Lifeboat Foundation

Dr. Joscha Bach is VP of Research at AI Foundation and Author of Principles of Synthetic Intelligence, focused on how our minds work, and how to build machines that can perceive, think, and learn.

http://bach.ai.
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LinkedIn ► https://linkedin.com/in/joschabach.

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What goes on inside planets like Neptune and Uranus? To find out, an international team headed by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the University of Rostock and France’s École Polytechnique conducted a novel experiment. They fired a laser at a thin film of simple PET plastic and investigated what happened using intensive laser flashes. One result was that the researchers were able to confirm their earlier thesis that it really does rain diamonds inside the ice giants at the periphery of our solar system. And another was that this method could establish a new way of producing nanodiamonds, which are needed, for example, for highly-sensitive quantum sensors. The group has presented its findings in the journal Science Advances.

The conditions in the interior of icy giant planets like Neptune and Uranus are extreme: temperatures reach several thousand degrees Celsius, and the pressure is millions of times greater than in the Earth’s atmosphere. Nonetheless, states like this can be simulated briefly in the lab: powerful laser flashes hit a film-like material sample, heat it up to 6,000 degrees Celsius for the blink of an eye and generate a shock wave that compresses the material for a few nanoseconds to a million times the atmospheric pressure.

“Up to now, we used hydrocarbon films for these kinds of experiment,” explains Dominik Kraus, physicist at HZDR and professor at the University of Rostock. “And we discovered that this extreme pressure produced tiny diamonds, known as nanodiamonds.”

Some of us, when we hear the word quantum (plural quanta, from the German word Quanten), might think of health supplements, a sports car, or even the television show Quantum Leap. More recently, in Marvel Studios movies such as Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, and Avengers: Endgame, “the quantum realm” is presented where time flows differently from our ordinary reality and the Avengers may use the subatomic world “to go back in time”, a world that “is smaller than a single atom” (Woodward, 2019, para.20)

We might have also seen or known the meaning of words such as quantum mechanics, quantum computing, and quantum entanglement, but what is a quantum and how does it relate to our ordinary realm?

A quantum is a word that refers to “how much”; it is a specific amount. For example, if the speed of your car happens to be quantized in increments of 10 mph, then as you accelerate your car from 10 mph, the speed will jump to 20 mph, without passing through any speed between 10 mph and 20 mph. A speed of 12 mph or 19 mph is excluded because the speed of your car can only exist in those increments of 10 mph.

We present a universal theory of quantum work statistics in generic disordered non-interacting Fermi systems, displaying a chaotic single-particle spectrum captured by random matrix theory. We…

Oxford quantum physicist Nikita Gourianov tore into the quantum computing industry this week, comparing the “fanfare” around the tech to a financial bubble in a searing commentary piece for the Financial Times.

In other words, he wrote, it’s far more hype than substance.

It’s a scathing, but also perhaps insightful, analysis of a burgeoning field that, at the very least, still has a lot to prove.

The atoms arranged in lines and sheets reached about 1.2 nanokelvin, more than 2 billion times colder than interstellar space. For the atoms in three-dimensional arrangements, the situation is so complex that the researchers are still figuring out the best way to measure the temperature.

The atoms in the experiment belong to a larger group called fermions and were “the coldest fermions in the universe”, says Hazzard. “Thinking about experimenting on this 10 years ago, it looked like a theorist’s dream,” he says.

Physicists have long been interested in how atoms interact in exotic magnets like this because they suspect that similar interactions happen in high-temperature superconductors – materials that perfectly conduct electricity. By better understanding what happens, they could build better superconductors.

A team of Japanese and US physicists has pushed thousands of Ytterbium atoms to just within a billionth of a degree above absolute zero to understand how matter behaves at these extreme temperatures. The approach treats the atoms as fermions, the type of particles like electrons and protons, that cannot end up in the so-called fifth state of matter at those extreme temperatures: a Bose-Einstein Condensate.

When fermions are actually cooled down, they do exhibit quantum properties in a way that we can’t simulate even with the most powerful supercomputer. These extremely cold atoms are placed in a lattice and they simulate a “Hubbard model” which is used to study the magnetic and superconductive behavior of materials, in particular the collective motion of electrons through them.

The symmetry of these models is known as the special unitary group, or, SU, and depends on the possible spin state. In the case of Ytterbium, that number is 6. Calculating the behavior of just 12 particles in a SU Hubbard model can’t be done with computers. However, as reported in Nature Physics, the team used laser cooling to reduce the temperature of 300,000 atoms to a value almost three billion times colder than the temperature of outer space.

Be it magnets or superconductors, materials are known for their various properties. However, these properties may change spontaneously under extreme conditions. Researchers at the Technische Universität Dresden (TUD) and the Technische Universität München (TUM) have discovered an entirely new type of these phase transitions. They display the phenomenon of quantum entanglement involving many atoms, which previously has only been observed in the realm of a few atoms. The results were recently published in the scientific journal Nature.

New fur for the quantum cat

In physics, Schroedinger’s cat is an allegory for two of the most awe-inspiring effects of quantum mechanics: entanglement and superposition. Researchers from Dresden and Munich have now observed these behaviors on a much larger scale than that of the smallest of particles. Until now, materials that display properties, like magnetism, have been known to have so-called domains—islands in which the materials properties are homogeneously either of one or a different kind (imagine them being either black or white, for example).

The infrared (IR) spectrum is a vast information landscape that modern IR detectors tap into for diverse applications such as night vision, biochemical spectroscopy, microelectronics design, and climate science. But modern sensors used in these practical areas lack spectral selectivity and must filter out noise, limiting their performance. Advanced IR sensors can achieve ultrasensitive, single-photon level detection, but these sensors must be cryogenically cooled to 4 K (−269 C) and require large, bulky power sources making them too expensive and impractical for everyday Department of Defense or commercial use.

DARPA’s Optomechanical Thermal Imaging (OpTIm) program aims to develop novel, compact, and room-temperature IR sensors with quantum-level performance – bridging the performance gap between limited capability uncooled thermal detectors and high-performance cryogenically cooled photodetectors.

“If researchers can meet the program’s metrics, we will enable IR detection with orders-of-magnitude improvements in sensitivity, spectral control, and response time over current room-temperature IR devices,” said Mukund Vengalattore, OpTIm program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “Achieving quantum-level sensitivity in room-temperature, compact IR sensors would transform battlefield surveillance, night vision, and terrestrial and space imaging. It would also enable a host of commercial applications including infrared spectroscopy for non-invasive cancer diagnosis, highly accurate and immediate pathogen detection from a person’s breath or in the air, and pre-disease detection of threats to agriculture and foliage health.”