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“It’s clear that the light is trapped — there are photons circulating around the atoms,” Everett says. “The atoms absorbed some of the trapped light, but a substantial proportion of the photons were frozen inside the atomic cloud.”

Co-researcher Geoff Campbell from ANU explained that while photons commonly pass by each other at the speed of light without any interactions, atoms interact with each other more freely.

“Corralling a crowd of photons in a cloud of ultra-cold atoms creates more opportunities for them to interact,” Campbell says.

Continue reading “Modern Jedi Physicists Freeze Light In Mid-Air: Bringing Quantum Computers Closer To Reality” »

The race towards quantum computing is heating up. Faster, brighter, more exacting – these are all terms that could be applied as much to the actual science as to the research effort going on in labs around the globe.

Quantum technologies are poised to provide exponentially stronger computational power and secured communications. But the bar is high – advances are hard won and competition is intense.

At the forefront of the candidates to implement such technologies is the field of quantum photonics, particularly light sources that emit photons one at a time to be used as carriers of information.

R2 is doing hotel work now…😄.

Need Room Service? This Robot Has You Covered.

Shock waves in the early universe could explain the generation of magnetic fields and the predominance of matter over antimatter.

Remember that scene in “The Force Awakens” where the dark side warrior Kylo Ren stops a laser blast in mid-air? In a Canberra laboratory, physicists have managed a feat almost as magical: they froze the movement of light in a cloud of ultracold atoms. This discovery could help bring optical quantum computers from the realms of sci-fi to reality.

The experiment, published in a paper this week, was inspired by a computer stimulation run by lead researcher Jesse Everett from the Australian National University. The researchers used a vaporized cloud of ultracold rubidium atoms to create a light trap, into which they shone infrared lasers. The light trap constantly emitted and re-captured the light.

Continue reading “Jedi scientists freeze light in midair to bring quantum computers a step closer to reality” »

A new system called HeroSurg, developed by researchers at Deakin and Harvard Universities, is set to increase what surgeons can achieve via robotic surgery, using a haptic feedback system to provide a sense of touch. It also brings other improvements over existing tech, such as collision avoidance, to make robotic surgery safer and more accurate.

Robotic surgery, wherein human-controlled robots perform delicate surgical tasks, has been around for a while. One great example of the tech is the da Vinci robotic surgical system from Intuitive Surgical – a setup made up of numerous robotic arms, a console to operate the instruments, and an imaging system that shows the surgeon what’s happening in real time. In 2008, Professor Suren Krishnan, a member of the team behind HeroSurg, became the first surgeon to perform ear, throat and nose operations using the da Vinci robotic surgical system.

Since then, we’ve seen numerous breakthroughs, including improvements to the original da Vinci system, and other robots emerging capable of achieving impressive tasks, such as performing surgery on a beating heart, or successfully stitching soft tissue.

Elon Musk spent two hours detailing his plan to bring humanity to Mars. We cut it down to less than 90 seconds. You’re welcome.

I’m on BBC World Service and some NPR stations over the next 6–10 hours talking politics and transhumanism with Prof. Lawrence Lessig and others. Jill Stein also on show. Give it a listen:

Why can’t a third party candidate become US president?

D-Wave Systems announced Tuesday (Sept. 28, 2016) a new 2000-qubit processor, doubling the number of qubits over the previous-generation D-Wave 2X system. The new system will enable larger problems to be solved and performance improvements of up to 1000 times.

D-Wave’s quantum system runs a quantum-annealing algorithm to find the lowest points in a virtual energy landscape representing a computational problem to be solved. The lowest points in the landscape correspond to optimal or near-optimal solutions to the problem. The increase in qubit count enables larger and more difficult problems to be solved, and the ability to tune the rate of annealing of individual qubits will enhance application performance.

Continue reading “D-Wave Systems previews 2000-qubit quantum processor” »