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By using a special combination of laser beams as a very fast stirrer, RIKEN physicists have created multiple vortices in a quantum photonic system and tracked their evolution. This system could be used to explore exotic new physics related to the emergence of quantum states from vortex matter. The research is published in the journal Nano Letters.

In principle, if you were to swim in a pool filled with a superfluid, a single stroke would be all you need to swim an infinite number of laps. That’s because, unlike normal fluids like water, superfluids have no resistance to motion below a certain velocity.

Superfluids also behave weirdly when stirred. “If you stir a bucket of water, you typically get just one big vortex,” explains Michael Fraser of the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science. “But when you rotate a superfluid, you initially create one vortex. And when you rotate it faster, you get progressively more and more vortices of precisely the same size.”

Silicon photonics (SiPh), the manufacturing of integrated photonics on CMOS platform, has been a buzzword in the recent two years, given the technology’s promising prospect to deliver a faster, securer and more efficient solution to data centers increasingly burdened by the ever-growing transmission demand of AI. However, the potential of silicon photonics is not confined to the realm of conventional computing and communication.

Buckle up, because we’re entering the era of thinking machines that make humans look like chattering chimps! But don’t worry about polishing your resume to impress our future robot overlords just yet. The experts are wildly divided on when superintelligent AI will actually arrive. It’s like we’re staring at an AI time machine without knowing if it will teleport us to 2 years from now or 2 decades into the future!

In one corner, we have Mustafa Suleyman from Inflection AI. He says take a chill pill, we’ve got at least 10–20 more years before the AI apocalypse. But hang on…his company just whipped up the world’s 2nd biggest AI supercomputer! It’s cruising with 3X the horsepower of GPT-4, the chatbot with reading skills rivaling a university professor. So something tells me Suleyman’s timeline is slower than your grandma driving without her glasses.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is broadcasting a very different arrival time. They believe superintelligence could show up within just 4 years! To get ready, they’ve launched an AI safety SWAT team, led by brainiacs like Ilya Sutskever. They’re funneling millions into this initiative with a strict 2027 deadline. Why so urgent? Well, they say superintelligence could either catapult humanity into a sci-fi future utopia, or permanently reduce us to drooling toddlers. Not great options there.

Intelligence and superintelligence.


Discover the captivating odyssey of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as it ventures into the enigmatic realm of superintelligence. Uncover the essence of AI and its transformative impact on our lives, while delving into the concept of superintelligence and the profound implications it holds for humanity.

Carlos Bravo-Prieto1,2,3, Ryan LaRose4, M. Cerezo1,5, Yigit Subasi6, Lukasz Cincio1, and Patrick J. Coles1

1Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87,545, USA. 2 Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain. 3 Institut de Ciències del Cosmos, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain. 4 Department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering & Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48,823, USA. 5 Center for Nonlinear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA 6 Computer, Computational and Statistical Sciences Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87,545, USA

Get full text pdfRead on arXiv Vanity.

The contrast between the James Webb Space Telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) is an orbiting infrared observatory that will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers longer wavelengths of light, with greatly improved sensitivity, allowing it to see inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are forming today as well as looking further back in time to observe the first galaxies that formed in the early universe.

A new article published in Opto-Electronic Science reviews the fundamentals and applications of optically trapped optical nanoparticles. Optical nanoparticles are one of the key elements of photonics. They not only allow optical imaging of a plethora of systems (from cells to microelectronics), but also behave as highly sensitive remote sensors.

The success of optical tweezers in isolating and manipulating individual optical nanoparticles has been recently demonstrated. This has opened the door to high-resolution, single-particle scanning and sensing.

The most relevant results in the quickly growing fields of optical trapping of individual optical nanoparticles are summarized by this article. According to different materials and their , the optical nanoparticles are classified into five families: , lanthanide-doped nanoparticles, polymeric nanoparticles, semiconductor nanoparticles, and nanodiamonds. For each case, the main advances and applications have been described.