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The introduction of topology in photonic systems has attracted considerable attention not only for the elaborate molding of light but also for its practical applications in novel photonic devices. Originally, the quantum Hall effect of light was realized in photonic crystals (PCs) by introducing external electric or magnetic fields to break the time-reversal symmetry (TRS).

Instead of breaking the TRS, the quantum spin-Hall effect of light has been achieved in TRS-preserved systems where photonic pseudospins can be constructed. Recently, the valley Hall effect of light has been realized by introducing the binary valley degree of freedom (DoF) into photonic systems. One of the vital features of the valley Hall effect is the nontrivial photonic band gap, which is characterized by the nonzero valley Chern number.

Furthermore, valley-dependent edge modes are supported at the domain wall which consists of two PCs with opposite-valley Chern numbers. The valley Hall effect of light is commonly realized in a triangular-lattice PC with broken mirror symmetry or in a honeycomb-lattice PC with broken spatial inversion symmetry, and it is compatible with existing nanophotonic fabrication technique.

Researchers from Linköping University and the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden have proposed a new device concept that can efficiently transfer the information carried by electron spin to light at room temperature—a stepping stone toward future information technology. They present their approach in an article in Nature Communications.

Light and electron charge are the main media for information processing and transfer. In the search for information technology that is even faster, smaller and more energy-efficient, scientists around the globe are exploring another property of electrons —their spin. Electronics that exploit both the spin and the charge of the electron are called “spintronics.”

Like the Earth, an electron spins around its own axis, either clockwise or counterclockwise. The handedness of the rotation is referred to as spin-up and spin-down states. In spintronics, the two states represent the binary bits and thus carry information. The information encoded by these spin states can be converted by a light-emitting device into light, which then carries the information over a long distance through fiber optics. The transfer of quantum information opens the possibility to exploit both electron spin and light, and the interaction between them, a technology known as “opto-spintronics.”

so-called qubits, to perform computations much faster than any classical computer ever could.

While multiple frontrunner startups have explored various technology platforms, from superconducting qubits and ion trap systems to diamond-based quantum accelerators, scaling the number of qubits from a few dozen to hundreds, thousands, and eventually millions of qubits has remained notoriously difficult. But this might change with photonic quantum computing.

The startup ORCA Computing builds photonic quantum computers that use photons, the fundamental particles of light, as qubits. Using quantum memories and established telecommunications technology, it can scale its devices more easily and integrate with existing computing infrastructure e.g. in data centers. Based on the core memory technology developed by Kris Kaczmarek, ORCA was officially co-founded by Ian Walmsley, Richard Murray, Josh Nunn, and Cristina Escoda in Oxford in the fall of 2019. This summer 2022, it has raised a $15M Series A led by Octopus Ventures and joined by Oxford Science Enterprises, Quantonation, and Verve Ventures, with additional, project-based funding provided by Innovate UK. Previous investors also include Atmos Ventures and Creative Destruction Lab.

Dr. Joscha Bach is VP of Research at AI Foundation and Author of Principles of Synthetic Intelligence, focused on how our minds work, and how to build machines that can perceive, think, and learn.

http://bach.ai.
Twitter ► https://twitter.com/Plinz.
LinkedIn ► https://linkedin.com/in/joschabach.

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What goes on inside planets like Neptune and Uranus? To find out, an international team headed by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the University of Rostock and France’s École Polytechnique conducted a novel experiment. They fired a laser at a thin film of simple PET plastic and investigated what happened using intensive laser flashes. One result was that the researchers were able to confirm their earlier thesis that it really does rain diamonds inside the ice giants at the periphery of our solar system. And another was that this method could establish a new way of producing nanodiamonds, which are needed, for example, for highly-sensitive quantum sensors. The group has presented its findings in the journal Science Advances.

The conditions in the interior of icy giant planets like Neptune and Uranus are extreme: temperatures reach several thousand degrees Celsius, and the pressure is millions of times greater than in the Earth’s atmosphere. Nonetheless, states like this can be simulated briefly in the lab: powerful laser flashes hit a film-like material sample, heat it up to 6,000 degrees Celsius for the blink of an eye and generate a shock wave that compresses the material for a few nanoseconds to a million times the atmospheric pressure.

“Up to now, we used hydrocarbon films for these kinds of experiment,” explains Dominik Kraus, physicist at HZDR and professor at the University of Rostock. “And we discovered that this extreme pressure produced tiny diamonds, known as nanodiamonds.”

Some of us, when we hear the word quantum (plural quanta, from the German word Quanten), might think of health supplements, a sports car, or even the television show Quantum Leap. More recently, in Marvel Studios movies such as Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, and Avengers: Endgame, “the quantum realm” is presented where time flows differently from our ordinary reality and the Avengers may use the subatomic world “to go back in time”, a world that “is smaller than a single atom” (Woodward, 2019, para.20)

We might have also seen or known the meaning of words such as quantum mechanics, quantum computing, and quantum entanglement, but what is a quantum and how does it relate to our ordinary realm?

A quantum is a word that refers to “how much”; it is a specific amount. For example, if the speed of your car happens to be quantized in increments of 10 mph, then as you accelerate your car from 10 mph, the speed will jump to 20 mph, without passing through any speed between 10 mph and 20 mph. A speed of 12 mph or 19 mph is excluded because the speed of your car can only exist in those increments of 10 mph.

We present a universal theory of quantum work statistics in generic disordered non-interacting Fermi systems, displaying a chaotic single-particle spectrum captured by random matrix theory. We…

Oxford quantum physicist Nikita Gourianov tore into the quantum computing industry this week, comparing the “fanfare” around the tech to a financial bubble in a searing commentary piece for the Financial Times.

In other words, he wrote, it’s far more hype than substance.

It’s a scathing, but also perhaps insightful, analysis of a burgeoning field that, at the very least, still has a lot to prove.

The atoms arranged in lines and sheets reached about 1.2 nanokelvin, more than 2 billion times colder than interstellar space. For the atoms in three-dimensional arrangements, the situation is so complex that the researchers are still figuring out the best way to measure the temperature.

The atoms in the experiment belong to a larger group called fermions and were “the coldest fermions in the universe”, says Hazzard. “Thinking about experimenting on this 10 years ago, it looked like a theorist’s dream,” he says.

Physicists have long been interested in how atoms interact in exotic magnets like this because they suspect that similar interactions happen in high-temperature superconductors – materials that perfectly conduct electricity. By better understanding what happens, they could build better superconductors.