42.2 percentage points in task success rates compared with the strongest baseline for each task.

The broader implication is significant: the internet could become a vast, continuously growing source of training data for robots. Instead of relying exclusively on costly, specially collected robot demonstrations, researchers could extract useful manipulation examples from videos of humans performing everyday tasks.

RoboTok does not mean robots can automatically master every skill simply by watching videos. They still need suitable learning methods and robot-specific training. But by making human demonstrations easier to find and reuse, this approach offers a promising path toward more scalable robot learning and more dexterous machines.

#ArtificialIntelligence #robotics #ImitationLearning #DexterousManipulation.

Continue reading “Robotok: Mining Internet Videos for Dexterous Robot Learning” | >

Jamming the flow to enable memory in quantum materials

Understanding and controlling phase transitions are fundamental to physics and central to many technological revolutions. There is currently strong interest in materials with coupled structural and electronic phase transitions, where controlling the transition plasticity naturally yields built-in memory—a key step in emulating neurons and synapses for “neuromorphic” or brain-like computing technologies.

A team of UC San Diego researchers led by physics professor Oleg Shpyrko developed a new approach to coherent X-ray diffraction—a microscopy technique that is highly sensitive to specific nanoscale domain configurations —that allowed them to observe dynamics within a neuristor (a man-made device that mimics the brain’s neurons) made of vanadium dioxide while electricity was applied.

By taking measurements while operating the neuristor, they discovered a strategy to make the material learn and forget a specific state, opening an avenue toward developing energy-efficient brain-inspired hardware.

Rare particle decays hint at deviations from Standard Model predictions

Studying rare processes is part and parcel of particle physics, providing stringent tests of the Standard Model. At the recent International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP), the CMS and LHCb collaborations presented their latest research into one such process: the transformation of a beauty quark into a strange quark, a muon and the oppositely charged antimuon (b→sμ⁺μ⁻).

Flavor transitions—when one type of quark turns into another—can only take place via the weak interaction, one of the four fundamental forces. Quantum physics describes how other particles, not directly involved in a particular transition, can influence how that transition takes place. If a process happens differently than is predicted by the influence of the particles we know about, which make up the Standard Model, this difference could point to the existence of as-yet-undiscovered particles and interactions.

Some of these transitions are extremely rare, which makes them very sensitive to any potential contributions from particles that may exist beyond the Standard Model. The b→sμ⁺μ⁻ transition is one such process, only occurring approximately once in every 10 million decays of particles containing beauty quarks, known as beauty particles. Over the past decade, signs have begun to appear that this transition may not occur as expected.

Quantum network test checks entanglement without having to trust detectors

Quantum networks are systems that connect different users or devices using principles of quantum mechanics. In the future, these networks could help improve the security of communications.

For entanglement-based quantum networks to work, however, researchers need to be able to verify that particles are entangled and assess the extent of their entanglement. Entanglement is a quantum mechanical effect in which the shared states of distant particles cannot be described as separate or independent.

Researchers at Shandong University recently introduced a new approach for verifying entanglement in a quantum network that does not require trusting the equipment used to analyze and detect photons (i.e., light particles), as most previously developed strategies do.

IBM executive warns of risk of quantum computing hacks

Organizations are unprepared for the risks posed by quantum computing, IBM’s Europe and Africa vice president Alessandro Curioni told AFP Wednesday, referring to the high-speed technology that could crack security encryptions and enable large-scale cyberattacks.

“If you look at the world, how many organizations became quantum-safe? I would say less than 10% today,” Curioni said on the sidelines of a London conference organized by the American technology pioneer.

IBM, a leader in the field competing against Microsoft and Google, aims to develop a “large-scale, fault-tolerant” quantum computer for commercial clients by 2029.

Software advance brings complex quantum simulations to standard computers

A major software advance could aid the creation of bigger, more reliable quantum computers, a study suggests. Researchers have developed an algorithm that enables off-the-shelf computers to run quantum simulations previously only possible using the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

It means the simulations can be run using around 5% of the computing power previously needed to perform them with a supercomputer, the team says.

The advance could make it cheaper and easier to run experiments vital for understanding the limitations of current quantum computers and informing the design of improved devices, experts say.

From spin wave to superconducting circuit: A one-way street for quantum information

Quantum information systems could one day shape everyday life through faster computing, sharper sensing and more secure communication. A new result from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U. of I.) marks an important step toward enabling magnetic spins—a quantum property of matter that can be used to store and manipulate information—to play a role in the future of quantum information processing.

The researchers show that ripples in the magnetic state of a material, called spin waves, can interact with superconducting circuits, tiny electrical circuits that can carry microwave signals. The result is a hybrid system in which these two different ways of carrying information can interact and work together.

One can think of it like a hybrid car: A gasoline engine and an electric motor operate in fundamentally different ways, but a hybrid vehicle connects them so they can work together. Similarly, the new quantum system brings together magnetic spin waves and superconducting circuits, potentially allowing researchers to combine the strengths of both.

A Quantum Breakthrough Inside a Diamond Could Help Solve One of Einstein’s Greatest Mysteries

Electrons inside a diamond have given a floating, centimeter-sized device a quantum nudge, opening a new path toward testing how quantum physics and gravity fit together.

Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have used electron spin inside a diamond to drive the motion of a centimeter-scale (roughly 0.4-inch-scale) levitating device. Published in Science Advances, the experiment offers a new way to explore quantum effects in objects massive enough to matter in future investigations of gravity.

Quantum mechanics already makes lasers, MRI scanners, semiconductors, and quantum computers possible. But testing its stranger predictions in larger objects is difficult because heat, vibration, and other environmental disturbances can overwhelm delicate quantum behavior.