A team of researchers led by an Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) faculty member performed the first-ever simulation of baryons—fundamental quantum particles—on a quantum computer.
With their results, the team has taken a step towards more complex quantum simulations that will allow scientists to study neutron stars, learn more about the earliest moments of the universe, and realize the revolutionary potential of quantum computers.
“This is an important step forward—it is the first simulation of baryons on a quantum computer ever,” Christine Muschik, an IQC faculty member, said. “Instead of smashing particles in an accelerator, a quantum computer may one day allow us to simulate these interactions that we use to study the origins of the universe and so much more.”
All known atomic nuclei and therefore almost all visible matter consists of protons and neutrons, yet many of the properties of these omnipresent natural building blocks remain unknown. As an uncharged particle, the neutron in particular resists many types of measurement and 90 years after its discovery there are still many unanswered questions regarding its size and lifetime, among other things.
The neutron consists of three quarks which whirl around inside it, held together by gluons. Physicists use electromagnetic form factors to describe this dynamic inner structure of the neutron. These form factors represent an average distribution of electric charge and magnetization within the neutron and can be determined by means of experimentation.
Blank space on the form factor map filled with precise data.
When sound was first incorporated into movies in the 1920s, it opened up new possibilities for filmmakers such as music and spoken dialogue. Physicists may be on the verge of a similar revolution, thanks to a new device developed at Stanford University that promises to bring an audio dimension to previously silent quantum science experiments.
In particular, it could bring sound to a common quantum science setup known as an optical lattice, which uses a crisscrossing mesh of laser beams to arrange atoms in an orderly manner resembling a crystal. This tool is commonly used to study the fundamental characteristics of solids and other phases of matter that have repeating geometries. A shortcoming of these lattices, however, is that they are silent.
“Without sound or vibration, we miss a crucial degree of freedom that exists in real materials,” said Benjamin Lev, associate professor of applied physics and of physics, who set his sights on this issue when he first came to Stanford in 2011. “It’s like making soup and forgetting the salt; it really takes the flavor out of the quantum ‘soup.’”.
In a first for particle physics, the CMS collaboration has observed three J/ψ particles emerging from a single collision between two protons.
It’s a triple treat. By sifting through data from particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the CMS collaboration has seen not one, not two but three J/ψ particles emerging from a single collision between two protons. In addition to being a first for particle physics, the observation opens a new window into how quarks and gluons are distributed inside the proton.
The J/ψ particle is a special particle. It was the first particle containing a charm quark to be discovered, winning Burton Richter and Samuel Ting a Nobel prize in physics and helping to establish the quark model of composite particles called hadrons.
A new phase of matter, thought to be understandable only using quantum physics, can be studied with far simpler classical methods.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge used computer modeling to study potential new phases of matter known as prethermal discrete time crystals (DTCs). It was thought that the properties of prethermal DTCs were reliant on quantum physics: the strange laws ruling particles at the subatomic scale. However, the researchers found that a simpler approach, based on classical physics, can be used to understand these mysterious phenomena.
Understanding these new phases of matter is a step forward towards the control of complex many-body systems, a long-standing goal with various potential applications, such as simulations of complex quantum networks. The results are reported in two joint papers in Physical Review Letters and Physical Review B.
A new analytical technique is able to provide hitherto unattainable insights into the extremely rapid dynamics of biomolecules. The team of developers, led by Abbas Ourmazd from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and Robin Santra from DESY
Commonly abbreviated as DESY, the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (English German Electron Synchrotron) is a national research center in Germany that operates particle accelerators used to investigate the structure of matter. It is a member of the Helmholtz Association and operates at sites in Hamburg and Zeuthen.
The Parker Solar Probe is an engineering marvel, designed by NASA to “touch the sun” and reveal some of the star’s most closely guarded secrets. The scorch-proof craft, launched by NASA in August 2,018 has been slowly sidling up to our solar system’s blazing inferno for the past three years, studying its magnetic fields and particle physics along the way. It’s been a successful journey, and the probe has been racking up speed records. In 2,020 it became the fastest human-made object ever built.
But Parker is learning a lesson about the consequences of its great speed: constant bombardment by space dust.
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Have you ever seen the popular movie called The Matrix? In it, the main character Neo realizes that he and everyone else he had ever known had been living in a computer-simulated reality. But even after taking the red pill and waking up from his virtual world, how can he be so sure that this new reality is the real one? Could it be that this new reality of his is also a simulation? In fact, how can anyone tell the difference between simulated reality and a non-simulated one? The short answer is, we cannot. Today we are looking at the simulation hypothesis which suggests that we all might be living in a simulation designed by an advanced civilization with computing power far superior to ours.
