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Scientists in Australia have developed a new approach to reducing the errors that plague experimental quantum computers; a step that could remove a critical roadblock preventing them scaling up to full working machines.

By taking advantage of the infinite geometric space of a particular quantum system made up of bosons, the researchers, led by Dr. Arne Grimsmo from the University of Sydney, have developed quantum error correction codes that should reduce the number of physical quantum switches, or qubits, required to scale up these machines to a useful size.

“The beauty of these codes is they are ‘platform agnostic’ and can be developed to work with a wide range of quantum hardware systems,” Dr. Grimsmo said.

A happy accident in the laboratory has led to a breakthrough discovery that not only solved a problem that stood for more than half a century, but has major implications for the development of quantum computers and sensors. In a study published today in Nature, a team of engineers at UNSW Sydney has done what a celebrated scientist first suggested in 1961 was possible, but has eluded everyone since: controlling the nucleus of a single atom using only electric fields.

“This discovery means that we now have a pathway to build quantum computers using single-atom spins without the need for any oscillating magnetic field for their operation,” says UNSW’s Scientia Professor of Quantum Engineering Andrea Morello. “Moreover, we can use these nuclei as exquisitely precise sensors of electric and magnetic fields, or to answer fundamental questions in quantum science.”

That a nuclear spin can be controlled with electric, instead of magnetic fields, has far-reaching consequences. Generating magnetic fields requires large coils and high currents, while the laws of physics dictate that it is difficult to confine magnetic fields to very small spaces—they tend to have a wide area of influence. Electric fields, on the other hand, can be produced at the tip of a tiny electrode, and they fall off very sharply away from the tip. This will make control of individual atoms placed in nanoelectronic devices much easier.

Collisions between beams of gravitons could convert the hypothesized particles into photons, producing a potentially detectable radio signal that would accompany some gravitational waves.

If gravity and quantum mechanics are to be unified, gravitational waves—usually studied as a classical phenomenon using general relativity—must comprise hypothesized particles called gravitons. In theory, gravitons can interact with each other to produce photons, but these interactions were thought to be vanishingly rare and impossible to detect. In new theoretical work, Raymond Sawyer of the University of California, Santa Barbara, finds that in certain cases, colliding gravitational waves could produce enough radio frequency photons to yield a detectable signal.

An international team of researchers, affiliated with UNIST has for the first time succeeded in demonstrating the ionization cooling of muons. Regarded as a major step in being able to create the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, this new muon accelerator is expected to provide a better understanding of the fundamental constituents of matter.

This breakthrough has been carried out by the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) collaboration, which includes many UK scientists, as well as Professor Moses Chung and his research team in the School of Natural Sciences at UNIST. Their findings have been published in the online version of Nature on February 5, 2020.

“We have succeeded in realizing muon ionization cooling, one of our greatest challenges associated with developing muon accelerators,” says Professor Chung. “Achievement of this is considered especially important, as it could change the paradigm of developing the Lepton Collider that could replace the Neutrino Factory or the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).”

Circa 2017 o.o

Lightning is nuts. It’s a supercharged bolt of electricity extending from the sky to the ground that can kill people. But it can also produce nuclear reactions, according to new research.

Scientists have long known that thunderstorms can produce high-energy radiation, like this one from December, 2015 that blasted a Japanese beach town with some gamma radiation. But now, another team of researchers in Japan are reporting conclusive evidence of these gamma rays setting off atom-altering reactions like those in a nuclear reactor.

In the 1970s, physicists uncovered a potential symmetry that united all the kinds of particles in our universe. This connection, known as supersymmetry, relies on the strange quantum property of spin, and could help unlock a new understanding of physics.

Teleportation is no longer science fiction, says a team of Chinese scientists, after teleporting a photon particle from the Earth’s surface to an orbiting satellite 870 miles (1,400 km) away. This does not mean, however, that we are now able to beam people up and down like Star Trek’s captains James Kirk, Jean-Luc Picard, or Kathryn Janeway – that is still very much in the realm of science fiction, physicists say.

Teleportation, also known as teletransportation, is the theoretical transfer of energy or matter from one point to another instantly – without traveling through the physical space between them.

Continue reading “Teleportation becomes a science fact, no longer fiction” »

During the 1930s, venerable theoretical physicist Albert Einstein returned to the field of quantum mechanics, which his theories of relativity helped to create. Hoping to develop a more complete theory of how particles behave, Einstein was instead horrified by the prospect of quantum entanglement — something he described as “spooky action at a distance.”

Despite Einstein’s misgivings, quantum entanglement has gone on to become an accepted part of quantum mechanics. And now, for the first time ever, a team of physicists from the University of Glasgow took an image of a form of quantum entanglement (aka Bell entanglement) at work. In so doing, they managed to capture the first piece of visual evidence of a phenomenon that baffled even Einstein himself.

The paper that described their findings, titled “Imaging Bell-type nonlocal behavior,” recently appeared in the journal Science Advances. The study was led by Dr. Paul-Antoine Moreau, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Glasgow, and included multiple researchers from Glasgow’s School of Physics & Astronomy.

In two new studies, scientists search for axions within new mass ranges but the particles remain elusive.