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Category: computing – Page 2

Physicists develop new protocol for building photonic graph states

Physicists have long recognized the value of photonic graph states in quantum information processing. However, the difficulty of making these graph states has left this value largely untapped. In a step forward for the field, researchers from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have proposed a new scheme they term “emit-then-add” for producing highly entangled states of many photons that can work with current hardware. Published in npj Quantum Information, their strategy lays the groundwork for a wide range of quantum enhanced operations including measurement-based quantum computing.

Entanglement is a key driver in delivering faster and more secure computational and information systems. But creating large, entangled states of more than two photons is challenging because the losses inherent in optical systems mean most photon sources have a low probability of successfully producing a photon that survives to the point of detection. Therefore, any attempt to build a large entangled state is full of missing photons, breaking the state apart. And identifying the missing spots would mean attempting detection of the photons, which is a destructive process itself, and precludes going back to fill those spots.

To circumvent this challenge, a team led by Associate Professor of Physics Elizabeth Goldschmidt and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Eric Chitambar began with a different mindset.

Cutting down on quantum-dot crosstalk: Precise measurements expose a new challenge

Devices that can confine individual electrons are potential building blocks for quantum information systems. But the electrons must be protected from external disturbances. RIKEN researchers have now shown how quantum information encoded into a so-called quantum dot can be negatively affected by nearby quantum dots. This has implications for developing quantum information devices based on quantum dots.

Quantum computers process information using so-called qubits: physical systems whose behavior is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. An electron, if it can be isolated and controlled, is one example of a qubit platform with great potential.

One way of controlling an electron is to use a quantum dot. These tiny structures trap charged particles using electric fields at the tips of metal electrodes separated by just a few tens of nanometers.

Rolling out the carpet for spin qubits with new chip architecture

Researchers at QuTech in Delft, The Netherlands, have developed a new chip architecture that could make it easier to test and scale up quantum processors based on semiconductor spin qubits. The platform, called QARPET (Qubit-Array Research Platform for Engineering and Testing) and reported in Nature Electronics, allows hundreds of qubits to be characterized within the same test-chip under the same operating conditions used in quantum computing experiments.

“With such a complex, tightly packed quantum chip, things really start to resemble the traditional semiconductor industry,” states researcher Giordano Scappucci.

When viewed under a microscope, the structure of the QARPET chip appears almost woven. Fabrication was in fact a stress test for engineering capabilities.

Apple fixes zero-day flaw used in ‘extremely sophisticated’ attacks

Apple has released security updates to fix a zero-day vulnerability that was exploited in an “extremely sophisticated attack” targeting specific individuals.

Tracked as CVE-2026–20700, the flaw is an arbitrary code execution vulnerability in dyld, the Dynamic Link Editor used by Apple operating systems, including iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, and visionOS.

Apple’s security bulletin warns that an attacker with memory write capability may be able to execute arbitrary code on affected devices.

NuMA promotes constitutive heterochromatin compaction by stabilizing linker histone H1 on chromatin

The nuclear repeat length (NRL) was calculated using NRLfinder as previous publication.33 Briefly, read lengths were extracted and converted into a frequency histogram, which was then smoothed using a digital 6th-order Butterworth filter with a zero-phase shift and a cutoff frequency of 0.04 cycles/read. This cutoff was empirically optimized to reduce noise from mononucleosomal DNA winding artifacts. Local minima and maxima were identified from the first derivative of the filtered histogram, with the second peak maximum corresponding to the dinucleosomal periodicity. The NRL shift between conditions (e.g., control vs. NuMA-depleted HCT116 cells) was calculated the mean difference between the first two peak maxima of each sample. All analyses were performed in Python 3.9 with NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib libraries.

