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Category: quantum physics

Circa 2019

An international team of physicists have created what they’re calling the world’s smallest engine. How small is it? The entire engine is a single calcium ion, making it around 10 billion times smaller than a car engine.

The experimental engine was conceived by an international team led by Professor Ferdinand Schmidt-Kaler and Ulrich Poschinger of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. The engine is electrically charged, which makes it easy to trap using electric fields. The moving parts of the engine are the ion’s “intrinsic spin.” On an atomic level, spin is a measurement of an atom’s angular momentum.

Within the engine, spin is used to capture and convert heat absorbed from laser beams into oscillations, or vibrations, of the trapped ion. The vibrations act as a flywheel and its energy is placed into units called “quanta,” predicted by quantum mechanics.

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Quantum Computing Platform Accelerates Transition from Bulk Optics to Integrated Photonics on a Silicon Chip Smaller Than a Penny

The quantum computing market is projected to reach $65 billion by 2,030 a hot topic for investors and scientists alike because of its potential to solve incomprehensibly complex problems.

Drug discovery is one example. To understand drug interactions, a pharmaceutical company might want to simulate the interaction of two molecules. The challenge is that each molecule is composed of a few hundred atoms, and scientists must model all the ways in which these atoms might array themselves when their respective molecules are introduced. The number of possible configurations is infinite—more than the number of atoms in the entire universe. Only a quantum computer can represent, much less solve, such an expansive, dynamic data problem.

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Physicists and engineers have found a way to identify and address imperfections in materials for one of the most promising technologies in commercial quantum computing.

The University of Queensland team was able to develop treatments and optimize protocols in common techniques for building on silicon chips.

Dr. Peter Jacobson, who co-led the research, said the team had identified that imperfections introduced during fabrication reduced the effectiveness of the .

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Integrated Information Theory is one of the leading models of consciousness. It aims to describe both the quality and quantity of the conscious experience of a physical system, such as the brain, in a particular state. In this contribution, we propound the mathematical structure of the theory, separating the essentials from auxiliary formal tools. We provide a definition of a generalized IIT which has IIT 3.0 of Tononi et al., as well as the Quantum IIT introduced by Zanardi et al. as special cases. This provides an axiomatic definition of the theory which may serve as the starting point for future formal investigations and as an introduction suitable for researchers with a formal background.

Integrated Information Theory (IIT), developed by Giulio Tononi and collaborators [5, 45–47], has emerged as one of the leading scientific theories of consciousness. At the heart of the latest version of the theory [19, 25 26, 31 40] is an algorithm which, based on the level of integration of the internal functional relationships of a physical system in a given state, aims to determine both the quality and quantity (‘Φ value’) of its conscious experience.

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Quantum mechanics generally refers to the wave-like properties of things that are commonly considered to be particles, such as electrons. This article discusses evidence of a quantum mechanical switching function that is performed by strictly biological structures—ferritin protein layers that are found in cells including neural tissue.

Many scientists are investigating quantum biology, which is the application of quantum mechanics to investigate biological functions. It has recently been used to answer a number of previously unanswered questions, such as the mechanisms behind photosynthesis and the way birds can perceive magnetic fields. These quantum biological effects generally involve electrons hopping or tunneling over distances of several nanometers, behavior that is incompatible with particles but which makes sense with waves.

Ferritin is a spherical iron storage protein that is found in plants and animals. Early studies of ferritin to look for quantum mechanical effects were conducted at cryogenic temperatures, because it was thought that biological structures were too “warm and wet” to exhibit such effects. Those studies were somewhat inconclusive. But when ferritin was subsequently electrically tested at room temperature, it was discovered that electron tunneling was occurring.

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Based on a multi-SIMD quantum processor architecture.

A team of researchers with AMD have filed a patent application that looks toward a more efficient and reliable quantum computing architecture, thanks to a conventional multi-SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) approach.

According to the application, AMD is researching a system that aims to use quantum teleportation to increase a quantum system’s reliability, while simultaneously reducing the number of qubits necessary for a given calculation. The aim is to both alleviate scaling problems and calculation errors stemming from system instability.

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LSU Quantum researchers rearrange photon distribution to create different light sources.

For decades, scholars have believed that the quantum statistical properties of bosons are preserved in plasmonic systems, and therefore will not create different form of light.

This rapidly growing field of research focuses on quantum properties of light and its interaction with matter at the nanoscale level. Stimulated by experimental work in the possibility of preserving nonclassical correlations in light-matter interactions mediated by scattering of photons and plasmons, it has been assumed that similar dynamics underlie the conservation of the quantum fluctuations that define the nature of light sources. The possibility of using nanoscale system to create exotic forms of light could pave the way for next-generation quantum devices. It could also constitute a novel platform for exploring novel quantum phenomena.

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New research by Surrey’s Nuclear Physics Group has shown that it’s possible to mimic excited quantum states with exotic nuclei, opening up a host of opportunities for next generation radioactive beam facilities, such as the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB).

The results of the project – which was a collaboration between the University of Surrey and Michigan State University, USA – were published in Physical Review Letters in January 2021. The lead author was Surrey PhD student Samuel Hallam, who also studied for his undergraduate physics degree at Surrey.

One of the biggest challenges in nuclear physics is measuring reactions that occur on excited quantum states, such as are found in exploding stars due to extreme temperature and density. Until now, physicists have had to determine the rates at which nuclear reactions occur in these conditions through theoretical estimates.

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Ultrafast electron microscope in Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials. Credit: Argonne National Laboratory.

Ultrafast electron microscope opens up new avenues for the development of sensors and quantum devices.

Everyone who has ever been to the Grand Canyon can relate to having strong feelings from being close to one of nature’s edges. Similarly, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have discovered that nanoparticles of gold act unusually when close to the edge of a one-atom.

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Researchers have created a scalable quantum computing platform that has been shrunk down to the size of a penny, which would serve as the basis for a quantum computer that can achieve quantum speeds while using far fewer devices than current designs.

The team hopes their research, published in Nature Communications, will help push quantum computing forward in the constant pursuit of use in real-world applications.

Over the past few years, quantum computing has gone from science fiction to a realistic technology that may see use in the next few decades. While quantum teleportation and even quantum computer chips have been demonstrated previously, the technology is still a long way off seeing real-world use.

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