Lifeboat Foundation

The particle known as a Majorana fermion is as mysterious and uncontrollable as it is unique. It’s the only known particle that is also its own antiparticle, and has properties that make it an alluring candidate for qubits, the basic unit of information in a quantum computer.

Harnessing that potential, however, is easier said than done — Majorana fermions are slippery little suckers. But a team of particle physicists now reports they’ve found a way to control them.

“We now have a new way to engineer Majorana quasiparticles in materials,” said physicist Ali Yazdani of Princeton University. “We can verify their existence by imaging them and we can characterise their predicted properties.”

Continue reading “Wild New Discovery Shows How We Can Switch Majorana Fermions On And Off” »

An intriguing experimental result, known as “the phantom leaf effect,” if fully verified, may be an example of some or even all of these biofield processes. In these experiments, coronal discharge or the Kirlian photographic effect reveals a field effect in the morphological form of an intact living leaf even after part of the leaf is severed. This suggests an analogy to the subjective experience of a phantom limb reported by patients after the limb has been amputated. There might be a persisting biofield that represents the amputatedlimb. First described by Adamenko and reported by Tiller and by Ostrander and Schroeder, more recent validating experiments have been performed with detection methods of greater precision; these are summarized in Hubacher. In his most recent publication, Hubacher performed the experiment with highest definition photographic samples using the largest number of samples to date. Of 137 leaves severed and imaged, 96 (70%) demonstrated clear phantoms.

This article briefly reviews the biofield hypothesis and its scientific literature. Evidence for the existence of the biofield now exists, and current theoretical foundations are now being developed. A review of the biofield and related topics from the perspective of physical science is needed to identify a common body of knowledge and evaluate possible underlying principles of origin of the biofield. The properties of such a field could be based on electromagnetic fields, coherent states, biophotons, quantum and quantum-like processes, and ultimately the quantum vacuum. Given this evidence, we intend to inquire and discuss how the existence of the biofield challenges reductionist approaches and presents its own challenges regarding the origin and source of the biofield, the specific evidence for its existence, its relation to biology, and last but not least, how it may inform an integrated understanding of consciousness and the living universe.

Key Words: Biofield, quantum mechanics, physics.

Continue reading “Biofield Science: Current Physics Perspectives” »

As mysterious as the Italian scientist for which it is named, the Majorana particle is one of the most compelling quests in physics.

Its fame stems from its strange properties—it is the only particle that is its own antiparticle—and from its potential to be harnessed for future quantum computing.

In recent years, a handful of groups including a team at Princeton have reported finding the Majorana in various materials, but the challenge is how to manipulate it for quantum computation.

Continue reading “Mysterious Majorana quasiparticle is now closer to being controlled for quantum computing” »

At the chemical level, diamonds are no more than carbon atoms aligned in a precise, three-dimensional (3D) crystal lattice. However, even a seemingly flawless diamond contains defects: spots in that lattice where a carbon atom is missing or has been replaced by something else. Some of these defects are highly desirable; they trap individual electrons that can absorb or emit light, causing the various colors found in diamond gemstones and, more importantly, creating a platform for diverse quantum technologies for advanced computing, secure communication and precision sensing.

Quantum technologies are based on units of quantum information known as “qubits.” The spin of electrons are prime candidates to serve as qubits; unlike binary computing systems where data takes the form of only 0s or 1s, electron spin can represent information as 0, 1, or both simultaneously in a quantum superposition. Qubits from diamonds are of particular interest to quantum scientists because their quantum-mechanical properties, including superposition, exist at room temperature, unlike many other potential quantum resources.

The practical challenge of collecting information from a single atom deep inside a crystal is a daunting one, however. Penn Engineers addressed this problem in a recent study in which they devised a way to pattern the surface of a diamond that makes it easier to collect light from the defects inside. Called a metalens, this surface structure contains nanoscale features that bend and focus the light emitted by the defects, despite being effectively flat.