For chromatin-state modeling, we used the ChromHMM (v.1.19).32 The input data of ATAC-seq and RNA-seq reported in this manuscript was generated as described above. Additional input data including ChIP-seq for CTCF, H3K4me3, H3K27me3, H3K4me1, H3K36me3 and H3K9me3 were download from ENCODE (https://www.encodeproject.org). briefly, raw bam files were download and replicates were combined. BinarizeBam and LearnModel tools in ChromHMM was used to generate chromatin state model with default settings. Emissions parameters were visualized in R.

A New Model for Particle Charging

As flour, plastic dust, and other powdery particles get blown through factory ducts, they become charged through contact with each other and with duct walls. To avoid discharges that could ignite explosions, ducts are metallic and grounded. Still, particles remain an explosive threat if they reach a silo while charged. The microphysics of contact charging is an active area of research, as is the quest to understand the phenomenon as it plays out on larger scales in dust storms, volcanic plumes, and processing plants. Now Holger Grosshans of the German National Metrology Institute in Braunschweig and his collaborators have developed a contact-charging model that can cope with particles and walls made of different materials [1]. What’s more, the model is compatible with computational approaches used to analyze large-scale turbulent flows.

The model treats particles’ acquisition of electric charge from each other and their surroundings as a stochastic process—one that involves some randomness. The resulting charge distributions depend on the amount of charge transferred per impact and other nanoscale parameters that would be tedious to measure for each system. Fortunately, Grosshans and his collaborators found that if they determined all parameters for one system in a controlled experiment, they could readily adjust the parameters to suit other systems.

To test their model, the researchers coupled it to a popular fluid-dynamics solver and simulated 300,000 polymer microparticles stirred by a turbulent flow while confined between four walls. The combination reproduced the complex charging patterns observed in lab experiments—and it did so efficiently: The charging model added less than 0.01% to the simulation’s computational cost.

Majorana qubits become readable as quantum capacitance detects even-odd states

The race to build reliable quantum computers is fraught with obstacles, and one of the most difficult to overcome is related to the promising but elusive Majorana qubits. Now, an international team has read the information stored in these quantum bits. The findings are published in the journal Nature.

“This is a crucial advance,” explains Ramón Aguado, a Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) researcher at the Madrid Institute of Materials Science (ICMM) and one of the study’s authors.

“Our work is pioneering because we demonstrate that we can access the information stored in Majorana qubits using a new technique called quantum capacitance,” continues the scientist, who explains that this technique “acts as a global probe sensitive to the overall state of the system.”

Quantum Computing Breakthrough: Scientists Finally Unlock the Secret of Majorana Qubits

Scientists have finally figured out how to read ultra-secure Majorana qubits—bringing robust quantum computing a big step closer.

“This is a crucial advance,” says Ramón Aguado, a CSIC researcher at the Madrid Institute of Materials Science (ICMM) and co author of the study. He explains that the team has shown it is possible to retrieve information stored in Majorana qubits using a technique known as quantum capacitance. According to Aguado, this method works as “a global probe sensitive to the overall state of the system,” allowing researchers to detect properties that were previously out of reach.

Why topological qubits are so hard to measure.

Why Earth-like worlds might be rare

Dr. Craig Walton: “This makes searching for life on other planets a lot more specific. We should look for solar systems with stars that resemble our own Sun.”

How common are Earth-like worlds beyond our solar system? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as an international team of scientists unveiled new evidence that Earth-like worlds might be rarer than previously thought. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of Earth-like worlds and what this could mean for finding life beyond Earth.

For the study, the researchers used a series of computer models to simulate the formation of the interiors of potential Earth-like worlds, specifically focusing on planetary interior formation. This is because the researchers note how nitrogen and phosphorus are essential for the formation of habitable worlds, and the planetary mantle, the layer just beneath the planetary crust, is where they are formed and exist.

In the end, the researchers found that the right amount of oxygen needs to be present within the mantle for nitrogen and phosphorus to form. They note while Earth has these conditions, worlds with less oxygen in their mantle could limit the ability of nitrogen and phosphorus to form, resulting in non-habitable worlds.

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