Lifeboat Foundation

Water flows more easily through narrower carbon nanotubes than larger ones and we have struggled to explain why. Now, one team has an answer: it may all be due to quantum friction.

Friction in its standard, classical sense is well understood by most people. The greater the degree of contact between two things moving past one another, the greater the energy needed to overcome friction. A narrow pipe has a larger wall relative to its cross-sectional area than a wider pipe, so you would expect the frictional forces experienced by water inside the smaller pipe to be proportionally greater. This means the water should flow less easily.

But carbon nanotubes don’t obey this rule. These are made of thin layers of graphite rolled into tubes just a few nanometres wide – and the narrower the diameter, the easier it is for water to flow through them.

Two teams have shown how quantum approaches can solve problems faster than classical computers, bringing physics and computer science closer together.

University of Delaware (UD) engineers have demonstrated a way to effectively capture 99% of carbon dioxide from air using a novel electrochemical syst.

For the first time, it is possible to see the quantum world from multiple points of view at once. This hints at something very strange – that reality only takes shape when we interact with each other.

For the first time, it is possible to see the quantum world from multiple points of view at once. This hints at something very strange – that reality only takes shape when we interact with each other.

Quantum computing is still rare enough that merely installing a system in a country is a breakthrough, and IBM is taking advantage of that novelty. The company has forged a partnership with the Canadian province of Quebec to install what it says is Canada’s first universal quantum computer. The five-year deal will see IBM install a Quantum System One as part of a Quebec-IBM Discovery Accelerator project tackling scientific and commercial challenges.

The team-up will see IBM and the Quebec government foster microelectronics work, including progress in chip packaging thanks to an existing IBM facility in the province. The two also plan to show how quantum and classical computers can work together to address scientific challenges, and expect quantum-powered AI to help discover new medicines and materials.

IBM didn’t say exactly when it would install the quantum computer. However, it will be just the fifth Quantum One installation planned by 2023 following similar partnerships in Germany, Japan, South Korea and the US. Canada is joining a relatively exclusive club, then.

As far as we can tell from modern science, there’s no upper limit to temperature. There sure is a lower limit, though. We call that absolute zero, measured as −273.15 °C (−459.67 °F). Scientists have yet to reach that limit in any experiment, but they’re getting close. A team of physicists in Germany has gotten closer than ever before, reaching a temperature of 38 trillionths of a degree from absolute zero, according to New Atlas.

This news might sound familiar because it is — scientists have inched closer to absolute zero on numerous occasions. A few years ago, MIT created what was at the time the coldest spot in the universe with sodium and potassium atoms. The International Space Station has also conducted experiments within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero. The problem is that no matter how well insulated your testing setup is, a tiny amount of energy always sneaks in from the environment. When that happens, you can’t reach absolute zero and halt all atomic motion.

The team from the University of Bremen broke the record once again by dropping the experiment (above) from the top of a very tall tower. Yes, really. They started with a cloud of 100,000 rubidium atoms, which were confined inside a magnetic field. When cooled, the atoms clump together and form a mysterious state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this state, the atoms act like one giant atom, making quantum effects visible at the macroscopic scale.

You can’t really enter into “another dimension” as science fiction would have you believe. Instead, dimensions are how we experience the world. But some aspects actually suggest to one expert, not one but two dimensions of time. If it were true, the theory could actually heal the most glaring rift in physics —between quantum mechanics and general relativity.

Quantum science holds promise for many technological applications, such as building hackerproof communication networks or quantum computers that could accelerate new drug discovery. These applications require a quantum version of a computer bit, known as a qubit, that stores quantum information.

But researchers are still grappling with how to easily read the information held in these qubits and struggle with the short memory time, or coherence, of qubits, which is usually limited to microseconds or milliseconds.

A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago has achieved two major breakthroughs to overcome these common challenges for quantum systems. They were able to read out their qubit on demand and then keep the quantum state intact for over five seconds—a new record for this class of devices. Additionally, the researchers’ qubits are made from an easy-to-use material called silicon carbide, which is widely found in lightbulbs, electric vehicles and high-voltage electronics.

If scientists could measure the oscillations of just one energized cesium atom, they’d be able to keep perfect time, but they can’t due to a weird phenomenon called the standard quantum limit.

Instead, they have to measure thousands of atoms at once and then average out the results for atomic clocks, which leads to a just slightly imprecise second.

Now, MIT researchers have found a way to create a more precise atomic clock by exploiting another weird quantum phenomenon: entanglement.