Tiny Dancer
Chakrabartty’s tunneling barrier was built in just such a way that “you can control the flow of electrons. You can make it reasonably slow, down to one electron every minute and still keep it reliable.”
The team is hoping the technology could one day power glucose or even brain activity monitors without the need for batteries.
By Christopher Sciacca
The first video games debuted in the1950s, later reaching mainstream popularity in the 1970s and 80s with arcades and home video systems like Atari and Commodore 64. Remember SpaceWar! and Pong? While limited by the capabilities of the hardware, they laid the foundation for the games we develop and play today, which by 2025 is expected to be a whopping $256 billion industry.
This history and the importance of these early video games was not lost on Qiskit’s James Wootton. In 2017, he created the world’s first video game for a quantum computer, Cat-Box-Scissors, based on Rock-Paper-Scissors. He continued creating other quantum games, in the process attracting quantum enthusiasts and video game developers who wanted to try something new. And soon, games incorporating quantum computing concepts will be available for anyone to play.
As our need for electronic gadgets and sensors grows, scientists are coming up with new ways to keep devices powered for longer on less energy.
The latest sensor to be invented in the lab can go for a whole year on a single burst of energy, aided by a physics phenomenon known as quantum tunnelling.
The tunnelling aspect means that with the help of a 50-million-electron jumpstart, this simple and inexpensive device (made up of just four capacitors and two transistors) can keep going for an extended period of time.
This discovery opens the door to topological quantum computing. Current quantum computing systems, where the elemental units of calculation are qubits that perform superfast calculations, require superconducting materials that only function in extremely cold conditions. Fluctuations in heat can throw one of these systems out of whack.
“The properties inherent to materials such as TaP could form the basis of future qubits,” says Nguyen. He envisions synthesizing TaP and other topological semimetals — a process involving the delicate cultivation of these crystalline structures — and then characterizing their structural and excitational properties with the help of neutron and X-ray beam technology, which probe these materials at the atomic level. This would enable him to identify and deploy the right materials for specific applications.
“My goal is to create programmable artificial structured topological materials, which can directly be applied as a quantum computer,” says Nguyen. “With infinitely better heat management, these quantum computing systems and devices could prove to be incredibly energy efficient.”
Some of the greatest medical discoveries of the 20th century came from physicists who switched careers and became biologists. Francis Crick, who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology and helped identify the structure of DNA, started his career as a physicist, as did Leo Szilard who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, writing the letter for Albert Einstein’s signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, but spent the last decades of his life doing pioneering work in biology, including the first cloning of a human cell.
Today, a group of world-renowned researchers at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics with expertise from cosmology to quantum gravity are using physics to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
Calculations show how theoretical ‘axionic strings’ could create odd behavior if produced in exotic materials in the lab.
A hypothetical particle that could solve one of the biggest puzzles in cosmology just got a little less mysterious. A RIKEN physicist and two colleagues have revealed the mathematical underpinnings that could explain how so-called axions might generate string-like entities that create a strange voltage in lab materials.
Axions were first proposed in the 1970s by physicists studying the theory of quantum chromodynamics, which describes how some elementary particles are held together within the atomic nucleus. The trouble was that this theory predicted some bizarre properties for known particles that are not observed. To fix this, physicists posited a new particle—later dubbed the axion, after a brand of laundry detergent, because it helped clean up a mess in the theory.
Not all scientific claims are equal. How can you tell if a discovery is real?
Extremely massive fundamental particles could exist, but they would seriously mess with our understanding of quantum mechanics.
Handedness—and the related concept of chirality—are double-sided ways of understanding how matter breaks symmetries.
Extreme quantum states.
A new mathematical framework helps physicists define the degree of quantumness of a system.
A researcher from The Australian National University (ANU) has used one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world to predict the quantum mechanical properties of large molecular systems with an accuracy that surpasses all previous experiments.
Calculations of this type have the potential to solve important problems in energy generation, fuel production, water purification, and the manufacturing of medicines, foods, textiles, and consumer goods.
By running his new algorithms on the Summit supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Lab in the U.S., Dr. Giuseppe Barca has broken the world record for the largest Hartree-Fock calculation ever performed, setting new standards in High-Performance Computing.
Shantanu Chakrabartty’s laboratory has been working to create sensors that can run on the least amount of energy. His lab has been so successful at building smaller and more efficient sensors, that they’ve run into a roadblock in the form of a fundamental law of physics.
Sometimes, however, when you hit what appears to be an impenetrable roadblock, you just have to turn to quantum physics and tunnel through it. That’s what Chakrabartty and other researchers at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis did.
The development of these self-powered quantum sensors from the lab of Chakrabartty, the Clifford W. Murphy Professor in the Preston M. Green Department of Systems & Electrical Engineering, was published online Oct. 28 in the journal Nature Communications.
