Lifeboat Foundation

Topological order of the toric code type is realized in two synthetic quantum systems.

A new report from the Harvard Kennedy School found that China’s rapidly gaining steam in the realms of AI, 5G, quantum computing, biotechnology, and more.

The wildly inventive physicist John Wheeler was an early explorer of this notion. In a 1989 paper, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” Wheeler takes a stab at “the age-old question: How come existence?” The answer, he speculates, might come from a fusion of physics and information theory. The former traffics in “its,” or physical things, and the latter in “bits,” defined as answers to yes-or-no questions.

Wheeler proposes that “every physical quantity, every it, derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit.” Noting the crucial role of measurement in the outcome of quantum experiments, Wheeler suggests that we live in a “participatory universe,” in which we bring the world into existence, and vice versa.

Picking up on Wheeler’s ideas, physicist Carlo Rovelli argues in a 1996 paper, “Relational Quantum Mechanics,” that quantum mechanics undermines “naive realism,” the notion that science discovers a reality that exists independently of our observation of it. He proposes what he calls a “relational” interpretation of quantum mechanics, which says things only exist in relation to other things. Rovelli notes that Galileo and Kant, among others, anticipated the relational perspective.

China has developed what it calls a Quantum Satellite System in a bid to combat any adversary intrusion into its power infrastructure. The country boasts the world’s largest national power grid.

Novel theorem demonstrates convolutional neural networks can always be trained on quantum computers, overcoming threat of ‘barren plateaus’ in optimization problems.

Convolutional neural networks running on quantum computers have generated significant buzz for their potential to analyze quantum data better than classical computers can. While a fundamental solvability problem known as “barren plateaus” has limited the application of these neural networks for large data sets, new research overcomes that Achilles heel with a rigorous proof that guarantees scalability.

“The way you construct a quantum neural network can lead to a barren plateau—or not,” said Marco Cerezo, coauthor of the paper titled “Absence of Barren Plateaus in Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks,” published recently by a Los Alamos National Laboratory team in Physical Review X. Cerezo is a physicist specializing in quantum computing 0, quantum machine learning, and quantum information at Los Alamos. “We proved the absence of barren plateaus for a special type of quantum neural network. Our work provides trainability guarantees for this architecture, meaning that one can generically train its parameters.”

The company belatedly gets into the race to build bigger, better language models despite ethical concerns.

A team at Harvard has documented a new state of matter which could advance quantum technology.

Physicists from Harvard University have documented a new state of matter which could significantly advance quantum technology, according to a new paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Science earlier this month.

The state of matter they found is called quantum spin liquid, which has special properties that produce long-range quantum entanglement — a phenomenon in which particles’ states are connected even when the particles are separated by distance.

Quantum spin liquid was first predicted by physicist Philip W. Anderson about 50 years ago, in 1973, but has never been observed in experiments.

(PhysOrg.com) — By greatly amplifying one photon from an entangled photon pair, physicists have theoretically shown that human eyes can be used as detectors to observe quantum effects. Usually, detecting quantum phenomena requires sensitive photon detectors or similar technology, keeping the quantum world far removed from our everyday experience. By showing that it’s possible to perform quantum optics experiments with human eyes as detectors, the physicists can bring quantum phenomena closer to the macroscopic level and to everyday life.

(PhysOrg.com) — By greatly amplifying one photon from an entangled photon pair, physicists have theoretically shown that human eyes can be used as detectors to observe quantum effects. Usually, detecting quantum phenomena requires sensitive photon detectors or similar technology, keeping the quantum world far removed from our everyday experience. By showing that it’s possible to perform quantum optics experiments with human eyes as detectors, the physicists can bring quantum phenomena closer to the macroscopic level and to everyday life.

The group of physicists is from the University of Geneva, and includes Pavel Sekatski, Nicolas Brunner (also from the University of Bristol), Cyril Branciard, Nicolas Gisin, and Christoph Simon. In their study published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters, the scientists theoretically show how human eyes can be used to detect a large Bell inequality violation, which proves the existence of quantum entanglement.

As the physicists explain, the key to achieving human-eye detection of quantum effects is to use the process of quantum cloning by stimulated emission. Recently, using quantum cloning, researchers in Rome have experimentally created tens of thousands of clones starting from a single-photon. Then, by amplifying one photon of an entangled pair, the researchers managed to demonstrate entanglement. In order to do this, specific detectors are required, which can distinguish two orthogonal amplified states with a high success rate.