Computer scientists at the University of California San Diego are showing how soil microbes can be harnessed to fuel low-power sensors. This opens new possibilities for microbial fuel cells (MFCs), which can power soil hydration sensors and other devices.
The diversity of quantum sensing applications is exciting for scientists, but challenging for potential investors.
Quantum computing startups are all the rage, but it’s unclear if they’ll be able to produce anything of use in the near future.
As a buzzword, quantum computing probably ranks only below AI in terms of hype. Large tech companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft now have substantial research and development efforts in quantum computing. A host of startups have sprung up as well, some boasting staggering valuations. IonQ, for example, was valued at $2 billion when it went public in October through a special-purpose acquisition company. Much of this commercial activity has happened with baffling speed over the past three years.
I am as pro-quantum-computing as one can be: I’ve published more than 100 technical papers on the subject, and many of my PhD students and postdoctoral fellows are now well-known quantum computing practitioners all over the world. But I’m disturbed by some of the quantum computing hype I see these days, particularly when it comes to claims about how it will be commercialized.
“Time-resolved photon-counting plays an indispensable role in precision metrology in both classical and quantum regimes. In particular, time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) has been the key enabling technology for applications such as low-light fluorescence lifetime spectroscopy and photon counting time-of-flight (ToF) 3D imaging. However, state-of-the-art TCSPC single-photon timing resolution (SPTR) is limited in the range of 10–100 ps by the available single-photon detector technology. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate a time-magnified TCSPC (TM-TCSPC) that achieves an unprecedentedly short SPTR of 550 fs for the first time with an off-the-shelf single-photon detector. The TM-TCSPC can resolve ultrashort pulses with a 130-fs pulsewidth difference at a 22-fs accuracy. When applied to photon counting ToF 3D imaging, the TM-TCSPC greatly suppresses the range walk error that limits all photon counting ToF 3D imaging systems by 99.2 % (130 times) and thus provides unprecedentedly high depth measurement accuracy and precision of 26 {\mu}m and 3 {\mu}m, respectively.”
It would take 15 billion years for the clock that occupies Jun Ye’s basement lab at the University of Colorado to lose a second—about how long the uni.
Using density functional theory calculations and the Greens’s function formalism, we report the existence of magnetic edge states with a non-collinear spin texture present on different edges of the 1T’ phase of the three monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs): MoS$_2$, MoTe$_2$ and WTe$_2$. The magnetic states are gapless and accompanied by a spontaneous breaking of the time-reversal symmetry. This may have an impact on the prospects of utilizing WTe$_2$ as a quantum spin Hall insulator. It has previously been suggested that the topologically protected edge states of the 1T’ TMDs could be switched off by applying a perpendicular electric field. We confirm with fully self-consistent DFT calculations, that the topological edge states can be switched off. The investigated magnetic edge states are seen to be robust and remains gapless when applying a field.
The prospects for directly testing a theory of quantum gravity are poor, to put it mildly. To probe the ultra-tiny Planck scale, where quantum gravitational effects appear, you would need a particle accelerator as big as the Milky Way galaxy. Likewise, black holes hold singularities that are governed by quantum gravity, but no black holes are particularly close by — and even if they were, we could never hope to see what’s inside. Quantum gravity was also at work in the first moments of the Big Bang, but direct signals from that era are long gone, leaving us to decipher subtle clues that first appeared hundreds of thousands of years later.
But in a small lab just outside Palo Alto, the Stanford University professor Monika Schleier-Smith and her team are trying a different way to test quantum gravity, without black holes or galaxy-size particle accelerators. Physicists have been suggesting for over a decade that gravity — and even space-time itself — may emerge from a strange quantum connection called entanglement. Schleier-Smith and her collaborators are reverse-engineering the process. By engineering highly entangled quantum systems in a tabletop experiment, Schleier-Smith hopes to produce something that looks and acts like the warped space-time predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
At GDC 2022 this week, VR glove creator Manus revealed its new Quantum Metagloves which the company says delivers significantly more accurate finger tracking than its prior solutions. Though priced for enterprise use, the company says it one day hopes to deliver the tech to consumers.
Manus has been building motion gloves for use in real-time VR and motion capture for years now, with prior offerings being based on IMU and flex-sensor tracking.
Continue reading “Latest Manus VR Gloves Promise New Levels of Finger Tracking Accuracy” »
We have designed an optical memristive element that allows the transmission of coherent quantum information as a superposition of single photons on spatial modes. We have realized the prototype of such a device on a glass-based, laser-written photonic processor and thereby provided what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first experimental demonstration of a quantum memristor. We have then designed a memristor-based quantum reservoir computer and tested it numerically on both classical and quantum tasks, achieving strong performance with very limited physical and computational resources and, most importantly, no architectural change from one to the other.
Our demonstrated quantum memristor is feasible in practice and readily scalable to larger architectures using integrated quantum photonics, with immediate feasibility in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum regime. The only hard limit for larger scalability—as with most quantum photonic applications—is the achievable single-photon rate. A foreseeable advancement would be the integration of optical and electronic components within the same chip (rather than using external electronics), which is conceivable using current semiconductor technology. Additionally, the frequency at which our quantum memristor operates can be easily improved. For laser-written circuits, high-frequency operations are readily available at the expense of higher-power consumption28, whereas other photonic platforms routinely enable frequencies even in the gigahertz regime43. For exploiting these frequencies, however, the photon detection rate must be improved as well.
To accurately diagnose and treat diseases, doctors and researchers need to see inside bodies. Medical imaging tools have come a long way since the humble X-ray, but most existing tools remain too coarse to quantify numbers or specific types of cells inside deep tissues of the body.
The senior product manager leading hardware and software product development at the Center for Quantum Computing wants to make fault-tolerant quantum computing a reality.
