Majorana particles have been getting bad publicity: a claimed discovery in ultracold nanowires had to be retracted. Now Leiden physicists open up a new door to detecting Majoranas in a different experimental system, the Fu-Kane heterostructure, they announce in Physical Review Letters.
Majorana particles are quasiparticles: collective movements of particles (electrons in this case) which behave as single particles. If detected in real life, they could be used to build stable quantum computers.
“Majoranas are quantum mechanical superpositions,” explains Gal Lemut. This superposition, a special kind of combination, comprises an electron and a hole (a place in a crystal where an electron is missing.
Since receiving a $25 million grant in 2,019 to become the first National Science Foundation (NSF) Quantum Foundry, UC Santa Barbara researchers affiliated with the foundry have been working to develop materials that can enable quantum information-based technologies for such applications as quantum computing, communications, sensing, and simulation.
They may have done it.
In a new paper, published in the journal Nature Materials, foundry co-director and UCSB materials professor Stephen Wilson and multiple co-authors, including key collaborators at Princeton University, study a new material developed in the Quantum Foundry as a candidate superconductor—a material in which electrical resistance disappears and magnetic fields are expelled—that could be useful in future quantum computation.
‘Some forms of encryption used today can be broken by future large-scale quantum computers, which drives a search for alternatives’
“Some forms of encryption used today can be broken by future large-scale quantum computers, which also drives a search for alternatives,” Ling said.
In a canned statement, the NUS said AWS will gain access to the university’s National Quantum-Safe Network, a vendor-neutral platform for developing technology and integrating some of it into local fiber networks.
“The understanding that we are using quantum communications technology to support experiments using existing fiber is correct,” AWS ASEAN managing director Tan Lee Chew told The Register.
No, it’s not forbidden to innovate, quite the opposite, but it’s always risky to do something different from what people are used to. Risk is the middle name of the bold, the builders of the future. Those who constantly face resistance from skeptics. Those who fail eight times and get up nine.
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Fernando Pessoa’s “First you find it strange. Then you can’t get enough of it.” contained intolerable toxicity levels for Salazar’s Estado Novo (Portugal). When the level of difference increases, censorship follows. You can’t censor censorship (or can you?) when, deep down, it’s a matter of fear of difference. Yes, it’s fear! Fear of accepting/facing the unknown. Fear of change.
What do I mean by this? Well, I may seem weird or strange with the ideas and actions I take in life, but within my weirdness, there is a kind of “Eye of Agamotto” (sometimes being a curse for me)… What I see is authentic and vivid. Sooner or later, that future I glimpse passes into this reality.
The social networking giant and its CEO have vast ambitions to dominate the next big thing in computing, but other tech giants are in a better position to turn the hype into reality.
Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.
Physicists of the Technische Universität Dresden introduce the first implementation of a complementary vertical organic transistor technology, which is able to operate at low voltage, with adjustable inverter properties, and a fall and rise time demonstrated in inverter and ring-oscillator circuits of less than 10 nanoseconds, respectively. With this new technology they are just a stone’s throw away from the commercialization of efficient, flexible and printable electronics of the future. Their groundbreaking findings are published in the renowned journal Nature Electronics.
Poor performance is still impeding the commercialization of flexible and printable electronics. Hence, the development of low-voltage, high-gain, and high-frequency complementary circuits is seen as one of the most important targets of research. High-frequency logic circuits, such as inverter circuits and oscillators with low power consumption and fast response time, are the essential building blocks for large-area, low power-consumption, flexible and printable electronics of the future. The research group “Organic Devices and Systems” (ODS) at the Institute of Applied Physics (IAP) at TU Dresden headed by Dr. Hans Kleemann is working on the development of novel organic materials and devices for high performance, flexible and possibly even biocompatible electronics and optoelectronics. Increasing the performance of organic circuits is one of the key challenges in their research. It was only some month ago, when Ph.D.
2D form of carbon transforms into a high-temperature superconductor if placed near a Bose-Einstein condensate, say theorists.
Graphene can be made to superconduct by placing it next to a Bose-Einstein condensate – a form of matter in which all the atoms are in the same quantum state. According to the theorists who discovered it, this new type of superconductivity stems from interactions between the electrons in graphene and quasiparticles called “bogolons” in the condensate. If demonstrated experimentally, the work could make it possible to develop new types of hybrid superconducting devices for applications in quantum sensing and quantum computing.
Conventional superconductivity occurs when phonons – quasiparticles that arise from vibrations in a material’s crystal lattice – cause electrons in the material to pair up despite their mutual electromagnetic repulsion. If the material is cooled to sufficiently low temperatures, these paired electrons (known as Cooper pairs) can travel through it without any resistance.
Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) form when bosons, or particles with integer quantum spin, are cooled until they are all in the same quantum state. Within this special “fifth state of matter”, quasiparticles called Bogoliubov excitations can develop. Named after the Russian physicist Nikolaï Bogoliubov, who was the first to provide a theoretical description of them, these quasiparticles are usually known as bogolons. Ivan Savenko, who led the research at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Korea, explains that bogolons are similar to phonons in the sense that they also serve as mediators for electron-electron attractions.
This next jump in battery-tech could solve a lot of EV problems.
The world of the internal combustion engine will sadly, but very necessarily, come to a close at some point in many of our lifetimes. Hybrids and electric vehicles are becoming more affordable and more advanced at a rapid pace, which means batteries are taking the place of fossil fuels. This has led to an equally rapid progression in battery technology, with the main goals of improving capacity, charging times, and safety. One major advancement in this field is the advent of solid-state batteries, which promise to push the boundaries of the limitations that current lithium-ion batteries carry.
Electric vehicles have been powered by lithium-ion batteries for years, which are similar to the ones used in laptops, cell phones, and other consumer electronics. They are constructed with a liquid electrolyte inside, which makes them heavy and susceptible to instability at high temperatures. Because each individual battery pack can’t generate all that much energy on its own, several have to be linked together in series, further adding to the weight. The cost of engineering, manufacturing, and installing battery packs makes up a considerable portion of the overall cost of an electric vehicle.
Just like a cell phone, the lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles need to be recharged. The speed at which an electric vehicle’s batteries can be charged depends on the vehicle itself, the type of batteries it uses, and on the charging infrastructure. In general, public charging stations fall into either the Level 2 or Level 3 categories, both of which can charge an EV far quicker than a standard household outlet. Level 1 and Level 2 chargers provide power to the on-board charger via AC power, which is converted to DC power to charge the battery. Level 3, which can also be called DC Fast Charging, bypasses that on-board generator and instead charges the battery directly and at a much quicker rate. Over time, however, both the battery capacity and the ability to reach peak charging rates degrade.
