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Researchers from a university and Google demonstrate a crucial error-correction step needed to make quantum computing practical.

Russia is getting closer in perfecting Quantum Processors.

A team of physicists including Russian researchers succeeded in conducting an experiment in which, for the first time in history, control over ultrafast motion of electrons down to three attoseconds (one attosecond refers to a second as one second refers to the lifetime of the Universe) was proved possible (“Coherent control with a short-wavelength free-electron laser”). This fact paves a way to new directions of research that seemed improbable before. The experiment was conducted with the help of the free-electron laser FERMI located at the “Elettra Sincrotrone” research center in Trieste, Italy.

The speed of chemical, physical and biological processes is extremely high, atomic bonds are broken and restored within femtoseconds (one millionth of one billionth of a second). The Egyptian-American chemist Ahmed Zewail was the first to succeed in observing the dynamics of chemical processes, which made him a winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Continue reading “Quantum processes control accurately to several attoseconds” »

Physicists have zoomed in on the transition that could explain why copper-oxides have such impressive superconducting powers.

Settling a 20-year debate in the field, they found that a mysterious quantum phase transition associated with the termination of a regime called the “pseudogap” causes a sharp drop in the number of conducting electrons available to pair up for superconductivity. The team hypothesizes that whatever is happening at this point is probably the reason that cuprates support superconductivity at much higher temperatures than other materials—about half way to room temperature.

“It’s very likely that the reason superconductivity grows in the first place, and the reason it grows so strongly, is because of that critical point,” CIFAR Senior Fellow Louis Taillefer (Université de Sherbrooke) says. The new findings are published in Nature.

New research supports an old, more intuitive theory of how sub-atomic particles behave. Cathal O’Connell explains.

Interesting article and does bring into question; what is “Cyberterrorism?” In the definition that I understand “Cyberterrorism” is when a person/s or a group inflict threats or conducts activities to create fear and/ or panic across the population. Therefore, with this definition cyberterrorism donesn’t necessarily be tied to a specific race, religion, political alliances, a gender, etc. It truly is any action or activity that creates fear and panic.

Unfortunately, this article really center on Cyberterrorism tied to certain group namely ISIS. And, only focusing on groups like ISIS is a big mistake; especially when you have hackers attacking hospitals, governments, banks, consumers, etc. and in some cases extorting money from their victims which ultimately has created fear and concerns across the population. Even the US Navy is considering to disconnect some of their own systems from the net. And, 2015 was the worst year ever for cyber attacks.

And, today, China (a country that has been listed as the country where most of the US Cyber attacks are coming from) has announced that they are on verge of providing their country Quantum technology which would mean China (including the hackers) would have an upper hand on protecting their systems and can easily hacked other countries systems including those with sophisticated encryptions.

Continue reading “Debunking the hysteria about cyberterrorism. Some sensible advice” »

Love on a Subatomic Scale.

When talking about love and romance, people often bring up unseen and mystical connections. Such connections exist in the subatomic world as well, thanks to a bizarre and counterintuitive phenomenon called quantum entanglement. The basic idea of quantum entanglement is that two particles can be intimately linked to each other even if separated by billions of light-years of space; a change induced in one will affect the other. In 1964, physicist John Bell posited that such changes can occur instantaneously, even if the particles are very far apart. Bell’s Theorem is regarded as an important idea in modern physics, but it seems to make little sense. After all, Albert Einstein had proven years before that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Indeed, Einstein famously described the entanglement phenomenon as “spooky action at a distance.” In the last half-century, many researchers have run experiments that aimed to test Bell’s Theorem. But they have tended to come up short because it’s tough to design and build equipment with the needed sensitivity and performance, NASA officials said. Last year, however, three different research groups were able to perform substantive tests of Bell’s Theorem, and all of them found support for the basic idea. One of those studies was led by Krister Shalm, a physicist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. Shalm and his colleagues used special metal strips cooled to cryogenic temperatures, which makes them superconducting — they have no electrical resistance. A photon hits the metal and turns it back into a normal electrical conductor for a split second, and scientists can see that happen. This technique allowed the researchers to see how, if at all, their measurements of one photon affected the other photon in an entangled pair. The results, which were published in the journal Physical Review Letters, strongly backed Bell’s Theorem. “Our paper and the other two published last year show that Bell was right: any model of the world that contains hidden variables must also allow for entangled particles to influence one another at a distance,” co-author Francesco Marsili, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. There are practical applications to this work as well. The “superconducting nanowire single photon detectors” (SNSPDs) used in the Shalm group’s experiment, which were built at NIST and JPL, could be used in cryptography and in deep-space communications, NASA officials said. NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere Dust and Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission, which orbited the moon from October 2013 to April 2014, helped demonstrate some of this communications potential. LADEE’s Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration used components on the spacecraft and a ground-based receiver similar to SNSPDs. The experiment showed that it might be possible to build sensitive laser communications arrays that would enable much more data to be up- and downloaded to faraway space probes, NASA officials said.

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New equation proves no “Big Bang” theory and no beginning either as well as no singularity.

(Phys.org) —The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once.

The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a “Big Bang” did the universe officially begin.

Continue reading “No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning” »

A reboot of a classic quantum experiment suggests that photons have a well-defined trajectory, resurrecting a previously dismissed theory.

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Very concerning news for the US security; we’ll see how the US responds. Remember, our largest hackers in the US is China; so we’ll need to determine what this means as well as how vulnerable we are.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/969692.shtml

China’s stock markets have been stabilizing in recent days after the rollercoaster ride at the start of the year. And one bright point has been stocks related to quantum communications, showing renewed investor interest in the new technology, which will play an important role in creating a safety net for the increasingly information technology-savvy economy.

Continue reading “China’s newest tech can offer quantum of security” »