Recently I saw a post on twitter claiming that AI could be powered with quantum vacuum energy. The post was accompanied by a figure from a paper published in Nature. Unfortunately for the poster, but fortunately for science, the paper had nothing to do with extracting energy from the vacuum. Rather, it was a description of an experimental realization of a transistor that uses the Casimir effect to mediate and amplify energy transfer across a new kind of transistor.
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For this technique to work at very high fidelity, a very fast and very sensitive bolometer is needed to measure the quantum state before it decays. In 2020, the Finnish researchers unveiled a bolometer that used graphene as its absorber – a fast and sensitive design that was intended for use in quantum computing. Unfortunately, this bolometer degraded over time and the team instead used an older bolometer design involving interfaces between superconductors and normal metals.
Möttönen says that the researchers had initially not expected the older design to be effective for reading out the states of individual qubits. He also expects that the read-out fidelity could be boosted using improved graphene bolometers. “I’m hoping to get the new graphene bolometers out of the oven soon,” he says.
David Pahl at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believes that the work is very preliminary, but potentially very important. He says that the two most important performance metrics for a scheme to read out quantum states are the fidelity and the speed: “The state of the art speed that we’ve seen in the past year is 0.1 μs and 99.5% fidelity…[Möttönen and colleagues] showed 14 μs and 61.7%,” he says.
The potential of quantum technology is huge but is today largely limited to the extremely cold environments of laboratories. Now, researchers at Stockholm University, at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics and at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice have succeeded in demonstrating for the very first time how laser light can induce quantum behavior at room temperature — and make non-magnetic materials magnetic. The breakthrough is expected to pave the way for faster and more energy-efficient computers, information transfer and data storage.
Within a few decades, the advancement of quantum technology is expected to revolutionize several of society’s most important areas and pave the way for completely new technological possibilities in communication and energy.
Of particular interest for researchers in the field are the peculiar and bizarre properties of quantum particles — which deviate completely from the laws of classical physics and can make materials magnetic or superconducting.
Researchers at EPFL have created the first detailed model explaining the quantum-mechanical effects that cause photoluminescence in thin gold films, a breakthrough that could advance the development of solar fuels and batteries.
Luminescence, the process where substances emit photons when exposed to light, has long been observed in semiconductor materials like silicon. This phenomenon involves electrons at the nanoscale absorbing light and subsequently re-emitting it. Such behavior provides researchers with valuable insights into the properties of semiconductors, making them useful tools for probing electronic processes, such as those in solar cells.
In 1969, scientists discovered that all metals luminesce to some degree, but the intervening years failed to yield a clear understanding of how this occurs. Renewed interest in this light emission, driven by nanoscale temperature mapping and photochemistry applications, has reignited the debate surrounding its origins. But the answer was still unclear – until now.
Some Google Chrome users report having issues connecting to websites, servers, and firewalls after Chrome 124 was released last week with the new quantum-resistant X25519Kyber768 encapsulation mechanism enabled by default.
Google started testing the post-quantum secure TLS key encapsulation mechanism in August and has now enabled it in the latest Chrome version for all users.
The new version utilizes the Kyber768 quantum-resistant key agreement algorithm for TLS 1.3 and QUIC connections to protect Chrome TLS traffic against quantum cryptanalysis.
Generally, it’s advised not to compare apples to oranges. However, in the field of topology, a branch of mathematics, this comparison is necessary. Apples and oranges, it turns out, are said to be topologically the same since they both lack a hole – in contrast to doughnuts or coffee cups, for instance, which both have one (the handle in the case of the cup) and, hence, are topologically equal.
In a more abstract way, quantum systems in physics can also have a specific apple or doughnut topology, which manifests itself in the energy states and motion of particles. Researchers are very interested in such systems as their topology makes them robust against disorder and other disturbing influences, which are always present in natural physical systems.
Things get particularly interesting if, in addition, the particles in such a system interact, meaning that they attract or repel each other, like electrons in solids. Studying topology and interactions together in solids, however, is extremely difficult. A team of researchers at ETH led by Tilman Esslinger has now managed to detect topological effects in an artificial solid, in which the interactions can be switched on or off using magnetic fields. Their results, which have just been published in the scientific journal Science, could be used in quantum technologies in the future.