Lifeboat Foundation

Superconductivity—the ability of a material to transmit an electric current without loss—is a quantum effect that, despite years of research, is still limited to very low temperatures. Now a team of scientists at the MPSD has succeeded in creating a metastable state with vanishing electrical resistance in a molecular solid by exposing it to finely tuned pulses of intense laser light. This effect had already been demonstrated in 2016 for only a very short time, but in a new study the authors of the paper have shown a far longer lifetime, nearly 10.000 times longer than before. The long lifetimes for light-induced superconductivity hold promise for applications in integrated electronics. The research by Budden et al. has been published in Nature Physics.

An intelligent material that learns by physically changing itself, similar to how the human brain works, could be the foundation of a completely new generation of computers. Radboud physicists working toward this so-called “quantum brain” have made an important step. They have demonstrated that they can pattern and interconnect a network of single atoms, and mimic the autonomous behavior of neurons and synapses in a brain. They report their discovery in Nature Nanotechnology.

Considering the growing global demand for computing capacity, more and more data centers are necessary, all of which leave an ever-expanding energy footprint. “It is clear that we have to find new strategies to store and process information in an energy efficient way,” says project leader Alexander Khajetoorians, Professor of Scanning Probe Microscopy at Radboud University.

“This requires not only improvements to technology, but also fundamental research in game changing approaches. Our new idea of building a ‘quantum brain’ based on the quantum properties of materials could be the basis for a future solution for applications in artificial intelligence.”

Mobile-phone chargers and other devices could become much smaller after an all-RIKEN team of physicists successfully shrunk an electrical component known as an inductor to microscale dimensions using a quantum effect.

In this video I show how I made a self-organisating network of Kuramoto-style oscillators in a system undergoing metaheuristic-guided synchronization. There are also ways to visually demonstrate this with relatively simple hardware, such as using modified microelectronics, controlled using microcontroller circuits.

In this project, which I have dubbed “Feynman’s Quantum Fireflies” I program individual systems of oscillators which display discontinuous pas coupling which can be implemented in a network of transceiver circuits. Using the Path Integral Approach is one way to understand how the system behaves like a quantum thermal bath.

Continue reading “Making Of A Neuromorphic Synchronization Circuit Using Quantum Metaheuristics” »

A neuroinformatics expert and a quantum biophysicist are our guests on the podcast this week.

IBM has found a way to speed up some quantum computing tasks by 100 times, finishing them in hours rather than months.

Breakthrough technology uses multiplexing entanglement to make an ultra-secure quantum internet.

Could there be a new kind of light in the universe? Since the late 19th century, scientists have understood that, when heated, all materials emit light in a predictable spectrum of wavelengths. Research published today in Nature Scientific Reports presents a material that emits light when heated that appears to exceed the limits set by that natural law.

In 1900, Max Planck first mathematically described a pattern of radiation and ushered in the quantum era with the assumption that energy can only exist in discrete values. Just as a fireplace poker glows red hot, increasing heat causes all materials to emit more intense radiation, with the peak of the emitted spectrum shifting to shorter wavelengths as heat rises. In keeping with Planck’s Law, nothing can emit more radiation than a hypothetical object that absorbs energy perfectly, a so-called “blackbody.”

The new material discovered by Shawn Yu Lin, lead author and a professor of physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, defies the limits of Planck’s law, emitting a coherent light similar to that produced by lasers or LEDs, but without the costly structure needed to produce the stimulated emission of those technologies. In addition to the spectroscopy study just published in Nature Scientific Reports, Lin previously published an imaging study in IEEE Photonics Journal. Both show a spike in radiation at about 1.7 microns, which is the near-infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Scientists from MIPT, Moscow Pedagogical State University and the University of Manchester have created a highly sensitive terahertz detector based on the effect of quantum-mechanical tunneling in graphene. The sensitivity of the device is already superior to commercially available analogs based on semiconductors and superconductors, which opens up prospects for applications of the graphene detector in wireless communications, security systems, radio astronomy, and medical diagnostics. The research results are published in Nature Communications.