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Category: quantum physics

From tiny snowflakes to the jagged fork of a lightning bolt, it’s not hard to find examples of fractals in the natural world. So it might come as a surprise that, until now, there have remained some places these endlessly repeating geometrical patterns have never been seen.

Physicists from MIT have now provided the first known example of a fractal arrangement in a quantum material.

The patterns were seen in an unexpected distribution of magnetic units called ‘domains’, which develop in a compound called neodymium nickel oxide — a rare earth metal with extraordinary properties.

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Exactly one century ago, on an evening in 1918, renowned physicist Albert Einstein wrote down an idea in the pages of his notebook. That idea could be the key to solving one of the grandest and most elusive mysteries in all of physics: that of dark matter and dark energy. Together they make up over 95% of the universe, working invisibly to envelop galaxies and at once continuing to expand our universe at an accelerating rate, driving us away from nearby star systems and into a future with great divides.

The idea Einstein wrote about was an adjustment to general relativity where empty space would become negative mass moving under the influence of gravity. These negative masses would populate interstellar space. But this idea emerged as a way to explain the cosmological constant — or what Einstein referred to as his life’s greatest mistake. At the time when the cosmological constant was created, it was a widely accepted belief that the universe was static. That is, it was neither expanding nor contracting. But if this was true then something had to be countering gravity to prevent the universe from collapsing in on itself. Thus the cosmological constant with antigravity properties was born.

Today we understand the universe is not static and that it continues to expand, and so the cosmological constant has taken on a new meaning. It represents dark energy within the Lambda CDM, our current and most accepted model of the universe. The newest theory on dark matter and dark energy does not contradict the standard model and instead builds off of the note Einstein made to himself all those years ago.

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An international team of scientists from Australia, Japan and the United States has produced a prototype of a large-scale quantum processor made of laser light.

Based on a design ten years in the making, the processor has built-in scalability that allows the number of quantum components—made out of —to scale to extreme numbers. The research was published in Science today.

Quantum computers promise fast solutions to hard problems, but to do this they require a large number of quantum components and must be relatively error free. Current quantum processors are still small and prone to errors. This new design provides an alternative solution, using light, to reach the scale required to eventually outperform classical computers on important problems.

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Harry Potter’s ‘invisibility cloak’ appears closer to reality as Canadian camouflage manufacturer Hyperstealth Biotechnology has applied for patents on its ‘Quantum Stealth’ material.

The ‘inexpensive and paper-thin’ technology works by bending light around a target to either alter its position or make it vanish altogether, leaving only the background visible. It is touted to be able to obscure the positions of heavy artillery, ground troops or even entire buildings from certain viewpoints.

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Topological insulators are innovative materials that conduct electricity on the surface, but act as insulators on the inside. Physicists at the University of Basel and the Istanbul Technical University have begun investigating how they react to friction. Their experiment shows that the heat generated through friction is significantly lower than in conventional materials. This is due to a new quantum mechanism, the researchers report in the scientific journal Nature Materials.

Thanks to their unique electrical properties, topological insulators promise many innovations in the electronics and computer industries, as well as in the development of quantum computers. The thin surface layer can conduct electricity almost without resistance, resulting in less heat than traditional materials. This makes them of particular interest for electronic components.

“Our measurements clearly show that at certain voltages there is virtually no heat generation caused by electronic friction.” — Dr. Dilek Yildiz

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Scientists have managed to send a record-breaking amount of data in quantum form, using a strange unit of quantum information called a qutrit.

The news: Quantum tech promises to allow data to be sent securely over long distances. Scientists have already shown it’s possible to transmit information both on land and via satellites using quantum bits, or qubits. Now physicists at the University of Science and Technology of China and the University of Vienna in Austria have found a way to ship even more data using something called quantum trits, or qutrits.

Qutrits? Oh, come on, you’ve just made that up: Nope, they’re real. Conventional bits used to encode everything from financial records to YouTube videos are streams of electrical or photonic pulses than can represent either a 1 or a 0. Qubits, which are typically electrons or photons, can carry more information because they can be polarized in two directions at once, so they can represent both a 1 and a 0 at the same time. Qutrits, which can be polarized in three different dimensions simultaneously, can carry even more information. In theory, this can then be transmitted using quantum teleportation.

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Alien life is behind the mysteries of the universe, according to a radical new theory.

Ancient non-human lifeforms morphed into the physical world and are the driving force behind mind-boggling quantum physics and phenomena like dark matter, according to a Columbia University astrophysicist.

The expert says our universe is the remains of intelligent alien life which controls all aspects of the physical world — from gravity to the speed of light.

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The smallest pieces of nature—individual particles like electrons, for instance—are pretty much interchangeable. An electron is an electron is an electron, regardless of whether it’s stuck in a lab on Earth, bound to an atom in some chalky moon dust or shot out of an extragalactic black hole in a superheated jet. In practice, though, differences in energy, motion or location can make it easy to tell two electrons apart.

One way to test for the similarity of particles like electrons is to bring them together at the same time and place and look for interference—a that arises when particles (which can also behave like waves) meet. This interference is important for everything from fundamental tests of quantum physics to the speedy calculations of quantum computers, but creating it requires exquisite control over particles that are indistinguishable.

With an eye toward easing these requirements, researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) and the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science (QuICS) have stretched out multiple photons—the quantum particles of light—and turned three distinct pulses into overlapping quantum waves. The work, which was published recently in the journal Physical Review Letters, restores the interference between photons and may eventually enable a demonstration of a particular kind of quantum supremacy—a clear speed advantage for computers that run on the rules of quantum physics.

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Topological insulators are innovative materials that conduct electricity on the surface, but act as insulators on the inside. Physicists at the University of Basel and the Istanbul Technical University have begun investigating how they react to friction. Their experiment shows that the heat generated through friction is significantly lower than in conventional materials. This is due to a new quantum mechanism, the researchers report in the scientific journal Nature Materials.

Thanks to their unique electrical properties, promise many innovations in the electronics and computer industries, as well as in the development of quantum computers. The thin surface layer can almost without resistance, resulting in less than traditional materials. This makes them of particular interest for .

Furthermore, in topological insulators, the electronic —i.e. the electron-mediated conversion of electrical energy into heat—can be reduced and controlled. Researchers of the University of Basel, the Swiss Nanoscience Institute (SNI) and the Istanbul Technical University have now been able to experimentally verify and demonstrate exactly how the transition from energy to heat through friction behaves—a process known as dissipation.

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Quantum computers have the potential to someday far outperform our traditional machines, thanks to their ability to store data on “qubits” that can exist in two states at once. That sounds good in theory, but in practice it’s hard to make materials that can do that and stay stable for long periods of time. Now, researchers from Johns Hopkins University have found a superconducting material that naturally stays in two states at once, which could be an important step towards quantum computers.

Our current computers are built on the binary system. That means they store and process information as binary “bits” – a series of ones and zeroes. This system has worked well for us for the better part of a century, but the general rate of computing progress has started to slow down in recent years.

Quantum computers could turn that trend on its head. The key is the use of qubits, which can store data as either a one, a zero or both at the same time – much like Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment with the cat that’s both alive and dead at the same time. Using that extra power, quantum computers would be able to outperform traditional ones at tasks involving huge amounts of data, such as AI, weather forecasting, and drug development.

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