Lifeboat Foundation

In molecules, the atoms vibrate with characteristic patterns and frequencies. Vibrations are therefore an important tool for studying molecules and molecular processes such as chemical reactions. Although scanning tunneling microscopes can be used to image individual molecules, their vibrations have so far been difficult to detect.

Physicists at Kiel University (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, CAU) have now invented a method with which the vibration signals can be amplified by up to a factor of 50. Furthermore, they increased the frequency resolution considerably. The new method will improve the understanding of interactions in molecular systems and further simulation methods. The research team has now published the results in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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By helping scientists control a strange but useful phenomenon of quantum mechanics, an ultrathin invention could make future computing, sensing, and encryption technologies remarkably smaller and more powerful. The device is described in new research that was recently published in the journal Science.

This device could replace a roomful of equipment to link photons in a bizarre quantum effect called entanglement, according to scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. It is a kind of nano-engineered material called a metasurface and paves the way for entangling photons in complex ways that have not been possible with compact technologies.

When photons are said to be entangled, it means they are linked in such a way that actions on one affect the other, no matter where or how far apart the photons are in the universe. It is a spooky effect of quantum mechanics, the laws of physics that govern particles and other very tiny things.

The founders all believed that the traditional method of building a quantum computer of a useful size would take too long. At the company’s inception, the PsiQuantum team established its goal to build a million qubit, fault-tolerant photonic quantum computer. They also believed the only way to create such a machine was to manufacture it in a semiconductor foundry.

Early alerts

PsiQuantum first popped up on my quantum radar about two years ago when it received $150 million in Series C funding which upped total investments in the company to $215 million.

There has been a lot of buzz about quantum computers and for good reason. The futuristic computers are designed to mimic what happens in nature at microscopic scales, which means they have the power to better understand the quantum realm and speed up the discovery of new materials, including pharmaceuticals, environmentally friendly chemicals, and more. However, experts say viable quantum computers are still a decade away or more. What are researchers to do in the meantime?

A new Caltech-led study in the journal Science describes how machine learning tools, run on classical computers, can be used to make predictions about quantum systems and thus help researchers solve some of the trickiest physics and chemistry problems. While this notion has been shown experimentally before, the new report is the first to mathematically prove that the method works.

“Quantum computers are ideal for many types of physics and materials science problems,” says lead author Hsin-Yuan (Robert) Huang, a graduate student working with John Preskill, the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics and the Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair of the Institute for Quantum Science and Technology (IQIM). “But we aren’t quite there yet and have been surprised to learn that classical machine learning methods can be used in the meantime. Ultimately, this paper is about showing what humans can learn about the physical world.”

An MIT professor who studies quantum computing is sharing a $3 million Breakthrough Prize.

MIT math professor Peter Shor shared in the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with three other researchers, David Deutsch at the University of Oxford, Charles Bennett at IBM Research, and Gilles Brassard at the University of Montreal. All of them are “pioneers in the field of quantum information,” the prize foundation said in a statement.

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When Mohammad Javad Khojasteh arrived at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) in 2020 to begin his postdoc appointment, he was introduced to an entirely new universe. The domain he knew best could be explained by “classical” physics that predicts the behavior of ordinary objects with near-perfect accuracy (think Newton’s three laws of motion). But this new universe was governed by bizarre laws that can produce unpredictable results while operating at scales typically smaller than an atom.

“The rules of quantum mechanics are counterintuitive and seem very strange when you first start to learn them,” Khojasteh says. “But the more you know, the clearer it becomes that the underlying logic is extremely elegant.”

As a member of Professor Moe Win’s lab, called the Wireless Information and Network Sciences Laboratory, or WINS Lab, Khojasteh’s job is to straddle both the classical and quantum realms, in order to improve state-of-the-art communication, sensing, and computational capabilities.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=R0NP5eMY7Q8

Quantum algorithms: An algorithm is a sequence of steps that leads to the solution of a problem. In order to execute these steps on a device, one must use specific instruction sets that the device is designed to do so.

Quantum computing introduces different instruction sets that are based on a completely different idea of execution when compared with classical computing. The aim of quantum algorithms is to use quantum effects like superposition and entanglement to get the solution faster.

Continue reading “How Does Quantum Artificial General Intelligence Work — Tim Ferriss & Eric Schmidt” »

An international team of physicists, with the participation of the University of Augsburg, has for the first time confirmed an important theoretical prediction in quantum physics…

Quantum computers and communication devices work by encoding information into individual or entangled photons, enabling data to be quantum securely transmitted and manipulated exponentially faster than is possible with conventional electronics. Now, quantum researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have demonstrated a method for encoding vastly more information into a single photon, opening the door to even faster and more powerful quantum communication tools.

Typically, quantum communication systems “write” information onto a photon’s spin angular momentum. In this case, photons carry out either a right or left circular rotation, or form a quantum superposition of the two known as a two-dimensional qubit.

It’s also possible to encode information onto a photon’s orbital angular momentum —the corkscrew path that light follows as it twists and torques forward, with each photon circling around the center of the beam. When the spin and angular momentum interlock, it forms a high-dimensional qudit—enabling any of a theoretically infinite range of values to be encoded into and propagated by a single photon.