Lifeboat Foundation

That general question is still hard to answer, again in part because of those pesky errors. (Future quantum machines will compensate for their imperfections using a technique called quantum error correction, but that capability is still a ways off.) Is it possible to get the hoped-for runaway quantum advantage even with uncorrected errors?

Most researchers suspected the answer was no, but they couldn’t prove it for all cases. Now, in a paper posted to the preprint server arxiv.org, a team of computer scientists has taken a major step toward a comprehensive proof that error correction is necessary for a lasting quantum advantage in random circuit sampling — the bespoke problem that Google used to show quantum supremacy. They did so by developing a classical algorithm that can simulate random circuit sampling experiments when errors are present.

Controlling quantum states in individual molecules with two-dimensional ferroelectrics.

A quantum camera can take images using light that has never actually illuminated the subject. It could be useful for imaging particularly fragile tissues and materials.

Researchers at Princeton’s Department of Chemistry discovered the first known de novo protein that catalyzes, or drives, the synthesis of quantum dots.

Nature uses 20 canonical amino acids.

Continue reading “Princeton Chemists Create Quantum Dots at Room Temperature Using Custom Protein” »

A new algorithm is probably not efficient enough to crack current encryption keys — but that’s no reason for complacency, researchers say.

Researchers in Brazil have achieved a quantum breakthrough by succeeding in the creation of a source of illumination that produces two separate entangled beams of light, according to new research.

The achievement was announced by a team of physicists with Brazil’s Laboratory for Coherent Manipulation of Atoms and Light (LMCAL), located at the University of São Paulo’s Physics Institute.

Quantum entanglement is among the most perplexing phenomena observed in modern physics. It involves particles that are linked in such a way that when changes affect the quantum state of one, the other to which it is “entangled” will also be affected. Strangely, such effects even occur over significant distances, a phenomenon first described as “spooky action at a distance” after its discussion in a landmark 1935 paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen.

Everything you ever wanted to know about parallel universes, time, entropy, free will and more, explained by physicist Sean Carroll.

Up next, Michio Kaku: The Universe in a nutshell (Full Presentation) ► https://youtu.be/0NbBjNiw4tk.

Continue reading “The Universe in 90 minutes: Time, free will, God, & more | Sean Carroll” »

Taming rays of light and bending them to your will is tricky business. Light travels fast and getting a good chunk of it to stay in one place for a long time requires a lot of skillful coaxing. But the benefits of learning how to hold a moonbeam (or, more likely, a laser beam) in your hand, or on a convenient chip, are enormous. Trapping and controlling light on a chip can enable better lasers, sensors that help self-driving cars “see,” the creation of quantum-entangled pairs of photons that can be used for secure communication, and fundamental studies of the basic interactions between light and atoms—just to name a few.

Of all the moonbeam-holding chip technologies out there, two stand the tallest: the evocatively named whispering gallery mode microrings, which are easy to manufacture and can trap light of many colors very efficiently, and photonic crystals, which are much trickier to make and inject light into but are unrivaled in their ability to confine light of a particular color into a tiny space—resulting in a very large intensity of light for each confined photon.

Recently, a team of researchers at JQI struck upon a clever way to combine whispering gallery modes and photonic crystals in one easily manufacturable device. This hybrid device, which they call a microgear photonic crystal ring, can trap many colors of light while also capturing particular colors in tightly confined, high-intensity bundles. This unique combination of features opens a route to new applications, as well as exciting possibilities for manipulating light in novel ways for basic research.

For the first time, physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have come across a novel type of quantum entanglement, the extremely bizarre phenomenon that occurs when a pair of particles remain connected even when separated by galactic distances. Thanks to this effect, the researchers were also able to peer inside the atomic nuclei with unprecedented detail.

Quantum entanglement is a strange and fascinating phenomenon that has puzzled scientists for decades. It occurs when pairs of particles become so closely connected that one can no longer be described without the other, no matter how far apart they may be. Even more strange, changing one will instantly trigger a change in its partner, even if it was on the other side of the universe. In theory, this effect would enable faster-than-light communication if you encode the changes in these states with 1s and 0s.

This concept may sound impossible to us, as it goes against our classical understanding of physics, and it even unnerved Albert Einstein, who referred to it as “spooky action at a distance.” However, numerous experiments have consistently proven the existence of quantum entanglement by manipulating the properties of the entangled particles, such as their spin or polarization, and observing the effects on the other particle. Today, quantum entanglement forms the backbone of emerging technologies such as quantum computers and networks.