The company wants to make large-scale quantum computers a reality within just 10 years.
Category: quantum physics – Page 413
Microsoft says its weird new particle could improve quantum computers
Researchers at Microsoft say they have created elusive quasiparticles called Majorana zero modes – but scientists outside the company are sceptical.
Record Temperatures in the North Atlantic
Lot’s of science news, stay till the end for the climate stuff.
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Today we’ll talk about plants that use quantum mechanics, the first data from a new galaxy survey, quantum utility, online hate groups, photonic computing, the most sensitive power measurement ever, how to map a tunnel with muons, bad climate news that I don’t want to talk about, and you don’t want to hear, but that we need to talk about anyway. And of course, the telephone will ring.
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00:00 Intro.
Waves of Light Can Be ‘Frozen’ in 3D Materials, According to a New Simulation
Scientists have solved a decades-long mystery on whether light can be effectively trapped in a 3D forest of microscopic particles.
Using a new method for crunching vast sums in a model of particle interactions, a team of physicists in the US and France revealed conditions under which a wave of light can be brought to a standstill by defects in the right kind of material.
Known as Anderson localization, after US theoretical physicist Philip W. Anderson, electrons can become trapped (localized) in disordered materials with randomly distributed abnormalities. Its proposal in 1958 was a significant moment in contemporary condensed matter physics, applying across quantum as well as classical mechanics.
Lego Poised to Enter The Quantum Computer Market
Disregarding an ever-increasing number of modalities and approaches and indifferent to the intense competition from savvy startups and techno giants, Lego could enter the race to build a quantum computer.
Well, at least one Lego fan designer is readying the Denmark-based toy company for the quantum era.
In a product suggestion, a Lego user pitched creating IBM Quantum Computer System in Lego Ideas, a site that allows users to submit suggestions for future logo sets.
The Evidence is Building that Dark Matter is Made of Axions
There’s some potentially big news on the hunt for dark matter. Astronomers may have a handle on what makes this mysterious cosmic stuff: strange particles called “axions.”
Rather than search directly for axions, however, a multinational team of researchers led by Keir Rogers from the University of Toronto looked for something else. They focused on the “clumpiness” of the Universe and found that cosmic matter is more evenly distributed than expected.
So, what role do axions play here? Quantum mechanics explains these ultra-light particles as “fuzzy” because they exhibit wave-like behavior. It turns out their wavelengths can be bigger than entire galaxies. Apparently, that fuzziness plays a role in smoothing out the Universe by influencing the formation and distribution of dark matter. If that’s true, then it goes a long way toward explaining why the matter in the cosmos is more evenly spread out. It implies that axions play a part in the distribution of matter in the cosmos.
Intel announces new quantum chip for research
The new 12-qubit “Tunnel Falls” chip announced by Intel packs important features into its tiny form factor that could help accelerate research in quantum computing.
Intel has announced a new 12-qubit “silicon spin” chip, Tunnel Falls, and is making it available to the research community. In addition, Intel is collaborating with the Laboratory for Physical Sciences (LPS) at the University of Maryland’s Qubit Collaboratory (LQC), to advance quantum computing research.
Quantum Light Experiment Proves Photosynthesis Starts with a Single Photon
The process that powers much of life on Earth, photosynthesis, is so finely tuned that just one photon is enough to kick it off.
Scientists have long suspected that photosynthesis must be sensitive to individual photons, or particles of light, because despite the way it dominates our days, the sun’s light is surprisingly sparse at the level of individual plant cells. But only now, with the help of quantum physics, have researchers been able to watch a single packet of light begin the process in an experiment described on June 14 in the journal Nature.
“It makes sense that photosynthesis only requires a single photon, but to actually be able to measure that … is really groundbreaking,” says Sara Massey, a physical chemist at Southwestern University in Texas, who was not involved with the new research. “Being able to actually see that hands-on with the data from these experiments is very valuable.”
Quantum Frustration Leads to Fundamental Physics Discovery: A New Phase of Matter
A team of physicists, including University of Massachusetts assistant professor Tigran Sedrakyan, recently announced in the journal Nature that they have discovered a new phase of matter. Called the “chiral bose-liquid state,” the discovery opens a new path in the age-old effort to understand the nature of the physical world.
Under everyday conditions, matter can be a solid, liquid, or gas. But once you venture beyond the everyday—into temperatures approaching absolute zero.
Absolute zero is the theoretical lowest temperature on the thermodynamic temperature scale. At this temperature, all atoms of an object are at rest and the object does not emit or absorb energy. The internationally agreed-upon value for this temperature is −273.15 °C (−459.67 °F; 0.00 K).