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Category: computing – Page 711

Largest virtual universe free for anyone to explore

Forget about online games that promise you a “whole world” to explore. An international team of researchers has generated an entire virtual universe, and made it freely available on the cloud to everyone.

Uchuu (meaning “outer space” in Japanese) is the largest and most realistic simulation of the to date. The Uchuu simulation consists of 2.1 trillion particles in a computational cube an unprecedented 9.63 billion light-years to a side. For comparison, that’s about three-quarters the distance between Earth and the most distant observed . Uchuu reveals the evolution of the universe on a level of both size and detail inconceivable until now.

Uchuu focuses on the large-scale structure of the universe: mysterious halos of dark matter that control not only the formation of galaxies, but also the fate of the entire universe itself. The scale of these structures ranges from the largest galaxy clusters down to the smallest galaxies. Individual stars and planets aren’t resolved, so don’t expect to find any alien civilizations in Uchuu. But one way that Uchuu wins big in comparison to other virtual worlds is the ; Uchuu simulates the evolution of matter over almost the entire 13.8 billion year history of the universe from the Big Bang to the present. That is over 30 times longer than the since animal life first crawled out of the seas on Earth.

A Laser Fired Through a Keyhole Can Expose Everything Inside a Room

The keyhole imaging technique, developed by researchers at Stanford University’s Computational Imaging Lab, is so named because all that’s needed to see what’s inside a closed room is a tiny hole (such as a keyhole or a peephole) large enough to shine a laser beam through, creating a single dot of light on a wall inside.

If you’re worried about privacy, it might be time to cover up your front door’s peephole.

‘Excitons’ Show Potential for Low-Power Quantum Computing

Circa 2019

LONDON — A laboratory in Switzerland has found a way of using a laser to change and regulate the polarization, wavelength and intensity of light in “excitons” in 2D materials, creating the potential for a new generation of transistors with less energy loss and heat dissipation, opening up the potential for low-power quantum computing.

Excitons are created when an electron absorbs light and moves into a higher energy level, or “energy band” as it is called in solid quantum physics. This excited electron leaves behind an “electron hole” in its previous energy band. And because the electron has a negative charge and the hole a positive charge, the two are bound together by an electrostatic force called a Coulomb force. It’s this electron-electron hole pair that is referred to as an exciton.

Scientists from EPFL’s Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures (LANES) had already developed a method to control exciton flows at room temperature last year. In the latest development, they have discovered new properties of these quasiparticles that can lead to more energy-efficient electronic devices and have found a way to control some of the properties and change the polarization of the light they generate. The scientists’ discovery forms part of a relatively new field of research called valleytronics and has just been published in Nature Photonics.

Solving Quantum Ground-State Problems with Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

Circa 2012

Quantum ground-state problems are computationally hard problems for general many-body Hamiltonians; there is no classical or quantum algorithm known to be able to solve them efficiently. Nevertheless, if a trial wavefunction approximating the ground state is available, as often happens for many problems in physics and chemistry, a quantum computer could employ this trial wavefunction to project the ground state by means of the phase estimation algorithm (PEA). We performed an experimental realization of this idea by implementing a variational-wavefunction approach to solve the ground-state problem of the Heisenberg spin model with an NMR quantum simulator. Our iterative phase estimation procedure yields a high accuracy for the eigenenergies (to the 10–5 decimal digit).

AMD teleportation patent could be ‘Zen moment’ for quantum computing

The patent in question is for a system that would use quantum teleportation in order to boost a quantum computer’s reliability, while at the same time reducing the number of qubits required for a given calculation. This “teleportation” technology would help solve scaling issues and calculation errors that arise from system instability.

One of the main issues behind quantum development is once you start pushing the pedal to the metal, there are major issues when it comes to scalability and stability. Quantum computing is far different to the 0s and 1s of traditional technology, so AMD’s new teleportation patent is quite an important step towards solving that issue.

Engine on a chip promises to best the battery

Circa 2006

MIT researchers are putting a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a silicon chip about the size of a quarter. The resulting device could run 10 times longer than a battery of the same weight can, powering laptops, cell phones, radios and other electronic devices.

It could also dramatically lighten the load for people who can’t connect to a power grid, including soldiers who now must carry many pounds of batteries for a three-day mission — all at a reasonable price.

The researchers say that in the long term, mass-production could bring the per-unit cost of power from close to that for power from today’s large gas-turbine power plants.

Fast tool developed for quantum computing and communication

Isaac Nape, an emerging South African talent in the study of quantum optics, is part of a crack team of Wits physicists who led an international study that revealed the hidden structures of quantum entangled states. The study was published in the renowned scientific journal, Nature Communications, on Friday, 27 August 2021.

Nape is pursuing his Ph.D. at Wits University and focuses on harnessing structured for high dimensional information encoding and decoding for use in .

Earlier this year he scooped up two awards at the South African Institute of Physics (SAIP) conference to add to his growing collection of accolades in the field of optics and photonics. He won the award for “Best Ph.D. oral presentation in applied physics,” and jointly won the award for “Best Ph.D. oral presentation in photonics.”

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