Lifeboat Foundation

Soot is one of the world’s worst contributors to climate change. Its impact is similar to global methane emissions and is second only to carbon dioxide in its destructive potential. This is because soot particles absorb solar radiation, which heats the surrounding atmosphere, resulting in warmer global temperatures. Soot also causes several other environmental and health problems including making us more susceptible to respiratory viruses.

Soot only persists in the atmosphere for a few weeks, suggesting that if these emissions could be stopped then the air could rapidly clear. This has recently been demonstrated during recent lockdowns, with some major cities reporting clear skies after industrial emissions stopped.

But soot is also part of our future. Soot can be converted into the useful carbon black product through thermal treatment to remove any harmful components. Carbon blacks are critical ingredients in batteries, tires and paint. If these carbons are made small enough they can even be made to fluoresce and have been used for tagging biological molecules, in catalysts and even in solar cells.

JILA researchers have tricked nature by tuning a dense quantum gas of atoms to make a congested “Fermi sea,” thus keeping atoms in a high-energy state, or excited, for about 10% longer than usual by delaying their normal return to the lowest-energy state. The technique might be used to improve quantum communication networks and atomic clocks.

Quantum systems such as atoms that are excited above their resting state naturally calm down, or decay, by releasing light in quantized portions called photons. This common process is evident in the glow of fireflies and emission from LEDs. The rate of decay can be engineered by modifying the environment or the internal properties of the atoms. Previous research has modified the electromagnetic environment; the new work focuses on the atoms.

The new JILA method relies on a rule of the quantum world known as the Pauli exclusion principle, which says identical fermions (a category of particles) can’t share the same quantum states at the same time. Therefore, if enough fermions are in a crowd—creating a Fermi sea—an excited fermion might not be able to fling out a photon as usual, because it would need to then recoil. That recoil could land it in the same quantum state of motion as one of its neighbors, which is forbidden due to a mechanism called Pauli blocking.

For the satellites spinning around Earth, using electricity to ionize and push particles of xenon gets them to go where they need to go. While xenon atoms ionize easily and are heavy enough to build thrust, the gas is rare and expensive, not to mention difficult to store.

Thanks to new research, we could soon have an alternative. Enter iodine.

Full in-orbit operation of a satellite powered by iodine gas has now been carried out by space tech company ThrustMe, and the technology promises to lead to satellite propulsion systems that are more efficient and affordable than ever before.

If you get a dense quantum gas cloud cold enough, you can see right through it. This phenomenon, called Pauli blocking, happens because of the same effects that give atoms their structure, and now it has been observed for the first time.

“This has been a theoretical prediction for more than three decades,” says Amita Deb at the University of Otago in New Zealand, a member of one of three teams that have now independently seen this. “This is the first time this been proven experimentally.”

Pauli blocking occurs in gases made up of a type of particle called a fermion, a category that includes the protons, neutrons and electrons that make up all atoms. These particles obey a rule called the Pauli exclusion principle, which dictates that no two identical fermions can occupy the same quantum state in a given system.

Aiming to emulate the quantum characteristics of materials more realistically, researchers have figured out a way to create a lattice of light and atoms that can vibrate – bringing sound to an otherwise silent experiment.

When sound was first incorporated into movies in the 1920s, it opened up new possibilities for filmmakers such as music and spoken dialogue. Physicists may be on the verge of a similar revolution, thanks to a new device developed at Stanford University that promises to bring an audio dimension to previously silent quantum science experiments.

In particular, it could bring sound to a common quantum science setup known as an optical lattice, which uses a crisscrossing mesh of laser beams to arrange atoms in an orderly manner resembling a crystal. This tool is commonly used to study the fundamental characteristics of solids and other phases of matter that have repeating geometries. A shortcoming of these lattices, however, is that they are silent.

While traditional computers use magnetic bits to represent a one or a zero for computation, quantum computers use quantum bits or qubits to represent a one or a zero or simultaneously any number in between.

Today’s quantum computers use several different technologies for qubits. But regardless of the technology, a common requirement for all quantum computing qubits is that it must be scalable, high quality, and capable of fast quantum interaction with each other.

IBM uses superconducting qubits on its huge fleet of about twenty quantum computers. Although Amazon doesn’t yet have a quantum computer, it plans to build one using superconducting hardware. Honeywell and IonQ both use trapped-ion qubits made from a rare earth metal called ytterbium. In contrast, Psi Quantum and Xanadu use photons of light.

Continue reading “Atom Computing: A Quantum Computing Startup That Believes It Can Ultimately Win The Qubit Race” »

OAKLAND, Calif. Nov 17 (Reuters) — A new quantum computer startup born from researchers at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) called QuEra Computing said on Wednesday it raised $17 million from investors, including Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten Inc (4755.T).

It’s the latest quantum computer hardware maker to come out of the lab at a time when funding for the nascent technology is booming. read more

While there are various technologies for creating so-called quantum bits or qubits where the computations happen, QuEra’s qubits use neutral atoms in a vacuum chamber and use lasers to cool and control them.

How are chemical elements produced in our Universe? Where do heavy elements like gold and uranium come from? Using computer simulations, a research team from the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, together with colleagues from Belgium and Japan, shows that the synthesis of heavy elements is typical for certain black holes with orbiting matter accumulations, so-called accretion disks. The predicted abundance of the formed elements provides insight into which heavy elements need to be studied in future laboratories — such as the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR), which is currently under construction — to unravel the origin of heavy elements. The results are published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

All heavy elements on Earth today were formed under extreme conditions in astrophysical environments: inside stars, in stellar explosions, and during the collision of neutron stars. Researchers are intrigued with the question in which of these astrophysical events the appropriate conditions for the formation of the heaviest elements, such as gold or uranium, exist. The spectacular first observation of gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation originating from a neutron star merger in 2017 suggested that many heavy elements can be produced and released in these cosmic collisions. However, the question remains open as to when and why the material is ejected and whether there may be other scenarios in which heavy elements can be produced.

Promising candidates for heavy element production are black holes orbited by an accretion disk of dense and hot matter. Such a system is formed both after the merger of two massive neutron stars and during a so-called collapsar, the collapse and subsequent explosion of a rotating star. The internal composition of such accretion disks has so far not been well understood, particularly with respect to the conditions under which an excess of neutrons forms. A high number of neutrons is a basic requirement for the synthesis of heavy elements, as it enables the rapid neutron-capture process or r-process. Nearly massless neutrinos play a key role in this process, as they enable conversion between protons and neutrons.

In quantum mechanics, counterfactual behaviours are generally associated with particles being affected by events taking place where they can’t be found. Here, the authors consider extended quantum Cheshire cat scenarios where a particle can be influenced in regions where only its disembodied property has entered.