A team of physicists, including University of Massachusetts assistant professor Tigran Sedrakyan, recently announced in the journal Nature that they have discovered a new phase of matter. Called the “chiral Bose-liquid state,” the discovery opens a new path in the age-old effort to understand the nature of the physical world.
Under everyday conditions, matter can be a solid, liquid or gas. But once you venture beyond the everyday—into temperatures approaching absolute zero, things smaller than a fraction of an atom or which have extremely low states of energy—the world looks very different. “You find quantum states of matter way out on these fringes,” says Sedrakyan, “and they are much wilder than the three classical states we encounter in our everyday lives.”
Sedrakyan has spent years exploring these wild quantum states, and he is particularly interested in the possibility of what physicists call “band degeneracy,” “moat bands” or “kinetic frustration” in strongly interacting quantum matter.
Researchers at IBM pitted their 127-qubit Eagle quantum computer against a conventional supercomputer in a challenge to perform a complex calculation – and the quantum computer won.
A team of theoretical and experimental physicists has made a fundamental discovery of a new state of matter.
In our day-to-day life, we encounter three types of matter—solid, liquid, and gas. But, when we move beyond the realm of daily life, we see exotic or quantum states of matter, such as plasma, time crystals, and Bose-Einstein condensate.
These are observed when we go to low temperatures near absolute zero or on atomic and subatomic scales, where particles can have very low energies. Scientists are now claiming that they have found a new phase of matter.
Germany’s oldest university hosts many scientists conducting groundbreaking work. Little did they know how they would become entangled in China’s quantum military strategy. A DW investigation with CORRECTIV.
A team led by Prof. Guo Guangcan from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) provides a comprehensive overview of the progress achieved in the field of quantum teleportation. The team, which includes Prof. Hu Xiaomin, Prof. Guo Yu, Prof. Liu Biheng, and Prof. Li Chuanfeng from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), CAS, was invited to publish a review paper on quantum teleportation in Nature Review Physics.
As one of the most important protocols in the field of quantum information, quantum teleportation has attracted great attention since it was proposed in 1993. Through entanglement distribution and Bell-state measurement, quantum teleportation enables the nonlocal transmission of an unknown quantum state, which has deepened the understanding of quantum entanglement. More importantly, quantum teleportation can effectively overcome the distance limitation of direct transmission of quantum states in quantum communication, as well as realize long-range interactions between different quantum bits in quantum computing.
The team has been at the forefront of experimental studies on high-dimensional quantum teleportation and quantum networks. Their notable achievements include the successful preparation of the world’s highest fidelity 32-dimensional quantum entanglement, the effective transmission of high-dimensional entanglement over 11 kilometers of optical fiber, and the development of efficient techniques for quantum entanglement detection. They have also made significant progress in areas such as high-dimensional quantum dense coding, high-dimensional quantum guidance, and high-dimensional quantum teleportation.
Here’s my new article for Aporia Magazine. A lot of wild ideas in it. Give it a read:
Regardless of the ethics and whether the science can even one day be worked out for Quantum Archaeology, the philosophical dilemma it presents to Pascal’s Wager is glaring. If humans really could eradicate the essence of death as we know it—including even the ability to ever permanently die—Pascal’s Wager becomes unworkable. Frankly, so does my Transhumanist Wager. After all, why should I dedicate my life and energy to living indefinitely through science when, by the next century, technology could bring me back exactly as I was—or even as an improved version of myself?
Outside of philosophical discourse, billions of dollars are pouring into the anti-aging and technology fields—much of it from Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area where I live. Everyone from entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerburg to nonprofits like XPRIZE to giants like Google is spending money on ways to try to end all diseases and overcome death. Bank of America recently reported that they expect the extreme longevity field to be worth over $600 billion dollars by 2025.
Technology research spending for computers, microprocessors, and information technology is even bigger: $4.3 trillion dollars is estimated to have been spent worldwide in 2019. This amount includes research into quantum computing, which is hoped to eventually make computers hundreds—maybe thousands—of times faster over the next 50 years.
Despite the advancements of the 21st Century, the science to overcome biological death is not even close to being ready, if ever. Over 100,000 people still die a day, and in some countries like America, life expectancy has actually started going slightly backward. However, like other black swans of innovation in history—such as the internet, combustion engine, and penicillin—we shouldn’t rule out that new inventions may make humans live dramatically longer and maybe even as long as they like. As our species reaches for the heavens with its growing scientific armory, Pascal’s Wager is going to be challenged. It just might need an upgrade.
