CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland Clinic and IBM have entered a 10-year partnership that will install a quantum computer — which can handle large amounts of data at lightning speeds — at the Clinic next year to speed up medical innovations.
The Discovery Accelerator, a joint Clinic-IBM center, will feature artificial intelligence, hybrid cloud data storage and quantum computing technologies. A hybrid cloud is a data storage technology that allows for faster storage and analysis of large amounts of data.
The partnership will allow Clinic researchers to use the advanced tech in its new Global Center for Pathogen Research and Human Health for research into genomics, population health, clinical applications, and chemical and drug discovery.
A force is something which tends to change the state of rest or state of motion, or size, shape, the direction of motion of a body, etc… There are four fundamental forces: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear forces. These forces are responsible for all possible interactions that can take place in this universe, from planets orbiting a star to protons and neutrons confined in the nucleus of an atom. In classical physics, the assumption was that an imaginary field exists, through which a force can be transmitted. But with the advent of quantum mechanics, this idea was changed radically. A field exists, but that is a quantum field. The field vibrates gently, and these vibrations give rise to particles and their corresponding antiparticle partners, i.e., particles with opposite charge. But these particles can exist for a limited amount of time. What gives rise to forces then? Particles called bosons. Bosons, named after Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, are particles, the exchange of which give rise to forces. Bosons, along with the fermions (which make up matter), are referred to as elementary particles [1].
In quantum mechanics, energy can be temporarily ‘borrowed’ from a particle. But, as per Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the greater the amount of energy you ‘borrow’, the sooner you must return it [2].
According to modern physics, light can be treated as a stream of particles called photons. The exchange of photons gives rise to electromagnetic forces. Virtual photons can pop out of nowhere around an electron, by ‘borrowing’ some of the electron’s energy. If there is another electron near the virtual photon, it will absorb the photon. Thus, essentially, some energy and momentum are exchanged between the electrons, causing them to repel, since the second electron, on gaining energy, will move away from the first one. It is basically due to this reason that a photon is considered a boson, for in the above case, exchange of the photon gave rise to the force of repulsion between the two electrons. Thus, electrons, both being negatively-charged (like-charged), repel. A photon can also materialize into an electron and its antiparticle, positron. This process is called pair production[3]. Here, electromagnetic energy is converted into matter.
Bacteria have been found exploiting quantum physics to survive.
Oxygen is life to animals like us. But for many species of microbe, the smallest whiff of the highly reactive element puts their delicate chemical machinery at risk of rusting up.
The photosynthesizing bacterium Chlorobium tepidum has evolved a clever way to shield its light-harvesting processes from oxygen’s poisonous effects, using a quantum effect to shift its energy production line into low gear.
A study conducted by scientists from the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis has shown how the bacterium throws a spanner into its quantum resonance to ‘tune’ its system so that it loses energy in the presence of oxygen, preventing it from wrecking its photosynthetic apparatus.
Once particularly useful future application, according to Harvard Business Review, will be the potential development of new drugs, a task it is “uniquely suited for” because it would operate on the same laws of quantum physics as the molecules it is simulating.
And so, Abu Dhabi has joined the community of nations endeavouring to accomplish this next step in human history.
The Advanced Technology Research Council is building the computer at its Quantum Research Centre labs in Abu Dhabi, in collaboration with Barcelona-based Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech.
A new class of quantum dots deliver a stable stream of single, spectrally tunable infrared photons under ambient conditions and at room temperature, unlike other single photon emitters. This breakthrough opens a range of practical applications, including quantum communication, quantum metrology, medical imaging and diagnostics, and clandestine labeling.
“The demonstration of high single-photon purity in the infrared has immediate utility in areas such as quantum key distribution for secure communication,” said Victor Klimov, lead author of a paper published today in Nature Nanotechnology by Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists.
The Los Alamos team has developed an elegant approach to synthesizing the colloidal-nanoparticle structures derived from their prior work on visible light emitters based on a core of cadmium selenide encased in a cadmium sulfide shell. By inserting a mercury sulfide interlayer at the core/shell interface, the team turned the quantum dots into highly efficient emitters of infrared light that can be tuned to a specific wavelength.
The torsion balance contains a rigid balance beam suspended by a fine thread as an ancient scientific instrument that continues to form a very sensitive force sensor to date. The force sensitivity is proportional to the lengths of the beam and thread and inversely proportional to the fourth power of the diameter of the thread; therefore, nanomaterials that support the torsion balances should be ideal building blocks. In a new report now published on Science Advances, Lin Cong and a research team in quantum physics, microelectronics and nanomaterials in China have detailed a torsional balance array on a chip with the highest sensitivity level. The team facilitated this by using a carbon nanotube as the thread and a monolayer graphene coated with aluminum films as the beam and mirror. Using the experimental setup, Cong et al. measured the femtonewton force exerted by a weak laser. The balances on the chip served as an ideal platform to investigate fundamental interactions up to zeptonewton in accuracy.
A modern role for ancient scientific instruments
The torsion pendulum is an ancient scientific instrument used to discover Coulomb’s law in 1785 and to determine the density of Earth in 1798. The instrument is useful across a range of applications including existing scientific explorations of precisely determining the gravitational constant. The most efficient method to achieve high sensitivity in the setup is by reducing the diameter of the suspension thread as much as possible. For instance, in 1931, Kappler et al. used a centimeters-long thread to develop a highly sensitive torsion balance to set a record for a hitherto unattained intrinsic force sensitivity. At present, carbon nanotubes form one of the strongest and thinnest materials known. In this work, the team synthesized ultra-long carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and large-area graphene to substantially increase the lengths of the balance beam and suspension thread to significantly improve the sensitivity of the instrument.
Bright semiconductor nanocrystals known as quantum dots give QLED TV screens their vibrant colors. But attempts to increase the intensity of that light generate heat instead, reducing the dots’ light-producing efficiency.
A new study explains why, and the results have broad implications for developing future quantum and photonics technologies where light replaces electrons in computers and fluids in refrigerators, for example.
In a QLED TV screen, dots absorb blue light and turn it into green or red. At the low energies where TV screens operate, this conversion of light from one color to another is virtually 100% efficient. But at the higher excitation energies required for brighter screens and other technologies, the efficiency drops off sharply. Researchers had theories about why this happens, but no one had ever observed it at the atomic scale until now.
The heart of any computer, its central processing unit, is built using semiconductor technology, which is capable of putting billions of transistors onto a single chip. Now, researchers from the group of Menno Veldhorst at QuTech, a collaboration between TU Delft and TNO, have shown that this technology can be used to build a two-dimensional array of qubits to function as a quantum processor. Their work, a crucial milestone for scalable quantum technology, was published today (March 242021) in Nature.
Quantum computers have the potential to solve problems that are impossible to address with classical computers. Whereas current quantum devices hold tens of qubits — the basic building block of quantum technology — a future universal quantum computer capable of running any quantum algorithm will likely consist of millions to billions of qubits. Quantum dot qubits hold the promise to be a scalable approach as they can be defined using standard semiconductor manufacturing techniques. Veldhorst: “By putting four such qubits in a two-by-two grid, demonstrating universal control over all qubits, and operating a quantum circuit that entangles all qubits, we have made an important step forward in realizing a scalable approach for quantum computation.”
