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Category: quantum physics

Laura Hiscott reviews Quantum Technology | Our Sustainable Future by The Quantum Daily.

How could quantum computing help us to fix climate change? This is the question at the heart of Quantum Technology | Our Sustainable Future, a half-hour-long documentary published on YouTube in July.

Made by “The Quantum Daily”, a resource for news and information on all things quantum, the documentary consists of interviews with people working in a host of organizations in the sector, from Oxford Instruments NanoScience to Google Quantum AI. The main idea is that, since quantum computers have the potential to be much more powerful than classical ones, they could speed up the discovery of solutions, such as molecules that would be very effective at carbon capture.

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The infamous twin paradox sends the astronaut Alice on a blazing-fast space voyage. When she returns to reunite with her twin, Bob, she finds that he has aged much faster than she has. It’s a well-known but perplexing result: Time slows if you’re moving fast.

Gravity does the same thing. Earth — or any massive body — warps space-time in a way that slows time, according to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. If Alice lived her life at sea level and Bob at the top of Everest, where Earth’s gravitational pull is slightly weaker, he would again age faster. The difference on Earth is modest but real — it’s been measured by putting atomic clocks on mountaintops and valley floors and measuring the difference between the two.

Physicists have now managed to measure this difference to the millimeter. In a paper posted earlier this month to the scientific preprint server arxiv.org, researchers from the lab of Jun Ye, a physicist at JILA in Boulder, Colorado, measured the difference in the flow of time between the top and the bottom of a millimeter-tall cloud of atoms.

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Don’t let the titanium metal walls or the sapphire windows fool you. It’s what’s on the inside of this small, curious device that could someday kick off a new era of navigation.

For over a year, the avocado-sized vacuum chamber has contained a cloud of atoms at the right conditions for precise navigational measurements. It is the first device that is small, energy-efficient and reliable enough to potentially move quantum sensors—sensors that use quantum mechanics to outperform conventional technologies—from the lab into commercial use, said Sandia National Laboratories scientist Peter Schwindt.

Sandia developed the chamber as a core technology for future that don’t rely on GPS satellites, he said. It was described earlier this year in the journal AVS Quantum Science.

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The strategy outlines how AI can be applied to defence and security in a protected and ethical way. As such, it sets standards of responsible use of AI technologies, in accordance with international law and NATO’s values. It also addresses the threats posed by the use of AI by adversaries and how to establish trusted cooperation with the innovation community on AI.

Artificial Intelligence is one of the seven technological areas which NATO Allies have prioritized for their relevance to defence and security. These include quantum-enabled technologies, data and computing, autonomy, biotechnology and human enhancements, hypersonic technologies, and space. Of all these dual-use technologies, Artificial Intelligence is known to be the most pervasive, especially when combined with others like big data, autonomy, or biotechnology. To address this complex challenge, NATO Defence Ministers also approved NATO’s first policy on data exploitation.

Individual strategies will be developed for all priority areas, following the same ethical approach as that adopted for Artificial Intelligence.

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Earlier this month D-Wave Systems, the quantum computing pioneer that has long championed quantum annealing-based quantum computing (and sometimes taken heat for that approach), announced it was expanding into gate-based quantum computing.

Surprised? Perhaps we shouldn’t be. Spun out of the University of British Columbia in 1,999 D-Wave initially targeted gate-based quantum computing and discovered how hard it would be to develop. The company strategy morphed early on.

“I joined in 2005 when the company was first transitioning from a gate-model focus to quantum annealing focus,” recalled Mark Johnson, now vice president of quantum technologies and systems products. “There was still this picture that we wanted to find the most direct path to providing valuable quantum applications and we felt that quantum annealing was the was the way to do that. We felt the gate model was maybe 20 years away.”

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When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down experiments at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory early last year, Shambhu Ghimire’s research group was forced to find another way to study an intriguing research target: quantum materials known as topological insulators, or TIs, which conduct electric current on their surfaces but not through their interiors.

Denitsa Baykusheva, a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellow, had joined his group at the Stanford PULSE Institute two years earlier with the goal of finding a way to generate high harmonic generation, or HHG, in these materials as a tool for probing their behavior. In HHG, shining through a material shifts to higher energies and higher frequencies, called harmonics, much like pressing on a guitar string produces higher notes. If this could be done in TIs, which are promising building blocks for technologies like spintronics, quantum sensing and quantum computing, it would give scientists a new tool for investigating these and other quantum materials.

With the experiment shut down midway, she and her colleagues turned to theory and computer simulations to come up with a new recipe for generating HHG in topological insulators. The results suggested that circularly polarized light, which spirals along the direction of the laser beam, would produce clear, unique signals from both the conductive surfaces and the interior of the TI they were studying, bismuth selenide—and would in fact enhance the signal coming from the surfaces.

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Light offers an irreplaceable way to interact with our universe. It can travel across galactic distances and collide with our atmosphere, creating a shower of particles that tell a story of past astronomical events. Here on earth, controlling light lets us send data from one side of the planet to the other.

Given its broad utility, it’s no surprise that light plays a critical role in enabling 21st century quantum information applications. For example, scientists use to precisely control atoms, turning them into ultra-sensitive measures of time, acceleration, and even gravity. Currently, such early quantum technology is limited by size—state-of-the-art systems would not fit on a dining room table, let alone a chip. For practical use, scientists and engineers need to miniaturize , which requires re-thinking certain components for harnessing light.

Now IQUIST member Gaurav Bahl and his research group have designed a simple, compact photonic circuit that uses to rein in light. The new study, published in the October 21 issue of the journal Nature Photonics, demonstrates a powerful way to isolate, or control the directionality of light. The team’s measurements show that their approach to isolation currently outperforms all previous on-chip alternatives and is optimized for compatibility with atom-based sensors.

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In a wide-ranging interview at the WSJ Tech Live conference that touched on topics like the future of remote work, AI innovation, employee activism and even misinformation on YouTube, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai also shared his thoughts on the state of tech innovation in the U.S. and the need for new regulations. Specifically, Pichai argued for the creation of a federal privacy standard in the U.S., similar to the GDPR in Europe. He also suggested it was important for the U.S. to stay ahead in areas like AI, quantum computing and cybersecurity, particularly as China’s tech ecosystem further separates itself from Western markets.

In recent months, China has been undergoing a tech crackdown, which has included a number of new regulations designed to combat tech monopolies, limit customer data collection and create new rules around data security, among other things. Although many major U.S. tech companies, Google included, don’t provide their core services in China, some who did are now exiting — like Microsoft, which just this month announced its plan to pull LinkedIn from the Chinese market.

Pichai said this sort of decoupling of Western tech from China may become more common.

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