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Category: computing – Page 8

Physicists set record with 6,100-qubit array

Quantum computers will need large numbers of qubits to tackle challenging problems in physics, chemistry, and beyond. Unlike classical bits, qubits can exist in two states at once—a phenomenon called superposition. This quirk of quantum physics gives quantum computers the potential to perform certain complex calculations better than their classical counterparts, but it also means the qubits are fragile. To compensate, researchers are building quantum computers with extra, redundant qubits to correct any errors. That is why robust quantum computers will require hundreds of thousands of qubits.

Now, in a step toward this vision, Caltech physicists have created the largest array ever assembled: 6,100 neutral-atom qubits trapped in a grid by lasers. Previous arrays of this kind contained only hundreds of qubits.

This milestone comes amid a rapidly growing race to scale up quantum computers. There are several approaches in development, including those based on superconducting circuits, trapped ions, and neutral atoms, as used in the new study.

Routing photonic entanglement toward a quantum internet

Imagine the benefits if the entire internet got a game-changing upgrade to speed and security. This is the promise of the quantum internet—an advanced system that uses single photons to operate. Researchers at Tohoku University have developed a new photonic router that can direct single and quantum entangled photons with unprecedented levels of efficiency. This advancement in quantum optics brings us closer to quantum networks and next-generation photonic quantum technologies becoming an everyday reality.

The findings were published in Advanced Quantum Technologies on September 2, 2025.

Photons are the backbone of many emerging quantum applications, from secure communication to powerful quantum computers. To make these technologies practical, photons must be routed quickly and reliably, without disturbing the delicate quantum states they carry.

Johns Hopkins Unlocks New Chemistry for Faster, Smaller Microchips

“By playing with the two components (metal and imidazole), you can change the efficiency of absorbing the light and the chemistry of the following reactions. And that opens us up to creating new metal-organic pairings,” Tsapatsis said. “The exciting thing is there are at least 10 different metals that can be used for this chemistry, and hundreds of organics.”

Looking Ahead to Next-Gen Manufacturing

The researchers have started experimenting with different combinations to create pairings specifically for B-EUV radiation, which they say will likely be used in manufacturing in the next 10 years.

“Quantum Computing Works at Room Temperature”: Physics Breakthrough Terrifies Tech Giants While Computing Revolution Explodes

Researchers have long faced a significant hurdle in the development of practical quantum devices: the requirement for ultra-cold environments to maintain

Engineers develop a magnetic transistor for more energy-efficient electronics

Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be.

MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly influences its electronic behavior, leading to more efficient control of the flow of electricity.

The team used a novel magnetic material and an optimization process that reduces the material’s defects, which boosts the transistor’s performance.

Ultrafast magnetization switching: Moving boundary challenges previous all-optical switching models

The field of ultrafast magnetism explores how flashes of light can manipulate a material’s magnetization in trillionths of a second. In the process called all-optical switching (AOS), a single laser pulse of several femtoseconds (≈10-15 seconds) duration flips tiny magnetic regions without the need for an externally applied magnetic field.

Enabling such an ultrafast control over magnetization, orders of magnitude faster than what can be achieved using a conventional magnet-based read/write head as in a magnetic hard drive, AOS is a promising candidate for novel spintronics devices that use magnetic spins with their associated as information carriers. Such devices typically consist of a stack of nanometer-thin materials, with the actual magnetic material being one of them.

Until now, the switching process was thought to happen uniformly in the magnetic material wherever the laser pulse deposits a sufficient amount of energy. In a study recently published in Nature Communications, researchers from the Max Born Institute together with collaborators from Berlin and Nancy revealed that this is not the case. Instead, there is an ultrafast propagation of a magnetization boundary into the depth of the material.

Self-locked microcomb on a chip tames Raman scattering to achieve broad spectrum and stable output

A research team has successfully developed a self-locked Raman-electro-optic (REO) microcomb on a single lithium niobate chip. By synergistically harnessing the electro-optic (EO), Kerr, and Raman effects within one microresonator, the microcomb has a spectral width exceeding 300 nm and a repetition rate of 26.03 GHz, without the need for external electronic feedback.

The research was published in the Nature Communications. The team was led by Prof. Dong Chunhua from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), in collaboration with Prof. Bo Fang’s group from Nankai University.

Optical frequency combs, light sources composed of equally spaced frequency lines, are essential tools in modern optical communications, , and fundamental physics research. While traditional are typically based on bulky mode-locked lasers, recent advances in integrated photonics have enabled chip-scale Kerr and EO combs.

Computer Has One Instruction, Many Transistors

There’s always some debate around what style of architecture is best for certain computing applications, with some on the RISC side citing performance per watt and some on the CISC side citing performance per line of code. But when looking at instruction sets it’s actually possible to eliminate every instruction except one and still have a working, Turing-complete computer. This instruction is called subleq or “subtract and branch if less-than or equal to zero ”. [Michael] has built a computer that does this out of discrete components from scratch.

We’ll save a lot of the details of the computer science for [Michael] or others to explain, but at its core this is a computer running with a 1 kHz clock with around 700 transistors total. Since the goal of a single-instruction computer like this is simplicity, the tradeoff is that many more instructions need to be executed for equivalent operations. For this computer it takes six clock cycles to execute one instruction, for a total of about 170 instructions per second. [Michael] also created an assembler for this computer, so with an LCD screen connected and mapped to memory he can write and execute a simple hello world program just like any other computer.

[Michael] does note that since he was building this from Logisim directly he doesn’t have a circuit schematic, but due to some intermittent wiring issues might have something in the future if he decides to make PCBs for this instead of using wire on a cardboard substrate. There’s plenty of other information on his GitHub page though. It’s a unique project that gets to the core of what’s truly needed for a working computer. There are a few programming languages out there that are built on a similar idea.

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