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‘Geometric frustration’ can cause the electrons in materials with atoms arranged in a triangular pattern to organize in three competing ways simultaneously, reveals a new computational study led by researchers at the Flatiron Institute.

Materials that look like mosaics of triangular tiles at the atomic level sometimes have paradoxical properties, and quantum physicists have finally found out why.

Using a combination of cutting-edge computational techniques, the scientists found that under special conditions, these triangular-patterned materials can end up in a mashup of three different phases at the same time. The competing phases overlap, with each wrestling for dominance. As a result, the material counterintuitively becomes more ordered when heated up, the scientists reported in Physical Review X.

An experiment, performed by Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica (INRIM) on 200 km of the Italian Quantum Backbone, in collaboration with Toshiba Europe, shows that coherent laser interferometry considerably improves the performances of quantum key distribution protocols in long-distance, real-world networks. The study has been published in Nature Communications.

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) protocols enable cryptographic keys to be shared between distant parties with an intrinsic security guaranteed by the laws of quantum mechanics. This is made possible by the transmission of single photons, the elementary particles of which light is made of.

The interest for this subject extends well beyond the scientific community, and has now a strong strategic and commercial relevance. The European Commission, within the “European Quantum Communication Infrastructure” intitative, aims at integrating quantum key distribution technologies into specific services throughout the European Union within the next 10 years, and INRIM will take part in the design of this infrastructure with the OQTAVO project.

A surprising property of how resonant photons interact with an absorbing medium has been uncovered by physicists in Canada. They say they have found that even photons passing straight through the medium energize atoms within it, causing atoms to spend nearly as much time in their excited states as those that have absorbed photons. They see their result as a challenge to theorists trying to describe how light interacts with matter quantum mechanically.

Aephraim Steinberg and colleagues at the University of Toronto made the discovery while investigating what happens to a beam of photons passing through a cloud of atoms when the photons’ frequency is equal to that of one of the atomic transitions. Intuitively, they say, it would be expected that those photons exciting atoms within the cloud would be absorbed and then at best re-emitted in a random direction. As such, the flux of photons coming from excited atoms that are detected in the forward direction would be miniscule.

Indeed, they point out, this idea that only absorbed, or “lost”, photons contribute to the excitation springs naturally from theory that tells us the total time atoms spend in the excited state is directly proportional to the number of photons that are lost.

Computers play an important role in many aspects of life today. Digital computers are the most widely used, while quantum computers are well known. However, the least known computers are the so-called Stochastic Pulse Computers. Their work is based on highly parallel logical operations between trains of electrical pulses, where the pulses occur at random times, as in neurons, the nerve cells in the brains of humans and mammals.

Researchers from the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnologies of the Cnr and the Politecnico di Milano have built a battery which, following the laws of quantum physics, has a recharge time that is inversely related to the amount of stored energy.

Quantum batteries are a new class of energy storage devices that operate according to the principles of quantum physics, the science that studies the infinitely small where the laws of classical physics do not always apply. Tersilla Virgili of the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnologies of the National Research Council (Cnr-Ifn) and Giulio Cerullo of the Physics Department of the Politecnico di Milano have shown that it is possible to manufacture a type of quantum battery where the charging power increases faster by increasing the battery capacity. The work, carried out together with other international research groups, was published in Science Advances.

“Quantum batteries have a counter-intuitive property in which the recharge time is inversely related to the battery capacity, that is the amount of stored electrical charge,” explains Virgili. “This leads to the intriguing idea that the charging power of quantum batteries is super-extensive, meaning that it increases faster with battery size.”

At just 1/1000th of a millimeter, nanoparticles are impossible to see with the naked eye. But, despite being small, they’re extremely important in many ways. If scientists want to take a close look at DNA, proteins, or viruses, then being able to isolate and monitor nanoparticles is essential.

Trapping these particles involves tightly focusing a laser beam to a point that produces a strong electromagnetic field. This beam can hold particles just like a pair of tweezers but, unfortunately, there are natural restrictions to this technique. Most notable are the size restrictions—if the particle is too small, the technique won’t work. To date, optical tweezers have been unable to hold particles like individual proteins, which are only a few nanometers in diameter.

Now, due to recent advances in nanotechnology, researchers in the Light-Matter Interactions for Quantum Technologies Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have developed a technique for precise nanoparticle trapping. In this study, they overcame the natural restrictions by developing optical tweezers based on metamaterials —a synthetic material with specific properties that do not occur naturally. This was the first time that this kind of metamaterial had been used for single nanoparticle trapping.

BERKELEY, Calif. 0, Jan. 20, 2022 — Atom Computing, the creators of the first quantum computer made of nuclear-spin qubits from optically-trapped neutral atoms, today announced closure of a $60M Series B round. Third Point Ventures led the round, followed by Primer Movers Lab and insiders including Innovation Endeavors, Venrock and Prelude Ventures. Following the completion of their first 100-qubit quantum computing system with world-record 40 second coherence times, Atom Computing will use this new investment to build their second-generation quantum computing systems and commercialize the technology.

“Atom Computing designed and built our first-generation machine, Phoenix 0, in less than two years and our team was the fastest to deliver a 100-qubit system,” said Rob Hays 0, CEO and President, Atom Computing. “We gained valuable learnings from the system and have proven the technology. The investment announced today accelerates the commercialization opportunities and we look forward to bringing this to market.”

With this new level of investment, the company will turn its focus to developing much larger systems that are required to run commercial use-cases with paradigm-shifting compute performance.

UNSW Sydney-led research paves the way for large silicon-based quantum processors for real-world manufacturing and application.

Australian researchers have proven that near error-free quantum computing is possible, paving the way to build silicon-based quantum devices compatible with current semiconductor manufacturing technology.

“Today’s publication in Nature shows our operations were 99 percent error-free,” says Professor Andrea Morello of UNSW, who led the work.

Official launch marks a milestone in the development of quantum computing in Europe.

A quantum annealer with more than 5,000 qubits has been put into operation at Forschungszentrum Jülich. The Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and D-Wave Systems, a leading provider of quantum computing systems, today launched the company’s first cloud-based quantum service outside North America. The new system is located at Jülich and will work closely with the supercomputers at JSC in the future. The annealing quantum computer is part of the Jülich UNified Infrastructure for Quantum computing (JUNIQ), which was established in autumn 2019 to provide researchers in Germany and Europe with access to various quantum systems.