Using a superconducting quantum computer, physicists created a large and complex version of an odd quantum material that has a repeating structure in time
Category: computing
Quantis QRNG Chips
Quantum smartphone chip.
IDQ’s QRNG chip is available in six models, depending on size, performance, power consumption and certifications, in order to fit various industry-specific needs. All IDQ QRNG chips have received NIST Entropy Source Validation (ESV) certification on the independently and identically distributed (IID) entropy estimation track SP 800-90B.
ID Quantique is the first company to achieve an ESV certificate with a quantum entropy source and IID estimation track. Such randomness provides the most trusted random keys for encryption. Since October 2022 it has been mandatory for cryptographic modules aiming for FIPS 140–3 certification to have an ESV validated entropy source. This ESV IID Certificate #63 will also facilitate IDQ’s customers who integrate IDQ’s Chips into their own devices to go through the NIST’s Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP).
Substituting stereotactic body radiation therapy boost for brachytherapy in Mayo protocol for peri-hilar cholangiocarcinoma
Blood vessels are less like straight pipes and more like a crowded city road map, with turns, forks, and sudden choke points that can change how traffic moves. For a long time, many lab built vessel models skipped that complexity and relied on simple, straight channels, even though real vessels rarely behave that neatly.
Researchers in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University are trying to close that gap with a customizable vessel-chip method. The goal is to recreate the kinds of shapes that matter in disease, so experiments on blood flow and potential treatments reflect what happens in the body more closely and can better support drug discovery.
Vessel-chips are engineered microfluidic devices that mimic human vasculature on a microscopic scale. Instead of studying blood flow in animals or oversimplified lab setups, scientists can use these chips to examine how fluid forces move through vessel-like structures in a controlled environment. Because the design can be tailored, the platform can also support patient-focused studies, which is especially useful when small differences in anatomy may affect how disease develops or how a therapy performs.
Record-breaking photons at telecom wavelengths—on demand
A team of researchers from the University of Stuttgart and the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg led by Prof. Stefanie Barz (University of Stuttgart) has demonstrated a source of single photons that combines on-demand operation with record-high photon quality in the telecommunications C-band—a key step toward scalable photonic quantum computation and quantum communication. “The lack of a high-quality on-demand C-band photon source has been a major problem in quantum optics laboratories for over a decade—our new technology now removes this obstacle,” says Prof. Stefanie Barz.
In everyday life, distinguishing features may often be desirable. Few want to be exactly like everyone else. When it comes to quantum technologies, however, complete indistinguishability is the name of the game. Quantum particles such as photons that are identical in all their properties can interfere with each other—much as in noise-canceling headphones, where sound waves that are precisely inverted copies of the incoming noise cancel out the background.
When identical photons are made to act in synchrony, then the probability that certain measurement outcomes occur can be either boosted or decreased. Such quantum effects give rise to powerful new phenomena that lie at the heart of emerging technologies such as quantum computing and quantum networking. For these technologies to become feasible, high-quality interference between photons is essential.
Beyond the eye of the beholder: Mathematically defining attributes essential to color perception
Research on the perception of color differences is helping resolve a century-old understanding of color developed by Erwin Schrödinger. Los Alamos scientist Roxana Bujack led a team that used geometry to mathematically define the perception of color as it relates to hue, saturation and lightness.
Presented at the 2025 Eurographics Conference on Visualization, their work formalizes Schrödinger’s model of color, decisively establishing the perception of color attributes as an intrinsic property. The paper, “The Geometry of Color in the Light of a Non-Riemannian Space,” was published in the Computer Graphics Forum.
“What we conclude is that these color qualities don’t emerge from additional external constructs such as cultural or learned experiences but reflect the intrinsic properties of the color metric itself,” Bujack said. “This metric geometrically encodes the perceived color distance—that is, how different two colors appear to an observer.”
2D discrete time crystals realized on a quantum computer for the first time
Physical systems become inherently more complicated and difficult to produce in a lab as the number of dimensions they exist in increases—even more so in quantum systems. While discrete time crystals (DTCs) had been previously demonstrated in one dimension, two-dimensional DTCs were known to exist only theoretically. But now, a new study, published in Nature Communications, has demonstrated the existence of a DTC in a two-dimensional system using a 144-qubit quantum processor.
Like regular crystalline materials, DTCs exhibit a kind of periodicity. However, the crystalline materials most people are familiar with have a periodically repeating structure in space, while the particles in DTCs exhibit periodic motion over time. They represent a phase of matter that breaks time-translation symmetry under a periodic driving force and cannot experience an equilibrium state.
“Consequently, local observables exhibit oscillations with a period that is a multiple of the driving frequency, persisting indefinitely in perfectly isolated systems. This subharmonic response represents a spontaneous breaking of discrete time-translation symmetry, analogous to the breaking of continuous spatial symmetry in conventional solid-state crystals,” the authors of the new study explain.
Mapping ‘figure 8’ Fermi surfaces to pinpoint future chiral conductors
One of the biggest problems facing modern microelectronics is that computer chips can no longer be made arbitrarily smaller and more efficient. Materials used to date, such as copper, are reaching their limits because their resistivity increases dramatically when they become too small. Chiral materials could provide a solution here. These materials behave like left and right hands: they look almost identical and are mirror images of each other, but cannot be made to match.
“It is assumed that the resistivity in some chiral materials remains constant or even decreases as the chiral material becomes smaller. That is why we are working on using electronic chirality to develop materials for a new generation of microchips that are faster, more energy-efficient and more robust than today’s technologies,” says Professor Niels Schröter from the Institute of Physics at MLU. Until now, however, it has been difficult to produce thin layers of these materials without the left-and right-handed areas canceling each other out in their effects.
This is precisely where the new study, in which the Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics in Halle was also involved, comes in. “For the first time, we have found materials that are not yet chiral themselves. However, they have the potential to be converted into electronically chiral materials with only a single-handedness through targeted distortion. These achiral materials can serve as so-called parent materials for engineering chiral conductors with reduced resistivity,” explains Schröter.
