Researchers have demonstrated quantum gate operations in a system where voltage pulses cause neighboring electron spins to swap with one another.
Research using a quantum computer as the physical platform for quantum experiments has found a way to design and characterize tailor-made magnetic objects using quantum bits, or qubits. That opens up a new approach to develop new materials and robust quantum computing.
“With the help of a quantum annealer, we demonstrated a new way to pattern magnetic states,” said Alejandro Lopez-Bezanilla, a virtual experimentalist in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Lopez-Bezanilla is the corresponding author of a paper about the research in Science Advances.
“We showed that a magnetic quasicrystal lattice can host states that go beyond the zero and one bit states of classical information technology,” Lopez-Bezanilla said. “By applying a magnetic field to a finite set of spins, we can morph the magnetic landscape of a quasicrystal object.”
Quantum cloud computing makes quantum computing resources available to organizations, academics and other users through cloud technology.
Cloud-based quantum computers function at greater speeds, with higher computing power than conventional computers, because they employ the principles of quantum physics when solving complex computational problems.
Different types of quantum computers exist, such as quantum annealers, analog quantum simulators and universal quantum computers. Quantum annealers are considered the least powerful among quantum computers but work well to solve optimization problems. Analog quantum simulators, on the other hand, are powerful systems that can solve physics and biochemistry problems.
The physicists Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments that proved the profoundly strange quantum nature of reality. Their experiments collectively established the existence of a bizarre quantum phenomenon known as entanglement, where two widely separated particles appear to share information despite having no conceivable way of communicating.
Entanglement lay at the heart of a fiery clash in the 1930s between physics titans Albert Einstein on the one hand and Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger on the other about how the universe operates at a fundamental level. Einstein believed all aspects of reality should have a concrete and fully knowable existence. All objects — from the moon to a photon of light — should have precisely defined properties that can be discovered through measurement. Bohr, Schrödinger and other proponents of the nascent quantum mechanics, however, were finding that reality appeared to be fundamentally uncertain; a particle does not possess certain properties until the moment of measurement.
Entanglement emerged as a decisive way to distinguish between these two possible versions of reality. The physicist John Bell proposed a decisive thought experiment that was later realized in various experimental forms by Aspect and Clauser. The work proved Schrödinger right. Quantum mechanics was the operating system of the universe.
Retrocausality is a theory in quantum science that reflects on how the future can affect the past. The future affecting the past sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi film (and it’s been in a few of these, too), but it’s also an actual theory based on quantum physics, and more scientists are starting to buy into it.
At the end of of 2022, we released a film offering a reply to the fine tuning argument for God from leading physicists and philosophers of physics. This included both those that doubt there is any fine tuning and those that think there is but it can be solved by naturalistic means.
Subsequently astrophysicist Luke Barnes and philosopher Philip Goff offered their criticism of our criticism. Here we have assembled some of our original talking heads to review their criticism and offer a reply, defending the original position that fine tuning argument for God does not work.
Our original film can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ-fj3lqJ6M
Luke Barnes and Philip Goff’s reply is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJYWkqOzUQ0&t=4036s and we also recommend this video on Bayes theorem on the Majesty of Reason Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1MdtyLL3Uw&t=4423s.
Continue reading “Fine Tuned Universe: the critics strike back” »
Quantum computing systems have the potential to outperform classical computers on some tasks, helping to solve complex real-world problems in shorter times. Research teams worldwide have thus been trying to realize this quantum advantage over traditional computers, by creating and testing different quantum systems.
Researchers at Tsinghua University recently developed a new programmable quantum phononic processor with trapped ions. This processor, introduced in a paper in Nature Physics, could be easier to scale up in size than other previously proposed photonic quantum processors, which could ultimately enable better performances on complex problems.
“Originally, we were interested in the proposal of Scott Aaronson and others about Boson sampling, which might show the quantum advantages of simple linear optics and photons,” Kihwan Kim, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “We were wondering if it is possible to realize it with the phonons in a trapped ion system.”
Quantum mechanics had a disordered beginning in the 1920s, and is still developing today. Science is rarely a done deal, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Columnist By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
It’s a very modern conjurer’s trick: Create a SXSW talk out of thin air, with the help of generative AI. That’s what whurley did this year in Austin. It took nine weeks for whurley — a staple of the Austin tech scene — to create and prepare for a keynote at SXSW 2018, where he would debut Strangeworks, a quantum computing startup he co-founded and runs. Five years later, generative AI would complete the task in just a few hours.
And it was actually pretty good. The 45-minute speech was comprehensive, interesting and struck a whurley-like tone. There was one swear word (fuck) and a few jokes (including two lawyer ones) that the audience laughed at.
For their new study, the researchers aimed to understand how quantum correlations inside a source material, be it a gas or a mineral, would impact the quantum properties of the light bursts coming out, if at all. “High harmonic generation is a very important area. And still, until recently, it was described by a classical picture of light,” Kaminer says.
In quantum mechanics, figuring out what’s going on with more than a few particles at the same time is notoriously difficult. Kaminer and Alexey Gorlach, a graduate student in his lab, used their COVID-imposed isolation to try to make progress on a fully quantum description of light emitted in high harmonics. “It’s really crazy; Alexey built a super complex mathematical description on a scale that we’ve never had before,” Kaminer says.
Next, to fully incorporate the quantum properties of the material used to generate this light, Kaminer and Gorlach teamed up with Andrea Pizzi, then a graduate student at the University of Cambridge and now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.
