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Category: quantum physics

Definitely could see QC being Blackberry’s achilles heal.

WATERLOO — Advances in quantum computing could present a huge challenge to BlackBerry’s biggest competitive advantage — its vaunted security software that has never been hacked.

This seldom talked-about subject was raised recently by John Thompson, the associate vice-president for research at the University of Waterloo. Thompson was listening to a presentation by Mike Wilson, a senior vice-president and chief evangelist for BlackBerry, at a medical technology conference in Kitchener about a month ago.

Both quantum computing and BlackBerry have deep roots in Waterloo. BlackBerry pioneered the smartphone industry and the wireless Internet from its suburban office parks in Waterloo.

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Awesome!

What if industrial waste water could become fuel? With affordable, long-lasting catalysts, water could be split to produce hydrogen that could be used to power fuel cells or combustion engines.

By conducting complex simulations, scientists showed that adding lithium to aluminum nanoparticles results in orders-of-magnitude faster water-splitting reactions and higher hydrogen production rates compared to pure aluminum nanoparticles. The lithium allowed all the aluminum atoms to react, which increased yields (Nano Letters, “Hydrogen-on-demand using metallic alloy nanoparticles in water”).

quantum molecular dynamics simulation of the production of hydrogen molecules

A snapshot from a large quantum molecular dynamics simulation of the production of hydrogen molecules (green) from an aluminum-lithium alloy nanoparticle containing 16,661 atoms (represented by the silver contour of charge density) and dissolved charged lithium atoms (red). For clarity, the water molecules were removed from the snapshot. Simulations were carried out at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.

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Great that they didn’t have to use a super computer to do their prescribed, lab controlled experiments. However, to limit QC to a super computer and experimental computations only is a big mistake; I cannot stress this enough. QC is a new digital infrastructure that changes our communications, cyber security, and will eventually (in the years to come) provide consumers/ businesses/ and governments with the performance they will need for AI, Biocomputing, and Singularity.

A group of physicists from the Skobeltsyn Institute of Nuclear Physics, the Lomonosov Moscow State University, has learned to use personal computer for calculations of complex equations of quantum mechanics, usually solved with help of supercomputers. This PC does the job much faster. An article about the results of the work has been published in the journal Computer Physics Communications.

Senior researchers Vladimir Pomerantcev and Olga Rubtsova, working under the guidance of Professor Vladimir Kukulin (SINP MSU) were able to use on an ordinary desktop PC with GPU to solve complicated integral equations of quantum mechanics — previously solved only with the powerful, expensive supercomputers. According to Vladimir Kukulin, personal computer does the job much faster: in 15 minutes it is doing the work requiring normally 2–3 days of the supercomputer time.

The equations in question were formulated in the 60s by the Russian mathematician Ludwig Faddeev. The equations describe the scattering of a few quantum particles, i.e., represent a quantum mechanical analog of the Newtonian theory of the three body systems. As the result, the whole field of quantum mechanics called “physics of few-body systems” appeared soon after this.

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We’re on a roll with QC.

The era of quantum computers is one step closer as a result of research published in the current issue of the journal Science. The research team has devised and demonstrated a new way to pack a lot more quantum computing power into a much smaller space and with much greater control than ever before. The research advance, using a 3-dimensional array of atoms in quantum states called quantum bits—or qubits—was made by David S. Weiss, professor of physics at Penn State University, and three students on his lab team. He said “Our result is one of the many important developments that still are needed on the way to achieving quantum computers that will be useful for doing computations that are impossible to do today, with applications in cryptography for electronic data security and other computing-intensive fields.”

The new technique uses both laser light and microwaves to precisely control the switching of selected individual qubits from one quantum state to another without altering the states of the other atoms in the cubic array. The new technique demonstrates the potential use of atoms as the building blocks of circuits in future quantum computers.

The scientists invented an innovative way to arrange and precisely control the qubits, which are necessary for doing calculations in a quantum computer. “Our paper demonstrates that this novel approach is a precise, accurate, and efficient way to control large ensembles of qubits for quantum computing,” Weiss said.

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We now have a way to do tracibility in QC.

Shutterstock.

Chinese scientists won a major victory recently, by proving that the Majorana fermion — a particle we’ve found tantalizing hints of for years — genuinely exists. This discovery has huge implications for quantum computing, and it might change the world. But how?

A Majorana fermion is weird even by the standards of quantum physics. If you remember your high school physics, you remember that atomic particles like protons and electrons have a charge, positive or negative. The Majorana fermion, however, doesn’t have a charge, which allows it to be matter and anti-matter at the same time. Yes, that is incredibly confusing, even to quantum physicists, and they’re still arguing over how that even works.

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This video is worthless. I hear a person who is out of touch with the QC work and isn’t even aware all of the work going on. Frankly, QC is being worked on by big tech (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, D-Wave, IBM), governmental labs and incubators, limited set of start ups who are also (in many cases tied to big tech), and university research labs. Therefore, I don’t really find this soapbox video that informative as well as not in touch with where QC is today. It appears to me that this guy has sour grapes over not being engaged.

At least if you’re going to get on a soapbox and try to talk about QC like you’re somehow an expert or informed; at least make sure you know what has been shown, reported, and in development currently that has been publically announced so that you don’t look like you’re an un-informed consultant doing a superficial presentation and didn’t even bother doing the due diligence 1st. Otherwise, you just discredited your VC/ firm to the public and to those working on QC.

watch time: 28 minutes

One of the key insights that legendary physicist and Nobel Prize laureate Richard Feynman had was that quantum mechanics (the branch of physics that deals with subatomic particles, uncertainty principle, and many other concepts beyond classic physics) is just way too complicated to simulate using traditional computers.

Nature, of course, can handle these complex calculations — computers however can’t do those same calculations (or would take a prohibitively long time and amount of resources to do so). But this isn’t just about being able to do more with computers in a faster (or smaller) way: It’s about solving problems that we couldn’t solve with traditional computers; it’s about a difference of kind not just degree.

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Nice.

Quantum computing makes small, but significant progress.

A high-energy physics experiment has been completed using a simple quantum device that, if scaled up, could potentially greatly outperform a conventional computer.

Physicists from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the Austrian Academy of Sciences have used the quantum computer to simulate the spontaneous creation of particle-antiparticle pairs.

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The craving to explore beyond our solar system grows sturdier every day. This proves true for the understanding of wormholes and time travel as well. In order to satisfy our thirst for the unknown, NASA will research unknown physics revolutionizing exploration of space. We first have to advance our understanding of space-time, the quantum vacuum, gravity and other physical phenomena. This info will help NASA send robots on interstellar space missions. Precisely 15 areas will be studied comprising human exploration, landing systems, nanotechnology and robots.

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