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Just over a decade ago, physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek from MIT wrote a paper musing about the potential properties of a theoretical object he called quantum time crystal. To the surprise of many, over the last few years, those time crystals have been found aplenty both in specific lab experiments and inside common things like children’s toys.

As is often the case, the exact nature of these objects is not widely understood. So let’s tackle this question together: what is a time crystal? First and foremost, let’s define what a crystal is. Let’s consider empty space like a blank sheet of paper extending as far as the eye can see. There is no special point to it because every point is the same.

That’s where the translational symmetry comes in. No point is special – but now let’s imagine that the paper is graphed, like sheets you might have used in math lessons. Now you will have a lot of empty space, but every little while you have lines and corners, etc. That is a repeating regular structure. In your regular crystal, from diamonds to snowflakes, their atoms are organized in repeating patterns like that.

A quantum harmonic oscillator—a structure that can control the location and energy of quantum particles that could, in the future, be used to develop new technologies including OLEDs and miniature lasers—has been made at room temperature by researchers led by the University of St Andrews.

The research, conducted in collaboration with scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and published in Nature Communications recently, used an organic semiconductor to produce polaritons, which show quantum states even at room temperature.

Polaritons are quantum mixtures of light and matter that are made by combining excitations in a semiconductor material with photons, the fundamental particles that form light. To create polaritons, the researchers trapped light in a thin layer of an organic semiconductor (the kind of light-emitting material used in OLED smartphone displays) 100 times thinner than a single human hair, sandwiched between two highly reflective mirrors.

Making predictions is never easy, but it is agreed that cryptography will be altered by the advent of quantum computers.

Thirteen, 53, and 433. That’s the size of quantum computers.

Hh5800/iStock.

Continue reading “Quantum computers: How scientists can shield against cyber attacks” »

State-of-the-art methods of information security are likely to be compromised by emerging technologies such as quantum computers. One of the reasons they are vulnerable is that both encrypted messages and the keys to decrypt them must be sent from sender to receiver.

A new method—called COSMOCAT—is proposed and demonstrated, which removes the need to send a decryption key since cosmic rays transport it for us, meaning that even if messages are intercepted, they could not be read using any theorized approach. COSMOCAT could be useful in localized various bandwidth applications, as there are limitations to the effective distance between sender and receiver.

In the field of information communication technology, there is a perpetual arms race to find ever more secure ways to transfer data, and ever more sophisticated ways to break them. Even the first modern computers were essentially code-breaking machines used by the U.S. and European Allies during World War II. And this race is about to enter a new regime with the advent of quantum computers, capable of breaking current forms of security with ease. Even security methods which use quantum computers themselves might be susceptible to other quantum attacks.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

Classical machine learning (ML) algorithms have proven to be powerful tools for a wide range of tasks, including image and speech recognition, natural language processing (NLP) and predictive modeling. However, classical algorithms are limited by the constraints of classical computing and can struggle to process large and complex datasets or to achieve high levels of accuracy and precision.

Enter quantum machine learning (QML).

The early 20^th century saw the advent of quantum mechanics to describe the properties of small particles, such as electrons or atoms. Schrödinger’s equation in quantum mechanics can successfully predict the electronic structure of atoms or molecules. However, the “duality” of matter, referring to the dual “particle” and “wave” nature of electrons, remained a controversial issue. Physicists use a complex wavefunction to represent the wave nature of an electron.

“Complex” numbers are those that have both “real” and “imaginary” parts—the ratio of which is referred to as the “phase.” However, all directly measurable quantities must be “real”. This leads to the following challenge: when the electron hits a detector, the “complex” phase information of the wavefunction disappears, leaving only the square of the amplitude of the wavefunction (a “real” value) to be recorded. This means that electrons are detected only as particles, which makes it difficult to explain their dual properties in atoms.

The ensuing century witnessed a new, evolving era of physics, namely, attosecond physics. The attosecond is a very short time scale, a billionth of a billionth of a second. “Attosecond physics opens a way to measure the phase of electrons. Achieving attosecond time-resolution, electron dynamics can be observed while freezing molecular motion,” explains Professor Hiromichi Niikura from the Department of Applied Physics, Waseda University, Japan, who, along with Professor D. M. Villeneuve—a principal research scientist at the Joint Attosecond Science Laboratory, National Research Council, and adjunct professor at University of Ottawa—pioneered the field of attosecond physics.

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Researchers have designed smart, color-controllable white light devices from quantum dots – tiny semiconductors just a few billionths of a meter in size – which are more efficient and have better color saturation than standard LEDs, and can dynamically reproduce daylight conditions in a single light.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, designed the next-generation smart lighting system using a combination of nanotechnology, color science, advanced computational methods, electronics, and a unique fabrication process.

Continue reading “LED Smart Lighting System Based on Quantum Dots More Accurately Reproduces Daylight” »

Australian engineers have discovered a new way of precisely controlling single electrons nestled in quantum dots that run logic gates. What’s more, the new mechanism is less bulky and requires fewer parts, which could prove essential to making large-scale silicon quantum computers a reality.

The serendipitous discovery, made by engineers at the quantum computing start-up Diraq and UNSW Sydney, is detailed in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Continue reading “New spin control method brings billion-qubit quantum chips closer” »

Water molecules that are close enough to “see’’ each other but far enough apart to be gas-like can undergo a quantum phase transition, a finding of relevance for making future water-based quantum devices.