Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2019

Light is the most energy-efficient way of moving information. Yet, light shows one big limitation: it is difficult to store. As a matter of fact, data centers rely primarily on magnetic hard drives. However, in these hard drives, information is transferred at an energy cost that is nowadays exploding. Researchers of the Institute of Photonic Integration of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) have developed a ‘hybrid technology’ which shows the advantages of both light and magnetic hard drives.

Ultra-short (femtosecond) light pulses allows data to be directly written in a magnetic memory in a fast and highly energy-efficient way. Moreover, as soon as the information is written (and stored), it moves forward leaving space to empty memory domains to be filled in with new data. This research, published in Nature Communications, promises to revolutionize the process of data storage in future photonic integrated circuits.

Continue reading “Next generation photonic memory devices are ‘light-written,’ ultrafast and energy efficient” »

Circa 2015 This is basically amazing leading to speeds in a computer basically infinite.

Quantum gases of atoms and exciton-polaritons are nowadays a well established theoretical and experimental tool for fundamental studies of quantum many-body physics and suggest promising applications to quantum computing. Given their technological complexity, it is of paramount interest to devise other systems where such quantum many-body physics can be investigated at a lesser technological expense. Here we examine a relatively well-known system of laser light propagating through thermo-optical defocusing media: based on a hydrodynamical description of light as a quantum fluid of interacting photons, we investigate such systems as a valid, room temperature alternative to atomic or exciton-polariton condensates for studies of many-body physics.

Quantum computers are promising computing machines that perform computations leveraging the collective properties of quantum physics states. These computers could help to tackle many computational problems that are currently intractable with conventional computers.

Despite their promise, fabricating quantum computers on a large-scale is currently very challenging, as a full-scale quantum computer integrates millions of qubits. To ensure that they can be produced using industrial semiconductor manufacturing processes, quantum device engineers have been trying to create quantum computers based on silicon quantum dots.

Nonetheless, existing quantum computers have been primarily fabricated using electron-beam lithography and conventional lift-off processes. This greatly limits their production rates, as both these processes only yield a few properly functioning devices at a time.

Labeling data can be a chore. It’s the main source of sustenance for computer-vision models; without it, they’d have a lot of difficulty identifying objects, people, and other important image characteristics. Yet producing just an hour of tagged and labeled data can take a whopping 800 hours of human time. Our high-fidelity understanding of the world develops as machines can better perceive and interact with our surroundings. But they need more help.

Scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Microsoft, and Cornell University have attempted to solve this problem plaguing vision models by creating “STEGO,” an algorithm that can jointly discover and segment objects without any human labels at all, down to the pixel.

Continue reading “Scientists create algorithm to assign a label to every pixel in the world, without human supervision” »

Polaritons are quasiparticles that are formed when photons couple strongly with excitations of matter. These quasi-particles, which are half-light and half-matter, underpin the functioning of a wide range of emergent photonic quantum systems, including semiconductor-based nanophotonic devices and circuit quantum electrodynamic systems.

Researchers at Stony Brook University have recently introduced a novel polariton system in which the matter excitation is replaced by an atom in an optical lattice and the photon by an atomic matter wave. This system, introduced in a paper published in Nature Physics, results in matter-wave polaritons, and could open interesting possibilities for the study of polaritonic quantum matter.

“A few years ago, we became interested in the idea of using ultracold atoms to simulate the dynamical behavior of quantum emitters,” Dr. Dominik Schneble, head of the team of researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “It turns out that it is possible to build an artificial atom that spontaneously emits matter waves, in much the same way as an atom spontaneously emits a photon (as described by the so-called Weisskopf-Wigner model).”

Thoughts, memories, sensations — why are we still in the dark about how they work?

The Aptera solar car is expected to hit roads in 2021, but even if it’s not the next big thing in transportation, its design elements could be.

Josh SeehermanI don’t think he’s wrong.

Walter Lynsdale” agreeing with a Twitter user who said the “Woke mind virus is the biggest threat to civilization,”

Continue reading “The art of Aphantasia: How ‘mind blind’ artists create without being able to visualise” »

This menagerie includes three spiral-shaped galaxies, an elliptical galaxy, and a lenticular (lens-like) galaxy. Somehow, these different galaxies crossed paths in their evolution to create an exceptionally crowded and eclectic galaxy sampler.

Caught in a leisurely gravitational dance, the whole group is so crowded that it could fit within a region of space that is less than twice the diameter of our Milky Way.

Continue reading “Celebrating Hubble’s 32nd Birthday: A Magnificent View of an Unusual Collection of Five Galaxies” »