The simulation hypothesis was popularized by Nick Bostrum, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, in 2003. He proposed that members of an advanced civilization with enormous computing power may run simulations of their ancestors. Perhaps to learn about their culture and history. If this is the case he reasoned, then they may have run many simulations making a vast majority of minds simulated rather than original. So, there is a high chance that you and everyone you know might be just a simulation. Do not buy it? There is more!
According to Elon Musk, if we look at games just a few decades ago like Pong, it consisted of only two rectangles and a dot. But today, games have become very realistic with 3D modeling and are only improving further. So, with virtual reality and other advancements, it seems likely that we will be able to simulate every detail of our minds and bodies very accurately in a few thousand years if we don’t go extinct by then. So games will become indistinguishable from reality with an enormous number of these games. And if this is the case he argues, “then the odds that we are in base reality are 1 in billions”.
There are other reasons to think we might be in a simulation. For example, the more we learn about the universe, the more it appears to be based on mathematical laws. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT argues that our universe is exactly like a computer game which is defined by mathematical laws. So for him, we may be just characters in a computer game discovering the rules of our own universe.
With our current understanding of the universe, it seems impossible to simulate the entire universe given a potentially infinite number of things within it. But would we even need to? All we need to simulate is the actual minds that are occupying the simulated reality and their immediate surroundings. For example, when playing a game, new environments render as the player approaches them. There is no need for those environments to exist prior to the character approaching them since this can save a lot of computing power. This can be especially true of simulations that are as big as our universe. So, it could be argued that distant galaxies, atoms, and anything that we are actively not observing simply does not exist. These things render into existence once someone starts to observe them.
On his podcast StarTalk, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice discussed the simulation hypothesis. Nice suggested that maybe there is a finite limit to the speed of light because if there wasn’t, we would be able to reach other galaxies very quickly. Tyson was surprised by this statement and further added that the programmer put in this limit to make sure we cannot get too far away places before the programmer has the time to program them.
Studying The Atoms Of Perception, Memory, Behavior and Consciousness — Dr. Christof Koch, Ph.D. — Chief Scientist, MindScope Program, Allen Institute.
Dr. Christof Koch, Ph.D. (https://alleninstitute.org/what-we-do/brain-science/about/team/staff-profiles/christof-koch/) is Chief Scientist of the MindScope Program at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, originally funded by a donation of more than $500 million from Microsoft founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen.
With his B.S. and M.S. in physics from the University of Tübingen in Germany and his Ph.D. from the Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Dr. Koch spent four years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT, and from 1987 until 2,013 was a professor at Caltech, from his initial appointment as Assistant Professor, Division of Biology and Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, to his final position as Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive & Behavioral Biology.
Dr. Koch joined the Allen Institute for Brain Science as Chief Scientific Officer in 2011 and became it’s President in 2015.
Dr. Koch’s passion are neurons, or what he refers to as the atoms of perception, memory, behavior and consciousness, including their diverse shapes, electrical behaviors, and their computational function within the mammalian brain, in particular in neocortex, and he leads the Allen Institute for Brain Science effort to identify all the different types of neurons in the brains of mice and humans – known as their cell census effort.
Dr. Koch’s writings and interests integrate theoretical, computational and experimental neuroscience with philosophy and contemporary trends, in particular artificial intelligence, and he has authored more than 300 scientific papers and multiple books including, The Feeling of Life Itself – Why Consciousness is Everywhere But Can’t be Computed, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, Biophysics of Computation: Information Processing in Single Neurons, and Methods in Neuronal Modeling: From Ions to Networks. He has also served as editor for several books on neural modeling and information processing.
Spintronic devices, a class of architectures that can store or transfer information by leveraging the intrinsic spin of electrons, have been found to be highly promising, both in terms of speed and efficiency. So far, however, the development of these devices has been hindered by the poor compatibility between semiconducting materials and ferromagnetic sources of spin, which underpin their operation.
In fact, while some semiconductors can generate electrical currents from transverse spin currents and vice versa, reliably controlling this spin-charge conversion has so far proved to be highly challenging. In recent years, some material scientists and engineers have thus been investigating the potential of fabricating spintronic devices using ferroelectric Rashba semiconductors, a class of materials with several advantageous properties, such as semiconductivity, large spin-orbit coupling and non-volatility.
A team of researchers at Politecnico di Milano, University Grenoble Alpes and other institutes worldwide have recently demonstrated the non-volatile control of the spin-to-charge conversion in germanium telluride, a known Rashba semiconductor, at room temperature. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, could have important implications for the future development of spintronic devices.
