Lifeboat Foundation

DARPA funds the Atoms-to-Products program that aims to maintain quantum nanoscale properties at the millimeter scale of microchips.

The main goal of the atoms-to-products program is to create technology and processes needed to create nanometer-scale pieces, with dimensions almost the size of atoms, into components and materials only millimeter scale in size. And to spur developments in the program DARPA has now posed the challenge to 10 laboratories across the nation.

To get the full benefits of nanoscale engineering at the millimeter scale, the organization has partnered with Intelligent Materials Solutions. “Our initial project will be to control infrared light by assembling nanoscale particles into finished components that are one million times larger,” explains Adam Gross, the team leader working closely with Christopher Roper to bring the Atoms-to Products project to fruition.

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Interesting, but older…

Two separate research groups, one of which is from MIT, have presented evidence that wormholes — tunnels that may allow us to travel through time and space — are “powered” by quantum entanglement. Furthermore, one of the research groups also postulates the reverse — that quantum entangled particles are connected by miniature wormholes.

A wormhole, or Einstein-Rosen bridge to give its formal name, is a hypothetical feature of spacetime that exists in four dimensions, and somehow connects to another wormhole that’s located elsewhere in both space and time. The theory, essentially, is that a wormhole is a tunnel that isn’t restricted by the normal limitations of 3D Cartesian space and the speed of light, allowing you to travel from one point in space and time, to another point in space and time — theoretically allowing you to traverse huge portions of the universe, and travel in time.

Continue reading “Wormholes are just quantum entangled black holes, says new research” »

A beam splitter is placed in a quantum superposition state of being both active and inactive allowing the wave and particle aspects of the system to be observed in a single setup.

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If a time traveler went back in time and stopped their own grandparents from meeting, would they prevent their own birth?

That’s the crux of an infamous theory known as the ‘grandfather paradox’, which is often said to mean time travel is impossible — but some researchers think otherwise. A group of scientists have simulated how time-travelling photons might behave, suggesting that, at the quantum level, the grandfather paradox could be resolved.

The research was carried out by a team of researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia and their results are published in the journal Nature Communications. The study used photons — single particles of light — to simulate quantum particles travelling back through time. By studying their behavior, the scientists revealed possible bizarre aspects of modern physics.

Continue reading “Could Time Travel Soon Become a Reality? Physicists Simulate Sending Quantum light Particles into the Past” »

A research group at Osaka University has succeeded in observing at the intended timing two-phonon quantum interference by using two cold calcium ions in ion traps, which spatially confine charged particles. A phonon is a unit of vibrational energy that arises from oscillating particles within crystals. Two-particle quantum interference experiments using two photons or atoms have been previously reported, but this group’s achievement is the world’s first observation using two phonons.

This group demonstrated that the phonon, a quantum mechanical description of an elementary vibrational motion in matter, and the photon, an elementary particle of light, share common properties. This group’s research results will contribute to quantum information processing research, including quantum simulation using phonons and quantum interface research.

Ion traps are an important technique in physically achieving quantum information processing including quantum computation, and research on ion traps is being carried out all over the world, with Dr. David J. Wineland of the United States, a leading expert in the field, winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2012.

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Graphene is a super strong, two-dimensional material with atom-thick layers. But now, a team of scientists have developed a new material with a similar structure that they’re calling borophene, and it may have graphene beat.

Borophene, a one atom thick sheet of boron, is being introduced by scientists as the next big thing after graphene, another two-dimensional material that made headlines back in 2004. If you aren’t aware, graphene is basically a supermaterial. A single layer of this is about 100 times stronger than steel and it is extremely flexible.

Continue reading “Borophene: This New, 2-Dimensional Material May Be Stronger Than Graphene” »

‘In a nice piece of “spin-off science” from this technological achievement, we were able to perform a “Bell test”, by first using the high-precision logic gate to generate an entangled state of the two different-species ions, then manipulating and measuring them independently. This is a test which probes the non-local nature of quantum mechanics; that is, the fact that an entangled state of two separated particles has properties that cannot be mimicked by a classical system. This was the first time such a test had been performed on two different species of atom separated by many times the atomic size.’

While Professor Lucas cautions that the so-called ‘locality loophole’ is still present in this experiment, there is no doubt the work is an important contribution to the growing body of research exploring the physics of entanglement. He says: ‘The significance of the work for trapped-ion quantum computing is that we show that quantum logic gates between different isotopic species are possible, can be driven by a relatively simple laser system, and can work with precision beyond the so-called “fault-tolerant threshold” precision of approximately 99% — the precision necessary to implement the techniques of quantum error correction, without which a quantum computer of useful size cannot be built.’

In the long term, it is likely that different atomic elements will be required, rather than different isotopes. In closely related work published in the same issue of Nature, by Ting Rei Tan et al, the NIST Ion Storage group has demonstrated a different type of quantum logic gate using ions of two different elements (beryllium and magnesium).

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We should use particle accelerators to propel our spacecraft to Alpha Centauri.

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As conventional computers draw ever closer to their theoretical limit, the race is on to build a machine that can truly harness the unprecedented processing power of quantum computing. And now two research teams have independently demonstrated how entangling atoms from different elements can address the problem of quantum memory errors while functioning within a logic gate framework, and also pass the all-important test of true entanglement.

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