Lifeboat Foundation

In a study published recently in Physical Review Letters, researchers unveiled a new type of quantum sensor that they report leverages quantum entanglement to perform detections that, note the quote marks, “travel back in time”. The researchers add the findings could — one day — lead to novel quantum sensors that are ideally suited for astronomical detection and magnetic field investigations.

The study, led by Kater Murch, Charles M. Hohenberg Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for Quantum Leaps at Washington University in St. Louis, introduces a sensor that can probe past events in complex systems. The team, which also included scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Cambridge, described the innovation in the press release as a bit like “sending a telescope back in time to capture a shooting star that you saw out of the corner of your eye.”

The sensor operates by entangling two quantum particles in a quantum singlet state, where their spins point in opposite directions. The process begins with one particle, the “probe,” being subjected to a magnetic field that causes it to rotate. The key breakthrough comes when the second particle, the “ancilla,” is measured. This measurement effectively sends its quantum state back in time to the probe, allowing researchers to optimally set the spin direction of the probe qubit in what Murch refers to as hindsight.

Quantum Systems, the Munich-based manufacturer of dual-use reconnaissance drones that use multi-sensor technology to collect data for government agencies and commercial users, confirms for the first time the deployment of a previously unreleased AI sensor upgrade of the type “Receptor AI” in Ukraine. The new upgrade kit is based on a Jetson Orin Nvidia chip and several sensors for the Vector reconnaissance drone. The further development enables optical navigation during the day and at night and in poor visibility conditions, as well as automated AI-supported object recognition and identification. In times of electronic warfare, navigation is the biggest challenge for the use of drones.

“We are implementing the upgrade without any weight changes and with the same range. We are designing these adaptations without fundamental changes to the existing platform architecture,” says Daniel Kneifel, Director of Software Engineering at Quantum Systems.

“We are demonstrating that AI does not have to be an abstract topic, but offers tangible benefits in use. For Quantum Systems, the combination of hardware and software is crucial to being able to offer market-leading solutions in the field of aerial intelligence,” says Sven Kruck, CRO and Managing Director, Quantum Systems.

Physicists in Konstanz (Germany) have discovered a way to imprint a previously unseen geometrical form of chirality onto electrons. The electrons are shaped into chiral coils of mass and charge. Such engineered elementary particles may open new research avenues in fundamental physics and electron microscopy.

Have you ever placed the palm of your left hand on the back of your right hand, in such a way that all fingers point in the same direction? If you have, then you probably know that your left thumb will not touch its right counterpart. Neither rotations nor translations nor their combinations can turn a left hand into a right hand and vice versa. This feature is called chirality.

Scientists at the University of Konstanz have now succeeded to imprint such a three-dimensional chirality onto the wave function of a single electron. They used laser light to shape the electron’s matter wave into left-handed or right-handed coils of mass and charge. Such engineered elementary particles with chiral geometries other than their intrinsic spin have implications for fundamental physics but may also be useful for a range of applications, such as quantum optics, particle physics or electron microscopy.

Wormholes, a captivating theoretical concept, offer a potential shortcut through space and time—a celestial tunnel connecting distant points through the intricate fabric of space-time. The inception of this idea dates all the way back to 1935 when Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen proposed the concept of a wormhole, also known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, as a unique solution within the framework of Einstein’s General Relativity(GR). The hypothetical existence of wormholes carries profound implications for space travel, such as the ability to traverse vast cosmic distances in remarkably short durations, and exploring their properties and implications could provide important information about the structure of space-time itself.

Furthermore, being closely linked to other perplexing cosmic phenomena, such as black holes, dark matter, and the enigmatic event known as the Big Bang—the cosmic genesis that set our universe into motion—wormholes have the potential to provide insights into these cosmic puzzles and deepen our understanding of the origin of the universe. Additionally, investigating wormholes could help bridge the gap between GR and quantum mechanics, which is currently one of the most important problems in theoretical physics.

Inspired by this, a team of researchers, led by Dr. P.K. Sahoo in collaboration with Mr. Zinnat Hassan from the Department of Mathematics at the Hyderabad Campus of Birla Institute of Technology (BITS) Pilani, recently delved into the investigation of wormholes. They focused on the modified teleparallel gravity framework with conformal symmetry within the context of non-commutative geometry. The primary objective of their research was to shed light on the specific conditions required for the existence of wormholes within the above framework. “The study of wormholes within the context of f(Q) symmetric teleparallel gravity with conformal symmetry under non-commutative geometry represents a sophisticated and specialized area of research in the field of theoretical physics and cosmology,” says Dr. Sahoo. Their findings were published in volume 437 of the journal Annals of Physics in February 2022.

The Standard Model of Particle Physics encapsulates nearly everything we know about the tiny quantum-scale particles that make up our everyday world. It is a remarkable achievement, but it’s also incomplete — rife with unanswered questions. To fill the gaps in our knowledge, and discover new laws of physics beyond the Standard Model, we must study the exotic phenomena and states of matter that don’t exist in our everyday world. These include the high-energy collisions of particles and nuclei that take place in the fiery heart of stars, in cosmic ray events occurring all across earth’s upper atmosphere, and in particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN or the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Computer simulations of fundamental physics processes play an essential role in this research, but many important questions require simulations that are much too complex for even the most powerful classical supercomputers. Now that utility-scale quantum computers have demonstrated the ability to simulate quantum systems at a scale beyond exact or “brute force” classical methods, researchers are exploring how these devices might help us run simulations and answer scientific questions that are inaccessible to classical computation. In two recent papers published in PRX Quantum (PRX)¹ and Physical Review D (PRD)², our research group did just that, developing scalable techniques for simulating the real-time dynamics of quantum-scale particles using the IBM® fleet of utility-scale, superconducting quantum computers.

The techniques we’ve developed could very well serve as the building blocks for future quantum computer simulations that are completely inaccessible to both exact and even approximate classical methods — simulations that would demonstrate what we call “quantum advantage” over all known classical techniques. Our results provide clear evidence that such simulations are potentially within reach of the quantum hardware we have today.

The 56-qubit H2-1 computer has broken the previous record in the ‘quantum supremacy’ benchmark first set by Google in 2019.

Oxford Ionics reported that the company’s newest chips can provide over twice the performance of previous records.

CSIRO research, published as a letter in Physical Review Research journal, found for the first time that AI could help process and resolve quantum errors known as qubit noise, which are generated by the nature of quantum physics.

Overcoming these errors is widely considered the largest barrier to advanced quantum computers moving from experiment to tool.

In conventional computers, information is stored and processed in “bits,” which work on the principles of binary numbers. Each bit can represent either 0 or 1. But quantum computing devices are made up of quantum bits, or “qubits.”

Entanglement, Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance,” today is THE tool of quantum information science. It is the essential resource for quantum computers and used to transmit quantum information in a future quantum network. But it is highly sensitive. It is therefore an enormous challenge to entangle resting quantum bits (qubits) with flying qubits in the form of photons “at the push of a button.”