Lifeboat Foundation

:oooo.

Metasurfaces are artificial materials designed at the nanoscale, which can control the scattering of light with exceptionally high precision. Over the past decade or so, these materials have been used to create a variety of technological tools ranging from sensors to lenses and imaging techniques.

A research team led by Mikhail Lukin at Harvard University has recently proposed a new type of metasurface that can control both the spatiotemporal and quantum properties of transmitted and reflected light. In a paper published in Nature Physics, the team showed that realizing a quantum metasurface is possible and could be achieved by entangling the macroscopic response of thin atom arrays to light.

Continue reading “A quantum metasurface that can simultaneously control multiple properties of light” »

When the American physicist Arthur Compton discovered that light waves behave like particles in 1922, and could knock electrons out of atoms during an impact experiment, it was a milestone for quantum mechanics. Five years later, Compton received the Nobel Prize for this discovery. Compton used very shortwave light with high energy for his experiment, which enabled him to neglect the binding energy of the electron to the atomic nucleus. Compton simply assumed for his calculations that the electron rested freely in space.

During the following 90 years up to the present, numerous experiments and calculations have been carried out with regard to Compton scattering that continually revealed asymmetries and posed riddles. For example, it was observed that in certain experiments, energy seemed to be lost when the motion energy of the electrons and light particles (photons) after the collision were compared with the energy of the photons before the collision. Since energy cannot simply disappear, it was assumed that in these cases, contrary to Compton’s simplified assumption, the influence of the nucleus on the photon-electron collision could not be neglected.

For the first time in an impact experiment with photons, a team of physicists led by Professor Reinhard Dörner and doctoral candidate Max Kircher at Goethe University Frankfurt has now simultaneously observed the ejected electrons and the motion of the nucleus. To do so, they irradiated helium atoms with X-rays from the X-ray source PETRA III at the Hamburg accelerator facility DESY. They detected the ejected electrons and the charged rest of the atom (ions) in a COLTRIMS reaction microscope, an apparatus that Dörner helped develop and which is able to make ultrafast reactive processes in atoms and molecules visible.

You really can not make this up The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated more than $21 million towards developing a vaccine technology that uses a tattoo-like mechanism which injects invisible nanoparticles under the skin that is now being tested in a vaccine against the virus that causes COVID-19.

Another study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and published in December, 2019 by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and the Global Good, Intellectual Ventures Laboratory in Bellevue, WA, describes how “near-infrared quantum dots” can be implanted under the skin along with a vaccine to encode information for “decentralized data storage and bio-sensing.”

“To maximize the utility of this technology for vaccination campaigns, we aimed to create a platform compatible with microneedle-delivered vaccines that could reliably encode data on an individual for at least five years after administration,” said the MIT paper, titled Biocompatible near-infrared quantum dots delivered to the skin by microneedle patches record vaccination. “In addition, this system also needed to be highly biocompatible, deliver a sufficient amount of dye after an application time of 2 min or less, and be detectable using a minimally adapted smartphone.”

Continue reading “Bill Gates and Intellectual Ventures Funds Microchip Implant Vaccine Technology” »

VTT researchers have successfully demonstrated a new electronic refrigeration technology that could enable major leaps in the development of quantum computers. Present quantum computers require extremely complicated and large cooling infrastructure that is based on mixture of isotopes of helium. The new electronic cooling technology could replace these cryogenic liquid mixtures and enable miniaturization of quantum computers.

In this purely electrical refrigeration method, cooling and thermal isolation operate effectively through the same point like junction. In the experiment the researchers suspended a piece of silicon from such junctions and refrigerated the object by feeding electrical current from one junction to another through the piece. The current lowered the thermodynamic temperature of the silicon object as much as 40% from that of the surroundings. This could lead to the miniaturization of future quantum computers, as it can simplify the required cooling infrastructure significantly. The discovery has been published in Science Advances.

“We expect that this newly discovered electronic cooling method could be used in several applications from the miniaturization of quantum computers to ultra-sensitive radiation sensors of the security field,” says Research Professor Mika Prunnila from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.

:oooo circa 2009.

The portrait of Peter Higgs is on display at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics. Photograph: Ken Currie.

