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Category: quantum physics

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.

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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.

“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.”

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D-Wave 2000-qubit processor (credit: D-Wave Systems)

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.

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Hmmm; like the graphic reminds of one of my posts.

In Brief.

  • Quantum computers would run some 100 million times faster than your PC, but they have proven to be a monumental feat of engineering.
  • In a new experiment, physicists managed to stop light, which helps us overcome challenges and brings us close to optical quantum computing.

A team of researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) may have found another work-around to bring us closer to quantum computing: The physicists have managed to find a new way to stop light.

Light was trapped by shining infrared lasers into ultra-cold atomic vapor. While the atoms absorbed some photons, a large amount were left in a frozen state in the atomic cloud — enhancing photon interaction with atoms or other photons.

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Nice article; however, not sure if the author is aware Los Alamos already has a quantum net as well as some Europe banks have the capabilities and 4 months ago it was announced that a joint effort by various countries from Europe, Asia, etc. have come together to re-engineer the Net infrastructure with QC technology…

Maybe the quantum will giveth what the quantum taketh away… at least when it comes to secure transmissions.

There’s been much speculation that emerging quantum computers will become capable of breaking advanced public key cryptography systems, such as 2048-bit RSA. This might leave encrypted data transmissions exposed to anyone who happens to own such a quantum computer.

According to a recent report by the Global Risk Institute (GRI):

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Whether for use in safe data encryption, ultrafast calculation of huge data volumes or so-called quantum simulation of highly complex systems: Optical quantum computers are a source of hope for tomorrow’s computer technology. For the first time, scientists now have succeeded in placing a complete quantum optical structure on a chip, as outlined Nature Photonics. This fulfills one condition for the use of photonic circuits in optical quantum computers.

“Experiments investigating the applicability of optical quantum technology so far have often claimed whole laboratory spaces,” explains Professor Ralph Krupke of the KIT. “However, if this technology is to be employed meaningfully, it must be accommodated on a minimum of space.” Participants in the study were scientists from Germany, Poland, and Russia under the leadership of Professors Wolfram Pernice of the Westphalian Wilhelm University of Münster (WWU) and Ralph Krupke, Manfred Kappes, and Carsten Rockstuhl of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

The light source for the quantum photonic circuit used by the scientists for the first time were special nanotubes made of carbon. They have a diameter 100,000 times smaller than a human hair, and they emit single light particles when excited by laser light. Light particles (photons) are also referred to as light quanta. Hence the term “quantum photonics.”

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This doesn’t surprise me at all given how we can leverage synthetic diamonds and their crystal formations for light networks, QC, and now storage.

Nuclear spins in diamond can store photonic information with high fidelity and have coherence times that exceed 10s, making diamond potentially useful as a node in quantum communications.

Quantum communications offer secure and fast information exchange between distant parties. To realize these links requires the building of quantum networks that incorporate stationary quantum nodes separated by large distances and photons (information carriers), which establish entanglement between the nodes1 (see Figure 1). Because such networks suffer unavoidable photon losses, enabling robust quantum communication over lossy transmission channels requires quantum memories with long coherence times to reliably store the incident photon states at any given node on the network.2 Hence, a quantum node should have the ability to coherently absorb/emit and store the information encoded in the photon state onto a memory element that has very long coherence times.

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The University of Rochester has begun work on what they call a Quantum Enigma Machine. This new machine is said to be responsible for unbreakable encryption. It will also shorten encryption keys, and make data interception much more difficult than it already is.

American Mathematician Claude Shannon came up with a binary system that would allow him to transmit messages under three stipulations: the key is random, only used once, and it has to be as long as the message itself is.

Recent studies show that scientists are theorizing that they could send a message with unbreakable encryption with a key that is much shorter than the message itself. Their theory may soon become fact as researchers have developed the quantum enigma machine.

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