Lifeboat Foundation

Devices can multiplex and herald entanglement.

“Conditional witnessing” technique makes many-body entangled states easier to measure.

Quantum error correction – a crucial ingredient in bringing quantum computers into the mainstream – relies on sharing entanglement between many particles at once. Thanks to researchers in the UK, Spain and Germany, measuring those entangled states just got a lot easier. The new measurement procedure, which the researchers term “conditional witnessing”, is more robust to noise than previous techniques and minimizes the number of measurements required, making it a valuable method for testing imperfect real-life quantum systems.

Quantum computers run their algorithms on quantum bits, or qubits. These physical two-level quantum systems play an analogous role to classical bits, except that instead of being restricted to just “0” or “1” states, a single qubit can be in any combination of the two. This extra information capacity, combined with the ability to manipulate quantum entanglement between qubits (thus allowing multiple calculations to be performed simultaneously), is a key advantage of quantum computers.

Continue reading “New quantum entanglement verification method cuts through the noise” »

Physics World

Quantum mechanics describes this frustration by suggesting that the orientation of the spins is not rigid. Instead, it constantly changes direction in a fluid-like way to produce an entangled ensemble of spin-ups and spin-downs. Thanks to this behaviour, a spin liquid will remain in a liquid state even at temperatures near absolute zero, where most materials usually freeze solid.

The holon and the spinon

Continue reading “Electrons dual nature appears in a quantum spin liquid” »

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New footage released from the US Navy shows an unmanned drone refueling a fighter jet.

Circa 2018

The death-cap mushroom has a long history as a tool of murder and suicide, going back to ancient Roman times. The fungus, Amanita phalloides, produces one of the world’s deadliest toxins: α-amanitin. While it may seem ill-advised, researchers are eager to synthesize the toxin because studies have shown that it could help fight cancer. Scientists now report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society how they overcame obstacles to synthesize the death-cap killer compound.

α-Amanitin achieves its impressive deadliness by acting as a potent inhibitor of RNA polymerase II, the enzyme primarily responsible for transcribing genes into the messenger molecule RNA. Using α-amanitin bound to antibodies against tumor molecules, cancer researchers have reportedly cured mice of pancreatic cancer. These conjugates are currently in human trials; however, the only way to obtain α-amanitin so far has been to harvest mushrooms, which is time-consuming and results in relatively small amounts of the compound. Synthetic production approaches have been hampered by α-amanitin’s unusual bicyclic structure, among other tricky features. David M. Perrin and colleagues decided to take on the challenge to produce the toxin in the laboratory, once and for all.

The researchers had to work through three key obstacles to produce α-amanitin in the laboratory: production of the “oxidatively delicate” 6-hydroxy-tryptathionine, the an enantio-selective synthesis of (2 S, 3 R, 4 R)-4, 5-dihydroxy-isoleucine and a diastereoselective sulfoxidation to favor the (R)-sulfoxide. Due to its toxic nature, the researchers limited production to less than a milligram, but based on their results, they are confident that good yields are can be readily obtained by scaling up the process. The researchers also say that the development of this synthetic route will enable chemists to attenuate the toxicity and potentially improve α-amanitin’s activity against cancer, something that is only made possible by the use of synthetic derivatives.

THIS is that upward exponential point that heralds the arrival of the Technological Singularity.

This is an Inside Science story.

Artificial intelligence can design computer microchips that perform at least as well as those designed by human experts, devising such blueprints thousands of times faster. This new research from Google is already helping with the design of microchips for the company’s next generation of AI computer systems.

Continue reading “Google researchers show artificial intelligence can design microchips better and faster than humans” »

This year, physicists gave us an early view of a third kingdom of quasiparticles that only arise in two dimensions.

The rest of the particles in the universe are bosons, a group that includes particles like photons (the messengers of light and radiation) and gluons (which “glue” quarks together). Unlike fermions, two or more bosons can exist in the same state at the same time.

This article appeared in Discover’s annual state of science issue as Anyons Join the Particle Party.

Continue reading “Physicists prove the existence of two-dimensional particles called anyons” »

A long-held goal by chemists across many industries, including energy, pharmaceuticals, energetics, food additives and organic semiconductors, is to imagine the chemical structure of a new molecule and be able to predict how it will function for a desired application. In practice, this vision is difficult, often requiring extensive laboratory work to synthesize, isolate, purify and characterize newly designed molecules to obtain the desired information.

Recently, a team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) materials and computer scientists have brought this vision to fruition for energetic molecules by creating machine learning (ML) models that can predict molecules’ crystalline properties from their chemical structures alone, such as molecular density. Predicting crystal structure descriptors (rather than the entire crystal structure) offers an efficient method to infer a material’s properties, thus expediting materials design and discovery. The research appears in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling.

“One of the team’s most prominent ML models is capable of predicting the crystalline density of energetic and energetic-like molecules with a high degree of accuracy compared to previous ML-based methods,” said Phan Nguyen, LLNL applied mathematician and co-first author of the paper.

This Stone Predates the Sun.

Recent analysis of a stone found in the Libyan Desert Glass area of southwest Egypt, has sparked debate and a rethink of the current consensus on the formation of the solar system.

In a study, due to be published next month, a team of international researchers announced the resulting analysis of a stone that was subsequently named Hypatia after the ancient female astronomer of Alexandria.

Continue reading “Egyptian stone predates the Sun” »