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Category: quantum physics

Another reliable article on the Quantum Internet work.

You can’t sign up for the quantum internet just yet, but researchers have reported a major experimental milestone towards building a global quantum network — and it’s happening in space.

With a network that carries information in the properties of single particles, you can create secure keys for secret messaging and potentially connect powerful quantum computers in the future. But scientists think you will need equipment in space to get global reach.

Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the University of Strathclyde, UK, have become the first to test in orbit technology for satellite-based quantum network nodes.

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A quantum node device that might pave the way for a future space-based quantum Internet has been successfully tested for the first time aboard a small satellite.

The device, called SPEQS, has been developed by a team from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Glasgow-based University of Strathclyde. It contains technology for creation of the so-called correlated photons, which are a precursor for the better known entangled photons that communicate across large distances.

In an article published in the latest issue of the journal Physical Review Applied, the team led by NUS researcher Alexander Ling described first result of the experiment, which saw the SPEQS system reliably creating and measuring pairs of photons with correlated properties.

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Excellent story; glad that this bank in Australia is getting prepared for Quantum now instead of later which will be too late for some. Good news is that Wall Street as well as the US Government are getting educated on Quantum Computing. I do hope more and more businesses and institutions start developing their own internal QC expertise so that they are prepared for the switch that is coming across all industries.

The Commonwealth Bank’s decision to contribute millions of dollars to quantum computing research is not just about the significant commercial potential of the technology itself but also about developing its own in-house expertise in the area, according to chief information officer David Whiteing.

The bank last year committed to contributing $10 million over five years to UNSW’s Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T). That was in addition to $5 million it announced in December 2014 that it would put towards the centre.

(Telstra last year announced it would also invest $10 million in the centre. The government’s $1.1b Innovation Agenda included $26 million for UNSW’s quantum computing research efforts.)

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“Astronomy has been a tool of discovery since the dawn of civilization. For thousands of years, humans used the stars to navigate and find their place in the universe,” said physicist Eic Perlman on the Florida Institute of Technolgy in an post on NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory blog. “Astronomy made possible the travels of the ancient Polynesians across the Pacific Ocean as well as measurements of the Earth’s size and shape by the ancient Greeks. Today, astronomers search for hints about what the universe was like when the universe was much younger. So imagine, for a second, what life would be like – and how much less we would know about ourselves and the universe – if the microscopic nature of space-time made some of these measurements impossible.”

Our experience of space-time is that of a continuous object, without gaps or discontinuities, just as it is described by classical physics. For some quantum gravity models however, the texture of space-time is “granular” at tiny scales (below the so-called Planck scale, 10–33 cm), as if it were a variable mesh of solids and voids (or a complex foam). One of the great problems of physics today is to understand the passage from a continuous to a discrete description of spacetime: is there an abrupt change or is there gradual transition? Where does the change occur?

The separation between one world and the other creates problems for physicists: for example, how can we describe gravity — explained so well by classical physics — according to quantum mechanics? Quantum gravity is in fact a field of study in which no consolidated and shared theories exist as yet. There are, however, “scenarios”, which offer possible interpretations of quantum gravity subject to different constraints, and which await experimental confirmation or confutation.

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Scientists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (MPQ) have devised a new interferometer to probe the geometry of band structures.

The geometry and topology of electronic states in solids play a central role in a wide range of modern condensed-matter systems, including graphene and topological insulators. However, experimentally accessing this information has proven to be challenging, especially when the bands are not well isolated from one another. As reported by Tracy Li et al. in last week’s issue of Science (Science, May 27, 2016, DOI: 10.1126/science.aad5812), an international team of researchers led by Professor Immanuel Bloch and Dr. Ulrich Schneider at LMU Munich and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics has devised a straightforward method with which to probe band geometry using ultracold atoms in an optical lattice. Their method, which combines the controlled transport of atoms through the energy bands with atom interferometry, is an important step in the endeavor to investigate geometric and topological phenomena in synthetic band structures.

A wide array of fundamental issues in condensed-matter physics, such as why some materials are insulators while others are metals, can be understood simply by examining the energies of the material’s constituent electrons. Indeed, band theory, which describes these electron energies, was one of the earliest triumphs of quantum mechanics, and has driven many of the technological advances of our time, from the computer chips in our laptops to the liquid-crystal displays on our smartphones. We now know, however, that traditional band theory is incomplete.

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As the world is wary about cyber hackers in China, the next big thing for it is launching an experimental quantum communication satellite in July that was designed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), making it first of its kind.

Since quantum communications assure the highest level of security being hard to replicate or separate. Nor can it be reverse engineered as it involves a complex process employing quantum entanglement. Once it is successful, China can be sure that no one can crack into its security networks, making it impossible for any world power to snoop around.

Developed over the last five years, the quantum satellite will be launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center with four ground stations to track and facilitate communication. Moreover, it will have one space quantum teleportation experiment station, said a report prepared by CAS.

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(Phys.org)—Researchers have designed a quantum thermal transistor that can control heat currents, in analogy to the way in which an electronic transistor controls electric current. The thermal transistor could be used in applications that recycle waste heat that has been harvested from power stations and other energy systems. Currently, there are methods for transporting and guiding this heat, but not for controlling, amplifying, and switching the heat on and off, as the quantum thermal transistor can do.

The researchers, Karl Joulain et al., at the University of Poitiers and CNRS in France, have published a paper on the quantum thermal transistor in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

“To manage electricity, one uses electronic diodes, transistor and amplifiers,” Joulain told Phys.org. “We would like to do the same thing with thermal currents. We would like to make logical thermal circuits in the same way electronic thermal circuits have been designed. In this way, wasted heat could be guided, switched on or off, amplified or modulated.”

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