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Objective reality might not be so objective after all. Scientists used a simple quantum trick to break the classical reality barrier. property= description.
Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology and the National Institute for Material Science in Tsukuba (Japan) have recently probed a Chern mosaic topology and Berry-curvature magnetism in magic-angle graphene. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, offers new insight about topological disorder that can occur in condensed matter physical systems.
“Magic angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) has drawn a huge amount of interest over the past few years due to its experimentally accessible flat bands, creating a playground of highly correlated physics,” Matan Bocarsly, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org, “One such correlated phase observed in transport measurements is the quantum anomalous Hall effect, where topological edge currents are present even in the absence of an applied magnetic field.”
The quantum anomalous Hall effect is a charge transport-related phenomenon, in which a material’s Hall resistance is quantized to the so-called von Klitzing constant. It resembles the so-called integer quantum Hall effect, which Bocarsly and his colleagued had studied extensively in their previous works, particularly in graphene and MATBG.
Using quantum entangled particles, scientists have managed to overcome the limits of probability to win a theoretical game more times than should be possible.
Theoretical physicists at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) have demonstrated how the coupling between intense lasers, the motion of electrons, and their spin influences the emission of light on the ultrafast timescale.
Electrons, which are present in all kinds of matter, are charged particles and therefore react to the application of light. When an intense light field hits a solid, electrons experience a force, called the Lorentz force, that drives them and induces some exquisite dynamics reflecting the properties of the material. This, in turn, results in the emission of light by the electrons at various wavelengths, a well-known phenomenon called high-harmonic generation.
Exactly how the electrons move under the influence of the light field depends on a complex mixture of properties of the solid, including its symmetries, topology, and band structure, as well as the nature of the light pulse. Additionally, electrons are like spinning tops. They have a propensity to rotate either clockwise or counter-clockwise, a property called the “spin” of the electrons in quantum mechanics.
Simpler, faster, smaller, and cheaper chips are a key to low-power computing — even in AI.
RISC-V is taking off like a rocket.
In this video I discuss how RISC-V will reshape chip design industry.
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We all learn from early on that computers work with zeros and ones, also known as binary information. This approach has been so successful that computers now power everything from coffee machines to self-driving cars and it is hard to imagine a life without them.
Building on this success, today’s quantum computers are also designed with binary information processing in mind. “The building blocks of quantum computers, however, are more than just zeros and ones,” explains Martin Ringbauer, an experimental physicist from Innsbruck, Austria. “Restricting them to binary systems prevents these devices from living up to their true potential.”
The team led by Thomas Monz at the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck, now succeeded in developing a quantum computer that can perform arbitrary calculations with so-called quantum digits (qudits), thereby unlocking more computational power with fewer quantum particles. Their study is published in Nature Physics.
This mind-bending property offers a sought-after benefit: Information stored in the phase is far more protected against errors than with alternative setups currently used in quantum computers. As a result, the information can exist without getting garbled for much longer, an important milestone for making quantum computing viable, says study lead author Philipp Dumitrescu.
The approach’s use of an “extra” time dimension “is a completely different way of thinking about phases of matter,” says Dumitrescu, who worked on the project as a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Quantum Physics in New York City. “I’ve been working on these theory ideas for over five years, and seeing them come actually to be realized in experiments is exciting.”
From its very inception quantum mechanics troubled physicists. It seemed to challenge our conception of reality and lead to apparent contradictions. One of the founders of quantum mechanics, Ernst Heisenberg, questioned whether the theory offered a description of reality at all. Others, like Niels Bohr, claimed that somehow human consciousness played a role in the theory. In this interview, Carlo Rovelli explains Heisenberg’s anti-realist motivations, clarifies the role of the “observer” in quantum mechanics, and articulates his relational interpretation of the theory, according to which reality is a network of interactions.
Carlo Rovelli will debate Sabine Hossenfelder and Eric Weinsten in the FREE IAI Live event, ‘Quantum Physics and the End of Reality’ on July 25th. Learn more here.
The founders of quantum mechanics were very uncomfortable with its results – famously Einstein thought it an incomplete theory and quipped “God doesn’t play dice”, and Schrödinger abandoned physics altogether for biology. What was so radically different about quantum mechanics than classical physics that caused such discomfort to its own creators?
