Lifeboat Foundation

QuTech has resolved a major issue on the road toward a working large-scale quantum computer. QuTech, a collaboration of TU Delft and TNO, and Intel have designed and fabricated an integrated circuit that can controlling qubits at extremely low temperatures. This paves the way for the crucial integration of qubits and their controlling electronics in the same chip. The scientists have presented their research during the ISSCC Conference in San Francisco.

Quantum computers

“This result brings us closer to a large-scale quantum computer which can solve problems that are intractable by even the most powerful supercomputers. Solutions to those problems can make a strong impact on everyday life, for instance in the fields of medicine and energy,” said team lead Fabio Sebastiano from QuTech and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science.

Competition between the U.S. and China in quantum computing revolves, in part, around the role such a system could play in breaking the encryption that makes things secure on the internet.

Truly useful quantum computing applications could be as much as a decade away, Aaronson says. Initially, these tools would be highly specialized.

“The way I put it is that we’re now entering the very, very early, vacuum-tube era of quantum computers,” he says.

Massive-scale particle physics produces correspondingly large amounts of data – and this is particularly true of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, which is housed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. In 2026, the LHC will receive a massive upgrade through the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) Project. This will increase the LHC’s data output by five to seven times – billions of particle events every second – and researchers are scrambling to prepare big data computing for this deluge of particle physics data. Now, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are working to tackle high volumes of particle physics data with quantum computing.

When a particle accelerator runs, particle detectors offer data points for where particles crossed certain thresholds in the accelerator. Researchers then attempt to reconstruct precisely how the particles traveled through the accelerator, typically using some form of computer-aided pattern recognition.

This project, which is led by Heather Gray, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a particle physicist at Berkeley Lab, is called Quantum Pattern Recognition for High-Energy Physics (or HEP.QPR). In essence, HEP.QPR aims to use quantum computing to speed this pattern recognition process. HEP.QPR also includes Berkeley Lab scientists Wahid Bhimji, Paolo Calafiura and Wim Lavrijsen.

Single-purpose quantum computers are helping physicists build simulations of nature’s greatest hits and observe them up close.

Popular Science discusses the Harold space warping project at NASA and Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thruster

Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thruster

White shows me into the facility and ushers me past its central feature, something he calls a quantum vacuum plasma thruster (QVPT). The device looks like a large red velvet doughnut with wires tightly wound around a core, and it’s one of two initiatives Eagleworks is pursuing, along with warp drive. It’s also secret. When I ask about it, White tells me he can’t disclose anything other than that the technology is further along than warp drive … Yet when I ask how it would create the negative energy necessary to warp space-time he becomes evasive.

A machine learning algorithm implemented on a quantum annealer—a D-Wave machine with 1,098 superconducting qubits—is used to identify Higgs-boson decays from background standard-model processes.

Molecule Rules

The team even managed to observe two of three atoms collide to form a molecule — a process that has never been observed on this scale before. They were surprised at how long it took compared to previous experiments and calculations.

“By working at this molecular level, we now know more about how atoms collide and react with one another,” lead author and postdoc researcher Marvin Weyland said in a statement. “With development, this technique could provide a way to build and control single molecules of particular chemicals.”

Circa 2016

MIT scientists have developed a 5-atom quantum computer, one that is able to render traditional encryption obsolete.

In my previous post “Cryonics for uploaders: WTF is consciousness?” I didn’t elaborate on the spiritual implications of emerging theories of consciousness and reality. Here’s a unified theory of consciousness, physics, Deity, reincarnation, afterlife, eschatology, and theo/technological resurrection wink