Lifeboat Foundation

Physicists have extended the conditions in which life can exist further than ever before.

Eduard Shyfrin, Ph.D., author of “From Infinity to Man: The Fundamental Ideas of Kabbalah Within the Framework of Information Theory and Quantum Physics,” addressed attendees at the eighteenth World Union of Jewish Studies Conference in Jerusalem on Monday.

Shyfrin spoke via Zoom on Kabbalah of Information: Absence of Information is Information’. He explained how Kabbalistic ideas can be explained using the support of information theory and physics.

A team of researchers from the Structured Light Laboratory at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, has made a significant breakthrough regarding quantum entanglement.

Led by Professor Andrew Forbes, in collaboration with renowned string theorist Robert de Mello Koch, now at Huzhou University in China, the team has successfully demonstrated a novel method to manipulate quantum entangled particles without altering their intrinsic properties.

This feat marks a monumental step in our understanding and application of quantum entanglement.

Many physicists and engineers have been trying to develop highly efficient quantum technologies that can perform similar functions to conventional electronics leveraging quantum mechanical effects. This includes high-dimensional quantum memories, storage devices with a greater information capacity and noise resilience than two-dimensional quantum memories.

So far, developing these high-dimensional memories has proved challenging, and most attempts have not yielded satisfactory efficiencies. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, a research team at University of Science and Technology of China and Hefei Normal University recently introduced an approach to realize a highly efficient 25-dimensional memory based on cold atoms.

“Our group has been using the orbital angular momentum mode in the space channel to study high-dimensional quantum storage and has accumulated a wealth of research experience and technology,” Dong Sheng Ding, co-author of the paper, told Phys.org. “Achieving high-dimensional and high-efficiency quantum storage has always been our goal.”

Within atomic and laser physics communities, scientist John “Jan” Hall has become a key figure in the history of laser frequency stabilization and precision measurement using lasers. Hall’s work revolved around understanding and manipulating stable lasers in ways that were revolutionary for their time. His work laid a technical foundation for measuring a tiny fractional distance change brought by a passing gravitational wave. His work in laser arrays awarded him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2005.

Building on this foundation, JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye and his team embarked on an ambitious journey to push the boundaries of precision measurement even further. This time, their focus turned to a specialized technique known as the Pound-Drever-Hall (PDH) method (developed by scientists R. V. Pound, Ronald Drever, and Hall himself), which plays a large role in precision optical interferometry and laser frequency stabilization.

While physicists have used the PDH method for decades in ensuring their laser frequency is stably “locked” to an artificial or quantum reference, a limitation arising from the frequency modulation process itself, called residual amplitude modulation (RAM), can still affect the stability and accuracy of the laser’s measurements.

Solid-state qubits: Forget about being clean, embrace mess, says a new recipe for dense arrays of qubits with long lifetimes.

New findings debunk previous wisdom that solid-state qubits need to be super dilute in an ultra-clean material to achieve long lifetimes. Instead, cram lots of rare-earth ions into a crystal and some will form pairs that act as highly coherent qubits, shows a paper in Nature Physics.

Clean lines and minimalism, or vintage shabby chic? It turns out that the same trends that occupy the world of interior design are important when it comes to designing the building blocks of quantum computers.

Unravel the mysteries of quantum mechanics with a pioneering experiment rolling through a curvy ramp in the dark and pushing the boundaries of our understanding.

An experiment proposed by physicists to unlock macroscopic quantum secrets in complete darkness. Explore the potential of quantum superposition.

The Dark Energy Survey took an entire decade to produce a value for the cosmological constant—and it’s smaller than you might think! There were other stories as well, including one about primeval black holes, and because I am inescapably drawn by the relentless gravity of black hole news, it’s included below, along with two other stories related in one way or another to heads.

Dogs’ primary sense is olfactory, and if their visual perception flags something interesting in the environment, the first thing they do is stick their cute little noses in it. But the opposite is true for humans; we are able to perceive millions of colors, but only a fraction of the olfactory stimuli dogs are usually way too engaged with.

If you smell natural gas in your house, you go looking for the source with your cute little retinas and their super-dense constellation of photoreceptive cells to determine that one of the gas knobs on the stove is open. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University grew retinal organoids in a lab to determine how human visual perception develops.

In the ever-evolving world of financial markets, understanding the unpredictable nature of stock market fluctuations is crucial. A new study has taken a leap in this field by developing an innovative quantum mechanics model to analyze the stock market.

This model not only encompasses economic uncertainty and investor behavior but also aims to unravel the mysteries behind stock market anomalies like fat tails, volatility clustering, and contrarian effects.

The core of this model is quantum mechanics, a pillar of physics known for explaining the behavior of subatomic particles.