Lifeboat Foundation

By laser-cooling atom clusters and studying their movements, a Missouri University of Science and Technology researcher hopes to better understand how atoms and their components are impacted and directed by environmental factors.

With a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Daniel Fischer, assistant professor of physics at Missouri S&T, tests the limits of quantum mechanics through his project titled “Control and Analysis of Atomic Few-Body Dynamics.”

In a hand-built vacuum chamber, Fischer manipulates lithium atoms by trapping them in a magnetic field and then shooting them with different lasers. This gives Fischer a large variety of initial states to test. Tests range from single, polarized atoms to larger groups that are laser-cooled to a consistent energy level. By doing so, Fischer works to help unravel the “few-body problem” that continues to confound the world of physics.

Micron sized onchip making printing and communication faster.

Researchers designed subwavelength micro-disk lasers (MDLs) as small as 1μm in diameter on exact (001) silicon, using colloidal lithography (dispersing silica colloidal beads as hard masks before etching the prepared QD material layers). Micron sized lasers are 1,000 times shorter in length, and 1 million times smaller than current onchip lasers.

A group of scientists from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; the University of California, Santa Barbara; Sandia National Laboratories and Harvard University were able to fabricate tiny lasers directly on silicon — a huge breakthrough for the semiconductor industry and well beyond.

Continue reading “Micron sized onchip quantum dot lasers will enable faster communication and computing” »

Stable nanomagnets that ultimately improves data storage on the smallest of devices.

Abstract: So-called “zero-point energy” is a term familiar to some cinema lovers or series fans; in the fictional world of animated films such as “The Incredibles” or the TV series “Stargate Atlantis”, it denotes a powerful and virtually inexhaustible energy source. Whether it could ever be used as such is arguable. Scientists at Jülich have now found out that it plays an important role in the stability of nanomagnets. These are of great technical interest for the magnetic storage of data, but so far have never been sufficiently stable. Researchers are now pointing the way to making it possible to produce nanomagnets with low zero-point energy and thus a higher degree of stability (Nano Letters, DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.6b01344).

Since the 1970s, the number of components in computer chips has doubled every one to two years, their size diminishing. This development has made the production of small, powerful computers such as smart phones possible for the first time. In the meantime, many components are only about as big as a virus and the miniaturization process has slowed down. This is because below approximately a nanometre, a billionth of a meter in size, quantum effects come into play. They make it harder, for example, to stabilise magnetic moments. Researchers worldwide are looking for suitable materials for magnetically stable nanomagnets so that data can be stored safely in the smallest of spaces.

Continue reading “Atomic bits despite zero-point energy? Jülich scientists explore novel ways of developing stable nanomagnets” »

I reported on this 3 weeks ago; however, here is a newer article on the quantum entanglement chaos. This article highlights Google’s involvement.

Researchers at UCSB blur the line between classical and quantum physics by connecting chaos and entanglement.

Good article overall; and yes QC is still evolving. However, to state Quantum networking is in its infancy is a wrong & misleading comment. Since 2009, Quantum Internet has been in beta at Los Alamos Labs. And, researchers will tell you that QC development can as far back as 1970s and the first official QC was introduced in 2009 when the first universal programmable quantum computer was introduced by University of Toronto’s Kim Luke.

Google has launched a two-year Chrome trial aimed at safeguarding the Internet against quantum computers, which security experts predict will shred all data.

Faster and better method around Q-dots development which ultimately extends the quality of Quantum Dots plus mass production of Q-Dots is much faster through this new method. Hoping this causes the costs of new cameras, phone displays, monitors/ video displays are now able to be created more cheaply and in larger quantities.

Materials researchers at North Carolina State University have fine-tuned a technique that enables them to apply precisely controlled silica coatings to quantum dot nanorods in a day — up to 21 times faster than previous methods. In addition to saving time, the advance means the quantum dots are less likely to degrade, preserving their advantageous optical properties.

Quantum dots are nanoscale semiconductor materials whose small size cause them to have electron energy levels that differ from larger-scale versions of the same material. By controlling the size of the quantum dots, researchers can control the relevant energy levels — and those energy levels give quantum dots novel optical properties. These characteristics make quantum dots promising for applications such as opto-electronics and display technologies.

Continue reading “Researchers develop faster, precise silica coating process for quantum dot nanorods” »

All seems to be on schedule this time for China’s Quantum Satellite Launch in the next few weeks. Google, hope you’re ready.

China will be launching its quantum satellite next month, answering longstanding questions about whether or not a global quantum network is feasible.

I am really glad people are focusing because August is going to be a big month for China and their state funded groups.

Coming to a browser near you, new, post-quantum crypto.

Finding evidence of many-body localization in a closed quantum system.

During equilibration ordinary many-body systems lose all information about the initial state. Every morning we experience an example for this behaviour. Milk poured into a cup of coffee mixes perfectly and after some time it is impossible to say how exactly the two fluids were put together. The same behaviour holds for almost all quantum systems. However, recently a new phenomenon called “many-body localization” has been predicted theoretically, which allows well insulated quantum systems to preserve memory of the initial state forever. Now a team of scientists around Dr. Christian Groß and Professor Immanuel Bloch (Director at MPQ and Chair of Quantum Optics at LMU Munich), in cooperation with David Huse (Princeton University), has obtained evidence of such a behaviour in a two-dimensional quantum system of cold rubidium atoms trapped in an optical lattice.

The scientists observed that – beyond a certain degree of disorder imprinted on the particle ensemble in the beginning – the system would relax into a steady state still containing detailed microscopic information about its past. “We were able to observe the transition from a thermalized state into a many-body localized phase”, Christian Groß points out. “It is the first observation of that kind in a regime that is not accessible with state-of-the-art simulations on classical computers.” The experiment is not only of fundamental interest; the results might also lead to new ways for storing quantum information.

Continue reading “Scientists obtain evidence of many-body localization in a closed quantum system” »