IN A NUTSHELL 🔬 Japanese scientists have developed a groundbreaking technique using quantum mechanics to analyze plasma turbulence. 📊 The new method, called multi-field singular value decomposition, provides clearer insights into the interactions within fusion plasmas. 🌊 The research has implications beyond plasma physics, potentially impacting fields like weather dynamics and social systems. 🔍 By
In a monumental breakthrough, scientists have measured the speed of quantum entanglement for the first time—an achievement that is set to radically transform the way we understand the quantum world. For years, quantum entanglement was thought to be an instantaneous process, but this new research, published in Physical Review Letters, has pushed the boundaries of our knowledge, providing new insights into the quantum realm and setting the stage for revolutionary advances in data security and computational technologies.
Physicists at the University of Oxford have set a new global benchmark for the accuracy of controlling a single quantum bit, achieving the lowest-ever error rate for a quantum logic operation—just 0.000015%, or one error in 6.7 million operations. This record-breaking result represents nearly an order of magnitude improvement over the previous benchmark, set by the same research group a decade ago.
To put the result in perspective: a person is more likely to be struck by lightning in a given year (1 in 1.2 million) than for one of Oxford’s quantum logic gates to make a mistake.
The findings, to be published in Physical Review Letters, are a major advance towards having robust and useful quantum computers.
One of the current hot research topics is the combination of two of the most recent technological breakthroughs: machine learning and quantum computing.
An experimental study shows that already small-scale quantum computers can boost the performance of machine learning algorithms.
This was demonstrated on a photonic quantum processor by an international team of researchers at the University of Vienna. The work, published in Nature Photonics, shows promising new applications for optical quantum computers.
Heat causes errors in the qubits that are the building blocks of a quantum computer, so quantum systems are typically kept inside refrigerators that keep the temperature just above absolute zero (−459 degrees Fahrenheit).
But quantum computers need to communicate with electronics outside the refrigerator, in a room-temperature environment. The metal cables that connect these electronics bring heat into the refrigerator, which has to work even harder and draw extra power to keep the system cold. Plus, more qubits require more cables, so the size of a quantum system is limited by how much heat the fridge can remove.
To overcome this challenge, an interdisciplinary team of MIT researchers has developed a wireless communication system that enables a quantum computer to send and receive data to and from electronics outside the refrigerator using high-speed terahertz waves.
(From 2023)
A new wireless terahertz communication system enables a super-cold quantum computer to send and receive data without generating too much error-causing heat.
The reliable manipulation of the speed at which light travels through objects could have valuable implications for the development of various advanced technologies, including high-speed communication systems and quantum information processing devices. Conventional methods for manipulating the speed of light, such as techniques leveraging so-called electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) effects, work by utilizing quantum interference effects in a medium, which can make it transparent to light beams and slow the speed of light through it.
Despite their advantages, these techniques only enable the reciprocal control of group velocity (i.e., the speed at which the envelope of a wave packet travels through a medium), meaning that a light beam will behave the same irrespective of the direction it is traveling in while passing through a device. Yet the nonreciprocal control of light speed could be equally valuable, particularly for the development of advanced devices that can benefit from allowing signals to travel in desired directions at the desired speed.
Researchers at the University of Manitoba in Canada and Lanzhou University in China recently demonstrated the nonreciprocal control of the speed of light using a cavity magnonics device, a system that couples microwave photons (i.e., quanta of microwave light) with magnons (i.e., quanta of the oscillations of electron spins in materials).