Continue reading “Engineers design nanostructured diamond metalens for compact quantum technologies” »

Any day now, quantum computers will solve a problem too hard for a classical computer to take on. Or at least, that’s what we’ve been hoping. Scientists and companies are racing toward this computing milestone, dubbed quantum supremacy and seemingly just beyond our reach, and if you’ve been following the quantum computing story, you might wonder why we’re not there yet, given all the hype.

The short answer is that controlling the quantum properties of particles is hard. And even if we could use them to compute, “quantum supremacy” is a misleading term. The first quantum supremacy demonstration will almost certainly be a contrived problem that won’t have a practical or consumer use. Nonetheless, it’s a crucial milestone when it comes to benchmarking these devices and establishing what they can actually do. So what’s holding us back from the future?

Using quantum entanglement, Micius allows perfectly secure, unhackable communication.

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Atomtronics manipulates atoms much in the way that electronics manipulates electrons. It carries the promise of highly compact quantum devices which can measure incredibly small forces or tiny rotations. Such devices might one day be used to monitor Earth’s status by sensing water levels in the desert or in the search for minerals and oil. They will also be used in navigation, when GPS fails on planes or ships due to malicious attacks or simply because it is not available, e.g. in the deep seas. They might also one day act as portable quantum simulators solving complex computational tasks.

Coherent atomtronics manipulates atoms in the form of matterwaves originating from Bose-Einstein condensates (a state of matter in which all the atoms lose their individual identity and become one single quantum state with all the atoms being everywhere in the condensate at the same time). The atoms in these matterwaves behave much more like waves rather than individual particles. These matterwaves can be brought to interfere and thus made to respond to the tiniest changes in their environment such as the difference in gravitational pull between light organic material and heavy iron ore. When compared to light, atoms can be 10 billion times more sensitive, e.g. to rotation or acceleration, when compared to the photons that make up light. This sensitivity depends on the measurement time and—just like Newton’s apple—atoms fall due to Earth’s gravity. This forces the most sensitive interferometers to be very tall, reaching 10 meters and in some cases even 100 meters.

A team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has found a way to make the Casimir effect attract or repulse depending on the size of the gap between two objects. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their technique and possible applications.

The Casimir effect, first proposed by Hendrik Casimir back in 1948, is the phenomenon in which two tiny surfaces in close proximity experience a force that pulls them closer together. Quantum fluctuations inside and outside of the gap push against the plates, but because those pushing from the outside are stronger, they create an attractive force between the two plates. The Casimir effect is more than a curiosity, because it can create problems in nanotechnology applications.

Just two years after Casimir first proposed the effect, others in the field began making predictions about ways to counter it—making it repulsive rather than attractive, for example, in the case of fluids and plates made of lower refractive metals. Then, in 2010, a team at MIT suggested that it should be possible to counter both attractive and repulsive effects to create a state of equilibrium between the two plates. In this new effort, the researchers report that they have done just that.

Continue reading “Researchers find a way to make Casimir effect attract or repulse depending on gap size” »

In “Avengers: Endgame,” Tony Stark warned Scott Lang that sending him into the quantum realm and bringing him back would be a “billion-to-one cosmic fluke.”

In reality, shrinking a light beam to a nanometer-sized point to spy on quantum-scale light-matter interactions and retrieving the information is not any easier. Now, engineers at the University of California, Riverside, have developed a new technology to tunnel light into the quantum realm at an unprecedented efficiency.

In a Nature Photonics paper, a team led by Ruoxue Yan, an assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering, and Ming Liu, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, describe the world’s first portable, inexpensive, optical nanoscopy tool that integrates a glass optical fiber with a silver nanowire condenser. The device is a high-efficiency round-trip light tunnel that squeezes visible light to the very tip of the condenser to interact with molecules locally and send back information that can decipher and visualize the elusive nanoworld.

Continue reading “Fiber-optic probe can see molecular bonds” »