Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: quantum physics – Page 661

A potentially useful material for building quantum computers has been unearthed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), whose scientists have found a superconductor that could sidestep one of the primary obstacles standing in the way of effective quantum logic circuits.

Newly discovered properties in the compound uranium ditelluride, or UTe2, show that it could prove highly resistant to one of the nemeses of quantum computer development — the difficulty with making such a computer’s memory storage switches, called qubits, function long enough to finish a computation before losing the delicate physical relationship that allows them to operate as a group. This relationship, called quantum coherence, is hard to maintain because of disturbances from the surrounding world.

The compound’s unusual and strong resistance to magnetic fields makes it a rare bird among superconducting (SC) materials, which offer distinct advantages for qubit design, chiefly their resistance to the errors that can easily creep into quantum computation. UTe2’s exceptional behaviors could make it attractive to the nascent quantum computer industry, according to the research team’s Nick Butch.

Read more | >

In a classic physics experiment, scientists set up quantum entanglement between sunlight and light generated here on Earth.

The researchers in China, the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom wondered whether any two particles of light, called photons, could show the spooky interactions governed by the rules of quantum mechanics, even if they originated from vastly distant sources. The experiment was mainly curiosity-driven, but it demonstrates that in the future, researchers might be able to use the Sun as a source of light for quantum mechanics-related purposes.

Read more | >

Dead or alive, left-spinning or right-spinning — in the quantum world particles such as the famous analogy of Schrödinger’s cat can be all these things at the same time. An international team, together with experts from Forschungszentrum Jülich, have now succeeded in transforming 20 entangled quantum bits into such a state of superposition. The generation of such atomic Schrödinger cat states is regarded as an important step in the development of quantum computers.

Read more | >

A new disruptive technology is on the horizon and it promises to take computing power to unprecedented and unimaginable heights.

And to predict the speed of progress of this new “quantum computing” technology, the director of Google’s Quantum AI Labs, Hartmut Neven, has proposed a new rule similar to the Moore’s Law that has measured the progress of computers for more than 50 years.

But can we trust “Neven’s Law” as a true representation of what is happening in quantum computing and, most importantly, what is to come in the future? Or is it simply too early on in the race to come up with this type of judgement?

Read more | >

A breakthrough in understanding how the quasi-particles known as magnetic monopoles behave could lead to the development of new technologies to replace electric charges.

Researchers at the University of Kent applied a combination of quantum and classic physics to investigate how magnetic atoms interact with each other to form composite objects known as ‘magnetic monopoles’.

Basing the study on materials known as Spin Ices, the team showed how the ‘hop’ of a monopole from one site in the crystal lattice of Spin Ice to the next can be achieved by flipping the direction of a single magnetic atom.

Read more | >

A team of scientists from MIT and Rice University recently discovered a new method for creating qubits that could revolutionize both quantum computing and cancer research – and all it takes is some household bleach and a UV light.

Qubits are the basic units of information used in quantum computing. Typically, when scientists create them they go through a complex process involving lasers or shearing single photons off of light using complex, difficult-to-work-with reactants that produce unwanted side-effects. These time consuming methods often require trial-and-error and seldom produce perfect results.

Read more | >

The scientists who came up with the theory of supergravity in the 1970s are $3 million richer.

The trio, physicists Sergio Ferrara, Daniel Z. Freedman and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, won the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, according to a statement Wednesday.

Supergravity is described in the prize announcement as a theory in which, “quantum variables are part of the description of the geometry of spacetime.”

Read more | >

Two independent research teams recently published studies indicating they’ve successfully teleported a qutrit — possibly within days of each other. Now, both await the scientific process of peer review to see which will ultimately get credit for being the first humans to do so.

But what’s a qutrit? It’s a lot like a qubit, an entangled pair of particles used to carry information in a quantum computing system. Qubits are analogous to bits, the binary units of information used by classical computers like the one you’re reading this on. Where bits can be represented by the numbers zero and one, qubits can be zero, one, or both at the same time. Trits, used in classical ternary systems, add a two into the mix. And qutrits are the quantum version of trits, capable of carrying more information than their qubit counterparts.

Read more | >

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have recently developed a metric that can be used to capture the space of collider events based on the earth mover’s distance (EMD), a measure used to evaluate dissimilarity between two multi-dimensional probability distributions. The metric they proposed, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, could enable the development of new powerful tools to analyze and visualize collider data, which do not rely on a choice of observables.

“Our research is motivated by a remarkably simple question: When are two similar?” Eric Metodiev, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), protons are smashed together at extremely high energies and each collision produces a complex mosaic of particles. Two collider events can look similar, even if they consist of different numbers and types of particles. This is analogous to how two mosaics can look similar, even if they are made up of different numbers and colors of tiles.”

In their study, Metodiev and his colleagues set out to capture the similarity between collider events in a way that is conceptually useful for particle physics. To do this, they employed a strategy that merges ideas related to optimal transport theory, which is often used to develop cutting-edge image recognition tools, with insights from , a construct that describes fundamental particle interactions.

Read more | >