Lifeboat Foundation

A walk down memory lane: I thought it would be fun to revisit an article from 1998 about Los Alamos’ announcement about their move to Quantum Computing which we found out later they expanded it to include a Quantum Network which they announced in 2009 their success in that launch. Times certainly have changed.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., March 17, 1998 — Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory have answered several key questions required to construct powerful quantum computers fundamentally different from today’s computers, they announced today at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society.

“Based on these recent experiments and theoretical work, it appears the barriers to constructing a working quantum computer will be technical, rather than fundamental to the laws of physics,” said Richard Hughes of Los Alamos’ Neutron Science and Technology Group.

Hughes also said that a quantum computer like the one Los Alamos is building, in which single ionized atoms act like a computer memory, could be capable of performing small computations within three years.

Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.”

That’s because entanglement, a voodoo-like phenomenon in quantum physics linking particles that once interacted, seems to surpass the speed of light, violating the cosmic speed limit.

Because of this, it doesn’t fit in with Einstein’s theory of relativity, so he concluded that it was too ludicrous to be real.

Continue reading “We just got better at detecting this phenomenon in quantum physics that Einstein thought was too ‘spooky’ to be real” »

RMIT quantum computing researchers have developed and demonstrated a method capable of efficiently detecting high-dimensional entanglement.

Entanglement in quantum physics is the ability of two or more particles to be related to each other in ways which are beyond what is possible in classical physics.

Having information on a particle in an entangled ensemble reveals an “unnatural” amount of information on the other particles.

A team from the University of Science and Technology of China has shattered the quantum entanglement record, entangling 10 photon pairs.

Quantum entanglement is one of the strangest occurrences in the already strange world of quantum physics. Basically, entanglement is the state where quantum particles become so deeply linked that they share what is, in essence, the same existence.

The video below delves into the ins and outs of this phenomenon.

Continue reading “Physicists Just Entangled 10 Photon Pairs And Set A New World Record” »

In a lovely demonstration of light’s quantum effects, physicists in the UK have just mixed a molecule with light at room temperature for the first time ever.

Light and matter are usually separate, with totally distinct properties, but now scientists have trapped a particle of light — called a photon — with a molecule in a tiny, golden cage of mirrors.

That’s a big deal, because it creates a whole new way to manipulate the physical and chemical properties of matter, and could change the way we process quantum information.

Continue reading “Physicists have mixed matter and light at room temperature for the first time” »

Nice.

Scientists have designed new energy-carrying particles that improve the way electrons are transported and could be used to develop new types of solar cells and miniaturized optical circuitry.

The work of researchers at the University of California (UC) San Diego, MIT, and Harvard University has synthetically engineered particles called “topological plexcitons,” which can enhance a process known as exciton energy transfer, or EET.

Continue reading “New Energy-Carrying Particles Help Advance Solar-Cell Development” »

Small electrical currents appear to activate certain immune cells to jumpstart or speed wound healing and reduce infection when there’s a lack of immune cells available, such as with diabetes, University of Aberdeen (U.K.) scientists have found.

In a lab experiment, the scientists exposed healing macrophages (white blood cells that eat things that don’t belong), taken from human blood, to electrical fields of strength similar to that generated in injured skin. When the voltage was applied, the macrophages moved in a directed manner to Candida albicans fungus cells (representing damaged skin) to facilitate healing (engulfing and digesting extracellular particles). (This process is called “phagocytosis,” in which macrophages clean the wound site, limit infection, and allow the repair process to proceed.)

Another article on Quantum Security; this time from Sydney (generating single photons to make communications and information secured).

With enough computing effort most contemporary security systems will be broken. But a research team at the University of Sydney has made a major breakthrough in generating single photons (light particles), as carriers of quantum information in security systems.

The collaboration involving physicists at the Centre for Ultrahigh bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS), an ARC Centre of Excellence headquartered in the School of Physics, and electrical engineers from the School of Electrical and Information Engineering, has been published in Nature Communications.

The team’s work resolved a key issue holding back the development of password exchange which can only be broken by violating the laws of physics. Photons are generated in a pair, and detecting one indicates the existence of the other. This allows scientists to manage the timing of photon events so that they always arrive at the time they are expected.

Continue reading “Breakthrough technology to improve cyber security” »

Hints of an unexpected new particle could be confirmed within days—and if it is, the Standard Model could be going down.