Lifeboat Foundation

Quantum mechanics, the physics of atoms and subatomic particles, can be strange, especially compared to the everyday physics of Isaac Newton’s falling apples. But this unusual science is enabling researchers to develop new ideas and tools, including quantum computers, that can help demystify the quantum realm and solve complex everyday problems.

That’s the goal behind a new U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science (DOE-SC) grant, awarded to Michigan State University (MSU) researchers, led by physicists at Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB). Working with Los Alamos National Laboratory, the team is developing algorithms – essentially programming instructions – for quantum computers to help these machines address problems that are difficult for conventional computers. For example, problems like explaining the fundamental quantum science that keeps an atomic nucleus from falling apart.

The $750,000 award, provided by the Office of Nuclear Physics within DOE-SC, is the latest in a growing list of grants supporting MSU researchers developing new quantum theories and technology.

Imagine if your manager could know whether you actually paid attention in your last Zoom meeting. Or, imagine if you could prepare your next presentation using only your thoughts. These scenarios might soon become a reality thanks to the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs).

To put it in the simplest terms, think of a BCI as a bridge between your brain and an external device. As of today, we mostly rely on electroencephalography (EEG) — a collection of methods for monitoring the electrical activity of the brain — to do this. But, that’s changing. By leveraging multiple sensors and complex algorithms, it’s now becoming possible to analyze brain signals and extract relevant brain patterns. Brain activity can then be recorded by a non-invasive device — no surgical intervention needed. In fact, the majority of existing and mainstream BCIs are non-invasive, such as wearable headbands and earbuds.

The development of BCI technology was initially focused on helping paralyzed people control assistive devices using their thoughts. But new use cases are being identified all the time. For example, BCIs can now be used as a neurofeedback training tool to improve cognitive performance. I expect to see a growing number of professionals leveraging BCI tools to improve their performance at work. For example, your BCI could detect that your attention level is too low compared with the importance of a given meeting or task and trigger an alert. It could also adapt the lighting of your office based on how stressed you are, or prevent you from using your company car if drowsiness is detected.

Secure telecommunications networks and rapid information processing make much of modern life possible. To provide more secure, faster, and higher-performance information sharing than is currently possible, scientists and engineers are designing next-generation devices that harness the rules of quantum physics. Those designs rely on single photons to encode and transmit information across quantum networks and between quantum chips. However, tools for generating single photons do not yet offer the precision and stability required for quantum information technology.

Now, as reported recently in the journal Science Advances, researchers have found a way to generate single, identical photons on demand. By positioning a metallic probe over a designated point in a common 2-D semiconductor material, the team led by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has triggered a photon emission electrically. The photon’s properties may be simply adjusted by changing the applied voltage.

“The demonstration of electrically driven single-photon emission at a precise point constitutes a big step in the quest for integrable quantum technologies,” said Alex Weber-Bargioni, a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry who led the project. The research is part of the Center for Novel Pathways to Quantum Coherence in Materials (NPQC), an Energy Frontier Research Center sponsored by the Department of Energy, whose overarching goal is to find new approaches to protect and control quantum memory that can provide new insights into novel materials and designs for quantum computing technology.

Whenever I tell my friends about the potential of Quantum Computing, for example, how a Quantum Computer (QC) can do a large number of calculations in parallel worlds, they look at me like I’m kind of crazy.

O,.o.

When you need to tell the future how cool you were, data longevity is key. A team of researches might have created a data storage medium for the ages with tungsten and silicon nitride.

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 6, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — The Coding School is collaborating with IBM Quantum to offer a first-of-its-kind quantum computing course for 5,000 high school students and above, designed to make quantum education globally accessible and to provide high-quality virtual STEM education. To ensure an equitable future quantum workforce, the course is free. Students can apply here.

Circa 2013

A standard computer is a complex group of individual parts working together as a whole — RAM, some kind of data storage, a processor, and so on. When one of those integral parts breaks, the computer is rendered useless and the part must be replaced, but what if the computer could begin routing the broken part’s tasks through the parts that are still functional? Computers can’t do that just yet, but researchers have now managed to coax a microchip into doing so.

Circa 2019

Quantum scrambling is the dispersal of local information into many-body quantum entanglements and correlations distributed throughout an entire system. This concept accompanies the dynamics of thermalization in closed quantum systems, and has recently emerged as a powerful tool for characterizing chaos in black holes^1,2,3,4. However, the direct experimental measurement of quantum scrambling is difficult, owing to the exponential complexity of ergodic many-body entangled states. One way to characterize quantum scrambling is to measure an out-of-time-ordered correlation function (OTOC); however, because scrambling leads to their decay, OTOCs do not generally discriminate between quantum scrambling and ordinary decoherence. Here we implement a quantum circuit that provides a positive test for the scrambling features of a given unitary process^5,6. This approach conditionally teleports a quantum state through the circuit, providing an unambiguous test for whether scrambling has occurred, while simultaneously measuring an OTOC. We engineer quantum scrambling processes through a tunable three-qubit unitary operation as part of a seven-qubit circuit on an ion trap quantum computer. Measured teleportation fidelities are typically about 80 per cent, and enable us to experimentally bound the scrambling-induced decay of the corresponding OTOC measurement.

Move over, graphene and carbyne — stanene, with 100% electrical efficiency at temperatures up to 100 degrees Celsius (212F), is here, and it wants to replace the crummy, high-resistance copper wires that are a big limiting factor in current computer chips. Where graphene is a single-atom-thick layer of carbon, stanene is a single-atom-thick layer of tin.