On the Right Track
In the final analysis, while IBM clearly has more work to do, it’s on the right track. Its investments in cloud and AI are already paying off, while blockchain and quantum computing bets are looking promising.
Furthermore, while IBM’s progress overall is clearly a massive team effort, Big Blue’s execution is due in large part to Rometty’s six years of leadership.
Researchers from the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering are part of a group that has received a multi-million dollar grant from IUs’ Emerging Areas of Research program.
Amr Sabry, a professor of informatics and computing and the chair of the Department of Computer Science, and Alexander Gumennik, assistant professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering, are part of the “Center for Quantum Information Science and Engineering” initiative led by Gerardo Ortiz, a professor of physics in IU’s College of Arts and Sciences. The initiative will focus on harnessing the power of quantum entanglement, which is a theoretical phenomenon in which the quantum state of two or more particles have to be described in reference to one another even if the objects are spatially separated.
“Bringing together a unique group of physicists, computer scientists, and engineers to solve common problems in quantum sensing and computation positions IU at the vanguard of this struggle,” Gumennik said. “I believe that this unique implementation approach, enabling integration of individual quantum devices into a monolithic quantum computing circuit, is capable of taking the quantum information science and engineering to a qualitatively new level.”
Hugh Everett, creator of this radical idea during a drunken debate more than 60 years ago, died before he could see his theory gain widespread popularity.
Posted in quantum physics
The power of quantum technology in 2018: how does this develop nowadays
Quantum technology is a new field in physics, derived from quantum physics and, especially, quantum mechanics and it transposes their principles into every day use applications such as quantum computers, quantum cryptography or quantum imaging. Ever since the study of quantum technology has been taking very seriously across the globe, a lot of new technologies and applications were developed to make our lives easier, faster and more secure.
Quantum technology still needs to be promoted.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Los Alamos-based startup Ubiquitous Quantum Dots got a $750,000 boost this week to further develop and begin deploying technology that enables windows to generate electricity.
The National Science Foundation awarded a phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant for UbiQD LLC to continue building quantum dot-tinted windows, which can harness sunlight to power everyday consumer products, and eventually entire buildings.
The NSF previously awarded a $225,000 phase I grant in 2016, allowing UbiQD to test and validate its technology at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado.
Many physicists sidestep the philosophical puzzles altogether, preferring to “shut up and calculate.”
If quantum mechanics can be said to have a capital city it is surely Copenhagen, birthplace of the physicist Niels Bohr (1885−1962) and of the formalism he and others developed to make sense of the subatomic realm. Their approach, the “Copenhagen Interpretation,” is expounded in every textbook. Yet it has been questioned many times, and in “What Is Real?” Adam Becker tells a fascinating if complex story of quantum dissidents. Two of the most important not only displeased Bohr, they also attracted the attention of the FBI.
Self-organized criticality emerges in dynamical complex systems driven out of equilibrium and characterizes a wide range of classical phenomena in physics, geology, and biology. We report on a quantum coherence–controlled self-organized critical transition observed in the light localization behavior of a coherence-driven nanophotonic configuration. Our system is composed of a gain-enhanced plasmonic heterostructure controlled by a coherent drive, in which photons close to the stopped-light regime interact in the presence of the active nonlinearities, eventually synchronizing their dynamics. In this system, on the basis of analytical and corroborating full-wave Maxwell-Bloch computations, we observe quantum coherence–controlled self-organized criticality in the emergence of light localization arising from the synchronization of the photons. It is associated with two first-order phase transitions: one pertaining to the synchronization of the dynamics of the photons and the second pertaining to an inversionless lasing transition by the coherent drive. The so-attained light localization, which is robust to dissipation, fluctuations, and many-body interactions, exhibits scale-invariant power laws and absence of finely tuned control parameters. We also found that, in this nonequilibrium dynamical system, the effective critical “temperature” of the system drops to zero, whereupon one enters the quantum self-organized critical regime.
The self-organization of many nonequilibrium complex systems toward an “ordered” state is a profound concept in basic science, ranging from biochemistry to physics (2–4). Examples include the group movement of flocks of birds , motions of human crowds , neutrino oscillations in the early universe , and the formation of shapes (“morphogenesis”) in biological organisms (8, 9). An intriguing trait of this nonequilibrium, driven-dissipative systems (2, 3) is that their self-organization can lead them to a phase transition and to critical behavior—a phenomenon known as self-organized criticality (SOC) (10). Unlike equilibrium phase-transition phenomena, such as superconductivity or ferromagnetism, where an exogenous control parameter (for example, temperature or pressure) needs to be precisely tuned for the phase transition to occur, no such fine-tuning is needed in SOC systems (10–13): They can self-organize and reach their critical state even when driven far away from it.
Silke Weinfurtner is trying to build the universe from scratch. In a physics lab at the University of Nottingham—close to the Sherwood forest of legendary English outlaw Robin Hood—she and her colleagues will work with a huge superconducting coil magnet, 1 meter across. Inside, there’s a small pool of liquid, whose gentle ripples stand to mimic the matter fluctuations that gave rise to the structures we observe in the cosmos.
Weinfurtner isn’t an evil genius hell-bent on creating a world of her own to rule. She just wants to understand the origins of the one we already have.
The Big Bang is by far the most popular model of our universe’s beginnings, but even its fans disagree about how it happened. The theory depends on the existence of a hypothetical quantum field that stretched the universe ultra-rapidly and uniformly in all directions, expanding it by a huge factor in a fraction of a second: a process dubbed inflation. But that inflation or the field responsible for it—the inflaton—is impossible to prove directly. Which is why Weinfurtner wants to mimic it in a lab.
Hundreds of comments under his post today: http://www.newsweek.com/quantum-archaeology-quest-3d-bioprin…ife-837967
