Lifeboat Foundation

What if everything in our world has a soul and mind? What if every desk, chair, and potted plant has a conscious stream of thoughts? That’s the basic idea behind Panpsychism, a theory first put forward in the late 16th century by Francesco Patrizi. It’s been a hundred years or so since science won out about this theory in the 1920s, but now it’s regaining momentum.

To understand why this theory is regaining popularity requires us to look at one of the most difficult conundrums that human scientists have ever faced: where consciousness comes from. Scientists have been trying to solve this hard problem for over a hundred years, and while developments in neuroscience, psychology, and quantum physics have come far, we still don’t have a definitive answer.

The argument is regaining momentum, though, thanks in part to the work of Italian neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, who proposed the idea that there is widespread consciousness even found in the simplest of systems. Tononi and American neuroscientist Christof Koch argued that consciousness will follow where there are organized lumps of matter. Some even believe that the stars may be conscious.

In the search for the most scalable hardware to use for quantum computers, qubits made of individual atoms are having a breakout moment.

An international team of researchers from Queen Mary University of London, the University of Oxford, Lancaster University, and the University of Waterloo have developed a new single-molecule transistor that uses quantum interference to control the flow of electrons. The transistor, which is described in a paper published in the Nature Nanotechnology (“Quantum interference enhances the performance of single-molecule transistors”), opens new possibilities for using quantum effects in electronic devices.

Transistor are the basic building blocks of modern electronics. They are used to amplify and switch electrical signals, and they are essential for everything from smartphones to spaceships. However, the traditional method of making transistors, which involves etching silicon into tiny channels, is reaching its limits.

As transistors get smaller, they become increasingly inefficient and susceptible to errors, as electrons can leak through the device even when it is supposed to be switched off, by a process known as quantum tunnelling. Researchers are exploring new types of switching mechanisms that can be used with different materials to remove this effect.

An experimental demonstration of how destructive quantum interference effects can increase the performance of single-molecule field-effect transistors to reach levels similar to those of nanoelectronic transistors.

This 2D material is only the second to exhibit the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect, and theorists are still debating how it works.

Welcome back to Coding with Qiskit! Join research scientist Dr. Derek Wang as he walks you through the exciting capabilities of Qiskit 1 for utility scale quantum computing.

He’ll show you how to install Qiskit version 1 from scratch and how to run quantum circuits–both unitary and dynamic, all based on some of the latest research papers by IBM Quantum–on devices with over 100 qubits using the latest error suppression and mitigation techniques. He’ll also be learning how to contribute to the Qiskit ecosystem with the help of open-source extraordinaire Abby Mitchell.

Continue reading “Coding with Qiskit 1.x Series Announcement” »

Researchers at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) have brought together two Nobel prize-winning research concepts to advance the field of quantum communication.

Research often unfolds as a multistage process. The solution to one question can spark several more, inspiring scientists to reach further and look at the larger problem from several different perspectives. Such projects can often be the catalyst for collaborations that leverage the expertise and capabilities of different teams and institutions as they grow.

For half a century, scientists have delved into the mysteries of 1T phase tantalum disulfide (1T-TaS₂), an inorganic layered material with some intriguing quantum properties, like superconductivity and charge density waves (CDW). To unlock the complex structure and behavior of this material, researchers from the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia and Université Paris-Saclay in France reached out to experts utilizing the Pair Distribution Function (PDF) beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility located at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, to learn more about the material’s structure. While the team in Slovenia had been studying these kinds of materials for decades, they were lacking the specific structural characterization that PDF could provide.

The results of this collaboration, recently published in Nature Communications, revealed a hidden electronic state that could only be seen by a local structure probe like the pair distribution function technique. With a more complete understanding of 1T-TaS₂’s electronic states, this material may one day play a role in data storage, quantum computing, and superconductivity.

In a new study, scientists propose the concept of “virtual quantum broadcasting,” which provides a workaround to the longstanding no-cloning theorem, thereby offering new possibilities for the transmission of quantum information.