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Blog – Page 10

A new type of time crystal could represent a breakthrough in quantum physics.

In a diamond zapped with lasers, physicists have created what they believe to be the first true example of a time quasicrystal – one in which patterns in time are structured, but do not repeat. It’s a fine distinction, but one that could help evolve quantum research and technology.

“They could store quantum memory over long periods of time, essentially like a quantum analog of RAM,” says physicist Chong Zu of Washington University in the US. “We’re a long way from that sort of technology. But creating a time quasicrystal is a crucial first step.”

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If there were such a thing as a photo album of the universe, it might include snapshots of pancake-like disks of gas and dust, swirling around newly formed stars across the Milky Way. Known as planet-forming disks, they are believed to be a short-lived feature around most, if not all, young stars, providing the raw materials for planets to form.

Most of these planetary nurseries are short-lived, typically lasting only about 10 million years—a fleeting existence by cosmic standards. Now, in a surprising find, researchers at the University of Arizona have discovered that disks can grace their host stars much longer than previously thought, provided the stars are small—one-tenth of the sun’s mass or less.

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Letters Journal, a research team led by Feng Long of the U of A Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, in the College of Science, reports a detailed observation of a protoplanetary disk at the ripe old age of 30 million years. Presenting the first detailed chemical analysis of a long-lived disk using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the paper provides new insights into planet formation and the habitability of planets outside our solar system.

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A small team of AI engineers at Zoom Communications has developed a new approach to training AI systems that uses far fewer resources than the standard approach now in use. The team has published their results on the arXiv preprint server.

The new approach developed at Zoom is called Chain of Draft (CoD), an update of the traditional approach now in use called Chain of Thought (CoT). CoT uses a step-by-step approach to solving a problem, similar in many ways to human problem-solving. The research team noted that CoT tends to generate more steps than are needed to solve a problem and found a way to reduce them.

Humans do not usually think about every step involved in solving a problem, especially if they are writing them down, because some steps are seen as basic knowledge. Instead, they jump over or combine some of them. The result is a list of essential steps.

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Somehow, we all know how a warp drive works. You’re in your spaceship and you need to get to another star. So you press a button or flip a switch or pull a lever and your ship just goes fast. Like really fast. Faster than the speed of light. Fast enough that you can get to your next destination by the end of the next commercial break.

Warp drives are staples of science fiction. And in 1994, they became a part of science fact. That’s when Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, who was inspired by Star Trek, decided to see if it was possible to build a warp drive. Not like actually build one with wrenches and pipes, but to see if it was even possible to be allowed to build a warp drive given our current knowledge of physics.

Physics is just a mathematical exploration of the natural universe, and the natural universe appears to play by certain rules. Certain actions are allowed, and other actions are not allowed. And the actions that are allowed have to proceed in a certain orderly fashion. Physics tries to capture all of those rules and express them in mathematical form. So Alcubierre wondered: does our knowledge of how nature works permit a warp drive or not?

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Quantum computers, devices that process information leveraging quantum mechanical effects, could outperform classical computers in some complex optimization and computational tasks. However, before these systems can be adopted on a large-scale, some technical challenges will need to be overcome.

One of these challenges is the effective connection of qubits, which operate at cryogenic temperatures, with external controllers that operate at higher temperatures. Existing methods to connect these components rely on coaxial cables or optical interconnects, both of which are not ideal as they introduce excessive heat and noise.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently set out to overcome the limitations of these approaches for connecting qubits and controllers, addressing common complaints about existing connecting cables. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, introduces a new wireless terahertz (THz) cryogenic interconnect based on complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, which was found to minimize heat in while effectively transferring .

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