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Category: particle physics

DNA is similar to a hard drive or storage device, in that contains the memory of each cell of every living, and has the instructions on how to make that cell. DNA is four molecules combined in any order to make a chain of one larger molecule. And if you can read that chain of four molecules, then you have a sequence of characters, like a digital code. Over the years the price of sequencing a human genome has dropped significantly, much to the delight of scientists. And since DNA is a sequence of four letters, and if we can manipulate DNA, we could insert a message and use DNA as the storage device.

At this point in time, we are at the height of the information age. And computers have had an enormous impact on all of our lives. Any information is able to be represented as a collection of bits. And with Moore’s law, which states that computing power doubles every 18 months, our ability to manipulate and store these bits has continued to grow and grow. Moore’s law has been driven by scientists being able to make transistors and integrated circuits continuously smaller and smaller, but there eventually comes a point we reach in which these transistors and integrated circuits cannot be made any smaller than they already are, since some are already at the size of a single atom. This inevitably leads us into the quantum world. Quantum mechanics has rules which are, in many ways, hard for us to truly comprehend, yet are nevertheless tested. Quantum computing looks to make use of these strange rules of quantum physics, and process information in a totally different way. Quantum computing looks to replace the classical bits which are either a 0 or a 1, with quantum bits, or qubits, which can be both a 0 and a 1 at the same time. This ability to be two different things at the same time is referred to as a superposition. 200 qubits hold more bits of information than there are particles in the universe. A useful quantum computer will require thousands or even millions of physical qubits. Anything such as an atom can serve as a quantum bit for making a quantum computer, then you can use a superconducting circuit to build two artificial atoms. So at this point in time we have a few working quantum transistors, but scientists are working on developing the quantum integrated circuit. Quantum error correction is the biggest problem encountered in development of the quantum computer. Quantum computer science is a field that right now is in its very early stages, since scientists have yet been able to develop any quantum hardware.

A quantum computer would be perfect for tackling quantum problems like simulating the properties of a new molecule or material or help us to create a catalyst that will remove CO2 from the atmosphere, or make pattern recognition in computers much more efficient, and also in code breaking, and privacy and security of personal information since quantum information can never be copied.

A great deal of the energy we create has to go into maintaining computations and data storage but we can reduce our energy expenditure significantly by looking to nature. Nature is much more effective at information processing. For example, in the process of photo synthesis, there is a nanowire, who’s quantum efficiency is almost 100%. DNA is also a great example of energy efficiency represented in nature, since DNA base pairing can be considered a computational process. Computers generate heat by performing computations because each computation is irreversible. Quantum mechanics can make those computations reversible, since a quantum computer can perform two functions at the same time.

Science Documentary: Large Hadron Collider, Time, Galaxy Formation a Documentary on Particle Physics.

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Since you first started learning about the world, you’ve known that cause leads to effect. Everything that’s ever happened to or near you has reiterated this point, making it seem like a fundamental law of nature. It isn’t.

It is, in fact, possible for an event to occur before its causal factors have manifested or happened. This isn’t how appliances work — you don’t have to worry about will have having left the oven on — but it is how particle physics works. It’s also the key to explaining how time travel, under the laws of quantum physics, could operate.

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DARPA funds the Atoms-to-Products program that aims to maintain quantum nanoscale properties at the millimeter scale of microchips.

The main goal of the atoms-to-products program is to create technology and processes needed to create nanometer-scale pieces, with dimensions almost the size of atoms, into components and materials only millimeter scale in size. And to spur developments in the program DARPA has now posed the challenge to 10 laboratories across the nation.

To get the full benefits of nanoscale engineering at the millimeter scale, the organization has partnered with Intelligent Materials Solutions. “Our initial project will be to control infrared light by assembling nanoscale particles into finished components that are one million times larger,” explains Adam Gross, the team leader working closely with Christopher Roper to bring the Atoms-to Products project to fruition.

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Interesting, but older…

Two separate research groups, one of which is from MIT, have presented evidence that wormholes — tunnels that may allow us to travel through time and space — are “powered” by quantum entanglement. Furthermore, one of the research groups also postulates the reverse — that quantum entangled particles are connected by miniature wormholes.