It seems that Peter Higgs, despite his known aversion to publicity is turning up everywhere. Of course the potential discovery of the particle in the next few years by either/both of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the Tevatron at Fermilab is bringing a lot more attention to him, and a little to the other theorists, such as Guralnik, Hagen, Kibble, Brout, and Englert, who also developed the ideas behind a mass-giving spontaneously symmetry broken quantum field and its manifestation as a particle, now known as the Higgs boson. (Yep, that sounds scary because it gets technical.)

Continue reading “Higgs turning up everywhere, this time in paint” »

Ions trapped nanoscale optical cavities could be used to distribute entangled quantum particles over large distances. That is the conclusion of Jonathan Kindem and colleagues at Caltech in the US, who showed that a trapped ion of ytterbium can remain entangled with a photon for long periods of time. Furthermore, the team showed that the ion’s quantum state can be read out when manipulated by laser and microwave pulses. Their achievement could lay the foundations for a future quantum internet.

Quantum computers are becoming a reality as research labs and companies roll out nascent devices. An important next step in this quantum revolution is creating a “quantum internet” across which quantum information can be shared. The delicate nature of quantum information, however, means that it is very difficult to connect quantum computers over long distances.

Most quantum computers encode quantum bits (qubits) of information into the quantum states of matter – trapped atoms or superconducting circuits, for example. However, the best way to transmit quantum information over long distances is to encode it into a photon of light. An important challenge is how to transfer quantum information from stationary matter-based qubits to photon-based “flying” qubits and then back again.

Could be made into a generator of some kind :3.

One of the strangest effects to arise from the quantum nature of the universe is the Casimir force. This pushes two parallel conducting plates together when they are just a few dozen nanometres apart.

At these kinds of scales, the Casimir force can dominate and engineers are well aware of its unwanted effects. One reason why microelectromechanical machines have never reached their original promise is the stiction that Casimir forces can generate.

Continue reading “Engineers Unveil First Casimir Chip That Exploits The Vacuum Energy” »

High vibrational states of the Magnesium dimer (Mg₂) are an important system in studies of fundamental physics, although they have eluded experimental characterization for half a century. Experimental physicists have so far resolved the first 14 vibrational states of Mg_2, despite reports that the ground-state may support five additional levels. In a new report, Stephen H. Yuwono and a research team in the departments of physics and chemistry at the Michigan State University, U.S., presented highly accurate initial potential energy curves for the ground and excited electron states of Mg₂. They centered the experimental investigations on calculations of state-of-the-art coupled-cluster (CC) and full configuration interaction computations of the Mg₂ dimer. The ground-state potential confirmed the existence of 19 vibrational states with minimal deviation between previously calculated rovibrational values and experimentally derived data. The computations are now published on Science Advances and provide guidance to experimentally detect previously unresolved vibrational levels.

Background

Weakly bound alkaline-earth (AE₂) dimers can function as probes of fundamental physics phenomena, such as ultracold collisions, doped helium nanodroplets, binary reactions and even optical lattice clocks and quantum gravity. The magnesium dimer is important for such applications since it has several desirable characteristics including nontoxicity and an absence of hyperfine structure in the most abundant ²⁴ Mg isotope that typically facilitates the analysis of binary collisions and other quantum phenomena. However, the status of Mg₂ as a prototype heavier AE₂ species is complicated since scientists have not been able to experimentally characterize its high vibrational levels and ground-state potential energy curve (PEC) for so long.

To process information, photons must interact. However, these tiny packets of light want nothing to do with each other, each passing by without altering the other. Now, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have coaxed photons into interacting with one another with unprecedented efficiency — a key advance toward realizing long-awaited quantum optics technologies for computing, communication and remote sensing.

The team, led by Yuping Huang, an associate professor of physics and director of the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering, brings us closer to that goal with a nano-scale chip that facilitates photon interactions with much higher efficiency than any previous system. The new method, reported as a memorandum in the Sept. 18 issue of Optica, works at very low energy levels, suggesting that it could be optimized to work at the level of individual photons — the holy grail for room-temperature quantum computing and secure quantum communication.

“We’re pushing the boundaries of physics and optical engineering in order to bring quantum and all-optical signal processing closer to reality,” said Huang.