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Category: quantum physics – Page 51

As the fundamental flaw of today’s quantum computers, improving qubit stability remains the focus of much research in this field. One such stability attempt involves so-called topological quantum computing with the use of anyons, which are two-dimensional quasiparticles. Such an approach has been claimed by Microsoft in a recent paper in Nature. This comes a few years after an earlier claim by Microsoft for much the same feat, which was found to be based on faulty science and hence retracted.

The claimed creation of anyons here involves Majorana fermions, which differ from the much more typical Dirac fermions. These Majorana fermions are bound with other such fermions as a Majorana zero mode (MZM), forming anyons that are intertwined (braided) to form what are in effect logic gates. In the Nature paper the Microsoft researchers demonstrate a superconducting indium-arsenide (InAs) nanowire-based device featuring a read-out circuit (quantum dot interferometer) with the capacitance of one of the quantum dots said to vary in a way that suggests that the nanowire device-under-test demonstrates the presence of MZMs at either end of the wire.

Microsoft has a dedicated website to their quantum computing efforts, though it remains essential to stress that this is not a confirmation until their research is replicated by independent researchers. If confirmed, MZMs could provide a way to create more reliable quantum computing circuitry that does not have to lean so heavily on error correction to get any usable output. Other, competing efforts here include such things as hybrid mechanical qubits and antimony-based qubits that should be more stable owing to their eight spin configurations.

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The achievement comes after the company spent nearly two decades of research in the field, but Microsoft claims that building Majorana 1 required that it create an entirely new state of matter, which it is referring to as a topological state.

Microsoft’s quantum chip employs eight topological qubits using indium arsenide, which is a semiconductor, and aluminum, which is a superconductor.

“The difficulty of developing the right materials to create the exotic particles and their associated topological state of matter is why most quantum efforts have focused on other kinds of qubits,” the company said in a blog Wednesday.

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In today’s AI news, Codeium, an AI-powered coding startup, is raising a new round of funding at a $2.85 billion valuation. The round is being led by returning investor Kleiner Perkins, the people said. The new round comes just six months after Silicon Valley-based Codeium announced that it had closed a $150 million Series C at a $1.25 billion post-money valuation.

In other advancements, a couple of weeks after the initial release of Mistral’s AI assistant, Le Chat, the company told Le Parisien that it has reached one million downloads. “Go and download Le Chat, which is made by Mistral, rather than ChatGPT by OpenAI — or something else,” French president Emmanuel Macron said in a TV interview ahead of the recent AI Action Summit in Paris.

And, Google is launching a new experiment that uses AI to help people explore more career possibilities. The company announced in a blog post on Wednesday that a new “Career Dreamer” tool can find patterns between your experiences, educational background, skills, and interests to connect you with careers that might be a good fit.

Meanwhile, Forbes’ Lance Eliot analyzes a popular mantra right now. The recent AI-industry groupthink that says we merely need to increase the so-called “thinking time” of generative AI and LLMs to get better responses. AI makers are allowing users to stipulate that the AI can expend more time and effort doing various processing before displaying a generated answer.

In videos, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella sits down with Dwarkesh Patel to talk about their new Majorana Quantum chip breakthrough, plans for artificial general intelligence, topological qubits, gaming world models, and whether Microsoft Office commoditizes LLMs, or the other way around.

Then, dive into the world of Model Context Protocol and learn how to seamlessly connect AI agents to databases, APIs, and more. IBM’s Roy Derks breaks down its components, from hosts to servers, and showcases real-world applications. Gain the knowledge to revolutionize your AI projects.

Continue reading “AI-Coding Startup Codeium In Talks To Raise Funds At Almost Billion Valuation” | >

Tech giant Microsoft unveiled a new computer chip on Wednesday that it says could transform everything from fighting pollution to developing new medicines, joining Google and IBM in arguing that the promise of quantum computing is closer to reality.

The US-made , called Majorana 1, can fit in the palm of a hand but packs a revolutionary design that Microsoft believes will solve one of the biggest challenges in quantum computing—making these super-powerful machines reliable enough for real-world use.

“We took a fresh approach and basically reinvented how quantum computers could work,” said Chetan Nayak, a senior scientist at Microsoft.

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Introducing a breakthrough in quantum computing. The Majorana 1 chip. An approach that ignores the limitations of current models to unleash the power of millions of potential qubits all working together to solve unsolvable challenges in creating new medicines, entirely new materials, and helping our natural world. All on a single chip.

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Microsoft announced a major milestone in its quantum computing efforts on Wednesday, unveiling its first quantum computing chip, called Majorana 1. Jason Zander, Microsoft’s executive VP of strategic missions and technologies explains this breakthrough and how it gets quantum computing technology closer to real world applications. Zander speaks to Bloomberg Technology’s Jackie Davalos.
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Hear from the Microsoft team behind the recent breakthrough in physics and quantum computing demonstrated by the new Majorana 1 chip, engineered from an entirely new material that has the potential to scale to millions of qubits on a single chip. Find out what is possible…

Chapters:
0:00 — Introducing Majorana 1
1:26 — Why does quantum computing matter?
2:47 — Qubits, the building blocks of quantum computing.
5:05 — Understanding the topological state.
7:00 — How the Majorana 1 chip works.
9:10 — How quantum and classical computing work together.
10:13 — The Quantum Age.

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For more about Microsoft, our technology, and our mission, visit https://aka.ms/microsoftstories

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When superconductors were discovered in 1911, they astounded researchers with their ability to conduct electricity with no resistance. However, they could only do so at temperatures close to absolute zero. But in 1986, scientists discovered that cuprates (a class of copper oxides) were superconductive at a relatively warm −225°F (above liquid nitrogen)—a step toward the ultimate goal of a superconductor that could operate at close to room temperature.

Applications of such a superconductor include compact and portable MRI machines, levitating trains, long-range electrical transmission without power loss, and more resilient quantum bits for quantum computers. Unfortunately, cuprates are a type of ceramic material which makes their application at industrial scales difficult—their brittleness, for example, would pose problems.

However, if researchers could understand what makes them superconduct at such high temperatures, they could recreate such processes in other materials. Despite a great deal of research, though, there is still a lack of consensus on the microscopic mechanism leading to their unusual superconductivity, making it difficult to take advantage of their unusual properties.

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There is a big problem with quantum technology—it’s tiny. The distinctive properties that exist at the subatomic scale usually disappear at macroscopic scales, making it difficult to harness their superior sensing and communication capabilities for real-world applications, like optical systems and advanced computing.

Now, however, an international team led by physicists at Penn State and Columbia University has developed a novel approach to maintain special quantum characteristics, even in three-dimensional (3D) materials.

The researchers published their findings in Nature Materials.

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We say a message is incoherent when we can’t make it out, or when it doesn’t make sense. A scribbled note, a drunken argument or a conversation taking place five tables down in a crowded cafe might all be incoherent. In general, “coherent” means the opposite—consistent, connected, clear.

In science, the word coherence takes on more specific, mathematical definitions, but they all get at a similar concept: Something is coherent if it can be understood, if it forms a unified whole and if those first two qualities persist.

Scientists originally developed the concept of coherence to understand and describe the wave-like behavior of light. Since then, the concept has been generalized to other systems involving waves, such as acoustic, electronic and quantum mechanical systems.

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