A wormhole, or Einstein-Rosen bridge to give its formal name, is a hypothetical feature of spacetime that exists in four dimensions, and somehow connects to another wormhole that’s located elsewhere in both space and time. The theory, essentially, is that a wormhole is a tunnel that isn’t restricted by the normal limitations of 3D Cartesian space and the speed of light, allowing you to travel from one point in space and time, to another point in space and time — theoretically allowing you to traverse huge portions of the universe, and travel in time.

An illustration of a wormholeWormholes, though, have never been observed — and while we’ve done a lot of theorizing about how a wormhole might work, and how they fit into general relativity, we’re still talking in purely theoretical terms. We don’t even know if wormholes would be traversable. Those caveats aside, though, a ton of new research suggests that each end of the wormhole is connected through spacetime with quantum entanglement.

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If a time traveler went back in time and stopped their own grandparents from meeting, would they prevent their own birth?

That’s the crux of an infamous theory known as the ‘grandfather paradox’, which is often said to mean time travel is impossible — but some researchers think otherwise. A group of scientists have simulated how time-travelling photons might behave, suggesting that, at the quantum level, the grandfather paradox could be resolved.

The research was carried out by a team of researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia and their results are published in the journal Nature Communications. The study used photons — single particles of light — to simulate quantum particles travelling back through time. By studying their behavior, the scientists revealed possible bizarre aspects of modern physics.

In the simulation, the researchers examined two possible outcomes for a time-travelling photon. In the simulation, the researchers examined the behavior of a photon traveling through time and interacting with its older self.

In their experiment they made use of the closely related, fictitious, case where the photon travels through normal space-time and interacts with another photon that is stuck in a time-travelling loop through a wormhole, known as a closed timelike curve (CTC).

Simulating the behavior of this second photon, they were able to study the behavior of the first — and the results show that consistent evolution can be achieved when preparing the second photon in just the right way. By definition ‘quantum’ refers to the smallest possible particles that can independently exist — such as photons.

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A research group at Osaka University has succeeded in observing at the intended timing two-phonon quantum interference by using two cold calcium ions in ion traps, which spatially confine charged particles. A phonon is a unit of vibrational energy that arises from oscillating particles within crystals. Two-particle quantum interference experiments using two photons or atoms have been previously reported, but this group’s achievement is the world’s first observation using two phonons.

This group demonstrated that the phonon, a quantum mechanical description of an elementary vibrational motion in matter, and the photon, an elementary particle of light, share common properties. This group’s research results will contribute to quantum information processing research, including quantum simulation using and quantum interface research.

Ion traps are an important technique in physically achieving quantum information processing including quantum computation, and research on ion traps is being carried out all over the world, with Dr. David J. Wineland of the United States, a leading expert in the field, winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2012.

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Graphene is a super strong, two-dimensional material with atom-thick layers. But now, a team of scientists have developed a new material with a similar structure that they’re calling borophene, and it may have graphene beat.

Borophene, a one atom thick sheet of boron, is being introduced by scientists as the next big thing after graphene, another two-dimensional material that made headlines back in 2004. If you aren’t aware, graphene is basically a supermaterial. A single layer of this is about 100 times stronger than steel and it is extremely flexible.

Now, according to research that was published in the journal Nature, borophene’s properties could potentially exceed those of graphene and other, similar materials in the 2D nanomaterial family.

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‘In a nice piece of “spin-off science” from this technological achievement, we were able to perform a “Bell test”, by first using the high-precision logic gate to generate an entangled state of the two different-species ions, then manipulating and measuring them independently. This is a test which probes the non-local nature of quantum mechanics; that is, the fact that an entangled state of two separated particles has properties that cannot be mimicked by a classical system. This was the first time such a test had been performed on two different species of atom separated by many times the atomic size.’

While Professor Lucas cautions that the so-called ‘locality loophole’ is still present in this experiment, there is no doubt the work is an important contribution to the growing body of research exploring the physics of entanglement. He says: ‘The significance of the work for trapped-ion quantum computing is that we show that quantum logic gates between different isotopic species are possible, can be driven by a relatively simple laser system, and can work with precision beyond the so-called “fault-tolerant threshold” precision of approximately 99% — the precision necessary to implement the techniques of quantum error correction, without which a quantum computer of useful size cannot be built.’

In the long term, it is likely that different atomic elements will be required, rather than different isotopes. In closely related work published in the same issue of Nature, by Ting Rei Tan et al, the NIST Ion Storage group has demonstrated a different type of quantum logic gate using ions of two different elements (beryllium and magnesium).

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