Lifeboat Foundation

“Hyperdegeneracy” could be used in quantum computing.

Microscopic oil droplets held aloft with optical tweezers can contain more than 200 resonant optical modes of similar energies, creating “hyperdegeneracy” for the first time. That is the claim of researchers in Israel, Spain and the US, who say that their breakthrough could ultimately find application in high-speed optical communications, sensing, quantum data processing and even the creation of dynamic optical circuits.

When optical materials with a high refractive index are formed into certain symmetrical shapes — such as rings, cylinders or spheres —light can be repeatedly reflected around the inside of the material, much in the same way that sound waves pass around the inside edge of St Paul’s Cathedral’s famous “whispering gallery”. The circulating light undergoes constructive interference, forming discrete resonant modes – or so-called degenerate states – with similar energies.

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Composite fermions are exotic quasi-particles found in interacting 2-D fermion systems at relatively large perpendicular magnetic fields. These quasi-particles, which are composed of an electron and two magnetic flux quanta, have often been used to describe a physical phenomenon known as the fractional quantum Hall effect.

Researchers at Princeton University and Pennsylvania State University recently used composite fermions to test a theory introduced by physicist Felix Bloch almost a century ago, suggesting that at very low densities, a paramagnetic Fermi “sea” of electrons should spontaneously transition to a fully magnetized state, which is now referred to as Bloch ferromagnetism. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, provides evidence of an abrupt transition to full magnetization that is closely aligned with the state theorized by Bloch.

“Composite fermions are truly remarkable,” Mansour Shayegan, professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University and one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “They are born of interaction and magnetic flux, and yet they map such a complex system to a simple collection of quasi-particles that to a large degree behave as non-interacting and also behave as if they don’t feel the large magnetic field. One of their most interesting properties is their spin polarization.”

We tackle the crucial challenge of fusing different modalities of features for multimodal sentiment analysis. Mainly based on neural networks, existing approaches largely model multimodal interactions in an implicit and hard-to-understand manner. We address this limitation with inspirations from quantum theory, which contains principled methods for modeling complicated interactions and correlations. In our quantum-inspired framework, the word interaction within a single modality and the interaction across modalities are formulated with superposition and entanglement respectively at different stages. The complex-valued neural network implementation of the framework achieves comparable results to state-of-the-art systems on two benchmarking video sentiment analysis datasets. In the meantime, we produce the unimodal and bimodal sentiment directly from the model to interpret the entangled decision.

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This stunning image captured last year by physicists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland is the first-ever photo of quantum entanglement — a phenomenon so strange, physicist Albert Einstein famously described it as ‘spooky action at a distance’.

It might not look like much, but just stop and think about it for a second: this fuzzy grey image was the first time we’d seen the particle interaction that underpins the strange science of quantum mechanics and forms the basis of quantum computing.

Continue reading “Looking Back on The First-Ever Photo of Quantum Entanglement” »

Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli bounced ideas off each other, Paul Halpern’s book shows.

Does the enormous computing power of neurons mean consciousness can be explained within a purely neurobiological framework, or is there scope for quantum computation in the brain?

Researchers pin down the contentious notion that ideas from the strange world of quantum mechanics underpin plants’ skill at harvesting sunlight.

A long-standing debate over just how “quantum” photosynthesis is may finally be coming to an end.

Modern construction is a precision endeavor. Builders must use components manufactured to meet specific standards — such as beams of a desired composition or rivets of a specific size. The building industry relies on manufacturers to create these components reliably and reproducibly in order to construct secure bridges and sound skyscrapers.

Now imagine construction at a smaller scale — less than 1/100th the thickness of a piece of paper. This is the nanoscale. It is the scale at which scientists are working to develop potentially groundbreaking technologies in fields like quantum computing. It is also a scale where traditional fabrication methods simply will not work. Our standard tools, even miniaturized, are too bulky and too corrosive to reproducibly manufacture components at the nanoscale.

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a method that could make reproducible manufacturing at the nanoscale possible. The team adapted a light-based technology employed widely in biology — known as optical traps or optical tweezers — to operate in a water-free liquid environment of carbon-rich organic solvents, thereby enabling new potential applications.