Lifeboat Foundation

We all learn from early on that computers work with zeros and ones, also known as binary information. This approach has been so successful that computers now power everything from coffee machines to self-driving cars and it is hard to imagine a life without them.

Building on this success, today’s quantum computers are also designed with binary information processing in mind. “The building blocks of quantum computers, however, are more than just zeros and ones,” explains Martin Ringbauer, an experimental physicist from Innsbruck, Austria. “Restricting them to binary systems prevents these devices from living up to their true potential.”

The team led by Thomas Monz at the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck, now succeeded in developing a quantum computer that can perform arbitrary calculations with so-called quantum digits (qudits), thereby unlocking more computational power with fewer quantum particles. Their study is published in Nature Physics.

This mind-bending property offers a sought-after benefit: Information stored in the phase is far more protected against errors than with alternative setups currently used in quantum computers. As a result, the information can exist without getting garbled for much longer, an important milestone for making quantum computing viable, says study lead author Philipp Dumitrescu.

The approach’s use of an “extra” time dimension “is a completely different way of thinking about phases of matter,” says Dumitrescu, who worked on the project as a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Quantum Physics in New York City. “I’ve been working on these theory ideas for over five years, and seeing them come actually to be realized in experiments is exciting.”

From its very inception quantum mechanics troubled physicists. It seemed to challenge our conception of reality and lead to apparent contradictions. One of the founders of quantum mechanics, Ernst Heisenberg, questioned whether the theory offered a description of reality at all. Others, like Niels Bohr, claimed that somehow human consciousness played a role in the theory. In this interview, Carlo Rovelli explains Heisenberg’s anti-realist motivations, clarifies the role of the “observer” in quantum mechanics, and articulates his relational interpretation of the theory, according to which reality is a network of interactions.

Carlo Rovelli will debate Sabine Hossenfelder and Eric Weinsten in the FREE IAI Live event, ‘Quantum Physics and the End of Reality’ on July 25^th. Learn more here.

The founders of quantum mechanics were very uncomfortable with its results – famously Einstein thought it an incomplete theory and quipped “God doesn’t play dice”, and Schrödinger abandoned physics altogether for biology. What was so radically different about quantum mechanics than classical physics that caused such discomfort to its own creators?

Scientists have been grappling with the strangeness of quantum entanglement for decades, and it’s almost as mysterious in 2022 as it was when Einstein famously dubbed the phenomenon “spooky action at a distance” in 1947. An experiment in Germany that set a new entanglement distance record — with atoms rather than photons — could help shed some light on this quirk of the universe.

Entanglement was initially proposed in the early 20th century as a consequence of quantum mechanics, but many scientists of the day, even Einstein himself, considered it to be impossible. However, many of the counterintuitive predictions of quantum mechanics have been verified over the years, including entanglement. As we’ve seen in numerous experiments, it is possible for particles to be “entangled” such that properties like position, momentum, spin, and polarization can be shared between them. A change in one is immediately reflected in its twin.

Scientists believe entanglement could form the basis for future communication systems that are faster and more secure than what we use today — if you measure the state of one entangled partner, you automatically know the state of the other, and this could be used to transmit data. You just need to separate the entangled pair to make it useful, and researchers from Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU) and Saarland University have pushed that range much farther in the new experiment.

Circa 2021 force field this can also shield the earth or cities.

The computational design of functional materials relies heavily on large-scale atomistic simulations. Such simulations are often problematic for conventional classical force fields, which require tedious and time-consuming parameterization of interaction parameters. The problem can be solved using a quantum mechanically derived force field (QMDFF)—a system-specific force field derived directly from the first-principles calculations. We present a computational approach for atomistic simulations of complex molecular systems, which include the treatment of chemical reactions with the empirical valence bond approach. The accuracy of the QMDFF is verified by comparison with the experimental properties of liquid solvents.

The future is now as IBM unveils its comprehensive strategy to take quantum computing from noisy to useful. property= description.

Implications of the existence of a ‘conscious’ quantum particle.

I know this story is going to be weird in many ways but this is something worth thinking about. Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once stated.

“Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.”

Continue reading “What if Electrons had Feelings” »

In a new paper in PNAS, “Triplet-Pair Spin Signatures From Macroscopically Aligned Heteroacenes in an Oriented Single Crystal,” National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) researchers Brandon Rugg, Brian Fluegel, Christopher Chang, and Justin Johnson tackle one of the fundamental problems in quantum information science: how to produce pure elements of quantum information—that is, those that start and remain in a well-defined “spin state”—at practical temperatures.

Quantum information science has the potential to revolutionize computation, sensing, and communications. But many of these applications are still beyond reach because of the challenges of producing units of quantum information, or qubits, without relying on extremely low temperatures to maintain their purity. Current approaches to identifying suitable quantum materials tend to rely on trial and error.

“The field of developing new molecules and materials [for quantum information science] sometimes progresses through ad hoc methods and serendipity. ‘This material just so happens to work better than the other one’—we saw a lot of that happening, and decided ultimately that it was not going to suffice for a project where the goal was to limit the set of possible options,” said Justin Johnson, a researcher in NREL’s Chemistry and Nanoscience Center. “We wanted to have the theory provide us with firm guidelines about what should happen.”