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Category: quantum physics – Page 353

The Laboratoire Sous-marin Provence Méditerranée (LSPM) lies 40 km off the coast of Toulon, at a depth of 2,450 m, inaccessible even to sunlight. Through this national research platform run by the CNRS in collaboration with Aix-Marseille University (AMU) and IFREMER, scientists will investigate undersea unknowns while scanning the skies for neutrinos. These elementary particles of extraterrestrial origin know few obstacles and can even traverse our planet without bumping into a single atom.

The main instrument at the LSPM is KM3NeT, a giant neutrino detector developed by a team of 250 researchers from 17 countries. In the pitch-black abyss, KM3NeT will study the trails of bluish light that neutrinos leave in the water. Capable of detecting dozens of these particles a day, it will help elucidate their quantum properties, which still defy our understanding.

The other LSPM instruments will permit the to study the life and chemistry of these depths. They will offer researchers insights into , deep-sea deoxygenation, marine radioactivity, and seismicity, and allow them to track cetacean populations as well as observe bioluminescent animals. This oceanographic instrumentation is integrated into the subsea observatory network of the EMSO European research infrastructure.

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An international team of scientists claim to have found a way to speed up, slow down, and even reverse the clock of a given system by taking advantage of the unusual properties of the quantum world, Spanish newspaper El País reports.

In a series of six papers, the team from the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna detailed their findings. The familiar laws of physics don’t map intuitively onto the subatomic world, which is made up of quantum particles called qubits that can technically exist in more than one state simultaneously, a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement.

Now, the researchers say they’ve figured out how to turn these quantum particles’ clocks forward and backward.

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A slow-motion movie on sports television channels shows processes in hundredths of a second. By contrast, processes on the nanoscale take place in the so-called femtosecond range: For example, an electron needs only billionths of a second to orbit a hydrogen atom. Physicists around the world are using special instruments to capture such ultrafast nano-processes in films.

Researchers at Kiel University (CAU) have developed a new method for such films that is based on a different physical concept and thus allows further and more precise options for investigation. To do this, they combined an electron microscope with nanostructured metallic thin films that generate very short light pulses.

In a first experiment, they were thus able to document the coherent interactions of light and electrons in a semiconductor on film.

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Quantum computers are highly energy-efficient and extremely powerful supercomputers. But for these machines to realize their full potential in new applications like artificial intelligence or machine learning, researchers are hard at work at perfecting the underlying electronics to process their calculations. A team at Fraunhofer IZM are working on superconducting connections that measure a mere ten micrometers in thickness, moving the industry a substantial step closer to a future of commercially viable quantum computers.

With the extreme computing power they promise, quantum computers have the potential to become the for technological innovations in all areas of modern industry. By contrast with the run-of-the-mill computers of today, they do not work with bits, but with qubits: No longer are these units of information restricted to the binary states of 1 or 0.

With quantum superposition or entanglement added, qubits mean a great leap forward in terms of sheer speed and power and the complexity of the calculations they can handle. One simple rule still holds, though: More qubits mean more speed and more computing power.

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In the physical world, time marches in one direction, but things aren’t so straight forward in the quantum realm. Researchers have discovered that it’s possible to speed up, slow down, or reverse the flow of time in a quantum system. This isn’t exactly time travel, but is instead implementing or reverting to different quantum states from different points in time.

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The CRYSTALS-Kyber public-key encryption and key encapsulation mechanism recommended by NIST in July 2022 for post-quantum cryptography has been broken. Researchers from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, used recursive training AI combined with side channel attacks.

A side-channel attack exploits measurable information obtained from a device running the target implementation via channels such as timing or power consumption. The revolutionary aspect of the research (PDF) was to apply deep learning analysis to side-channel differential analysis.

“Deep learning-based side-channel attacks,” say the researchers, “can overcome conventional countermeasures such as masking, shuffling, random delays insertion, constant-weight encoding, code polymorphism, and randomized clock.”

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