Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: quantum physics – Page 352

Superconducting quantum technology has long promised to bridge the divide between existing electronic devices and the delicate quantum landscape beyond. Unfortunately progress in making critical processes stable has stagnated over the past decade.

Now a significant step forward has finally been realized, with researchers from the University of Maryland making superconducting qubits that last 10 times longer than before.

What makes qubits so useful in computing is the fact their quantum properties entangle in ways that are mathematically handy for making short work of certain complex algorithms, taking moments to solve select problems that would take other technology decades or more.

Read more | >

Physicist Lennard Kwakernaak finds the “complexity of simple things” intriguing, and it is a tough ask to make an inanimate object count.

A collaboration between researchers at Leiden University and AMOLF in Amsterdam has yielded a new metamaterial, a rubber block that can count. The researchers are calling it a Beam Counter and it is pretty nifty.

In a world where researchers are racing to make a quantum computer that can do complex math, building a new rubber block might not seem like much. But physicist Lennard Kwakernaak finds the “complexity of simple things” intriguing, and it is a tough ask to make an inanimate object count.

Read more | >

When you turn on a lamp to brighten a room, you are experiencing light energy transmitted as photons, which are small, discrete quantum packets of energy.

These photons must obey the sometimes strange laws of quantum mechanics, which, for instance, dictate that photons are indivisible, but at the same time, allow a photon to be in two places at once.

Similar to the photons that make up beams of light, indivisible quantum particles called phonons make up a beam of sound. These particles emerge from the collective motion of quadrillions of atoms, much as a “stadium wave” in a sports arena is due to the motion of thousands of individual fans. When you listen to a song, you’re hearing a stream of these very small quantum particles.

Read more | >

EPFL scientists show that even a few simple examples are enough for a quantum machine-learning model, the “quantum neural networks,” to learn and predict the behavior of quantum systems, bringing us closer to a new era of quantum computing.

Imagine a world where computers can unravel the mysteries of , enabling us to study the behavior of complex materials or simulate the intricate dynamics of molecules with unprecedented accuracy.

Thanks to a pioneering study led by Professor Zoe Holmes and her team at EPFL, we are now closer to that becoming a reality. Working with researchers at Caltech, the Free University of Berlin, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, they have found a new way to teach a quantum computer how to understand and predict the behavior of quantum systems. The research has been published in Nature Communications.

Read more | >

Camera sensitive enough to spot a single photon finally achieved by researchers in colorado.

A team of researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, has successfully developed a super-sensitive camera capable of detecting a single photon.

This remarkable achievement opens up new avenues for scientific exploration and holds significant potential for applications in quantum computing, communications, space exploration, and medical research.

Read more | >

Have you ever been compelled to enter sensitive payment data on the website of an unknown merchant? Would you be willing to consign your credit card data or passwords to untrustworthy hands? Scientists from the University of Vienna have now designed an unconditionally secure system for shopping in such settings, combining modern cryptographic techniques with the fundamental properties of quantum light. The demonstration of such “quantum-digital payments” in a realistic environment has been published in Nature Communications.

Digital payments have replaced physical banknotes in many aspects of our daily lives. Similar to banknotes, they should be easy to use, unique, tamper-resistant and untraceable, but additionally withstand digital attackers and data breaches.

In today’s ecosystem, customers’ sensitive data is substituted by sequences of random numbers, and the uniqueness of each is secured by a classical cryptographic method or code. However, adversaries and merchants with powerful computational resources can crack these codes and recover the customers’ private data, and for example, make payments in their name.

Read more | >

The term ‘quantum computer’ gets usually tossed around in the context of hyper-advanced, state-of-the-art computing devices, but much as how a 19th century mechanical computer, a discrete computer created from individual transistors, and a human being are all computers, the important quantifier is how fast and accurate the system is at the task, whether classical or quantum computing. This is demonstrated succinctly by [Davide ‘dakk’ Gessa] with 200 lines of BASIC code on a Commodore 64 (GitHub), implementing a range of quantum gates.

Much like a transistor in classical computing, the qubit forms the core of quantum computing, and we have known for a long time that a qubit can be simulated, even on something as mundane as an 8-bit MPU. Ergo [Davide]’s simulations of various quantum gates on a C64, ranging from Pauli-X, Pauli-Y, Pauli-Z, Hadamard, CNOT and SWAP, all using a two-qubit system running on a system that first saw the light of day in the early 1980s.

Naturally, the practical use of simulating a two-qubit system on a general-purpose MPU running at a blistering ~1 MHz is quite limited, but as a teaching tool it’s incredibly accessible and a fun way to introduce people to the world of quantum computing.

Read more | >

Quantum computing has long been heralded as the next frontier in computing. However, despite their immense potential, quantum computers today still make too many errors to be useful.

While it may become possible to correct these errors in the future, there is still a long way to go to reach fault tolerance. For now, the best strategy is to minimize errors and mitigate their impact on quantum computations by devising methods that can work with the existing quantum hardware.

QEDMA Quantum Computing was founded in 2020 by Asif Sinay, Netanel Lindner, and Dorit Aharonov to develop the quantum operating system of the future. QEDMA’s vision encompasses not only methods to characterize quantum hardware but also robust error mitigation strategies to get optimal results from the current generation of quantum computers.

Read more | >