Lifeboat Foundation

Electrons are very much at the mercy of magnetic fields, which scientists can manipulate to control the electrons and their angular momentum—i.e. their “spin.”

A Cornell team led by Greg Fuchs, assistant professor of applied and engineering physics in the College of Engineering, in 2013 invented a new way to exert this control by using acoustic waves generated by mechanical resonators. That approach enabled the team to control electron spin transitions (also known as spin resonance) that otherwise wouldn’t be possible through conventional magnetic behavior.

The finding was a boon for anyone looking to build quantum sensors of the sort used in mobile navigation devices. However, such devices still required a magnetic control field—and therefore a bulky magnetic antenna—to drive certain spin transitions.

Plug And Play

The underlying mechanics of a quantum computer won’t be any less difficult to comprehend under Gil’s vision of the future. But, he argues, it won’t matter because programming quantum computing software would become far more automated along the way.

“You’ll simply have to write a line of code in any programming language you work with,” Gil wrote, “and the system will match it with the circuit in the library and the right quantum computer.”

Mobile phones and computers are currently responsible for up to 8% of the electricity use in the world. This figure has been doubling each past decade but nothing prevents it from skyrocketing in the future. Unless we find a way for boosting energy efficiency in information and communications technology, that is. An international team of researchers, including Ikerbasque Research Associate Alexey Nikitin (DIPC), has just published in Nature ¹ a breakthrough in quantum physics that could deliver exactly that: electronics and communications technology with ultralow energy consumption.

Future information and communication technologies will rely on the manipulation of not only electrons but also of light at the nanometer-scale. Squeezing light to such a small size has been a major goal in nanophotonics for many years. Particularly strong light squeezing can be achieved with polaritons, quasiparticles resulting from the strong coupling of photons with a dipole-carrying excitation, at infrared frequencies in two-dimensional materials, such as graphene and hexagonal boron nitride. Polaritons can be found in materials consisting of two-dimensional layers bound by weak van der Waals forces, the so-called van der Waals materials. These polaritons can be tuned by electric fields or by adjusting the material thickness, leading to applications including nanolasers, tunable infrared and terahertz detectors, and molecular sensors.

But there is a major problem: even though polaritons can have long lifetimes, they have always been found to propagate along all directions (isotropic) of the material surface, thereby losing energy quite fast, which limits their application potential.

Quantum computing is still the province of specialized programmers—but that is likely to change very quickly.

According to new research, black holes could be like a hologram, where all the information is amassed in a two-dimensional surface able to reproduce a three-dimensional image.

We can all picture that incredible image of a black hole that traveled around the world about a year ago. Yet, according to new research by SISSA, ICTP and INFN, black holes could be like a hologram, where all the information is amassed in a two-dimensional surface able to reproduce a three-dimensional image. In this way, these cosmic bodies, as affirmed by quantum theories, could be incredibly complex and concentrate an enormous amount of information inside themselves, as the largest hard disk that exists in nature, in two dimensions. This idea aligns with Einstein’s theory of relativity, which describes black holes as three dimensional, simple, spherical, and smooth, as they appear in that famous image. In short, black holes “appear” as three dimensional, just like holograms. The study which demonstrates it, and which unites two discordant theories, has recently been published in Physical Review X.

The mystery of black holes.

Quantum computers could keep it secure like the dwave.

By now, the company is mostly back online.

Artist’s view of individual electrons interacting with an optical whispering gallery mode as it circles a silica sphere. The matching between the velocities of the electron and the light-wave it is riding changes the quantum state of the electron, illustrated as a wider halo. Credit: Dr. Murat Sivis.

The Quantum Random Number Generator makes it much harder to hack some services.

The famous cat-in-a-box thought experiment by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger is an illustration of one of the defining characteristics of quantum mechanics — the unpredictable behaviour of particles at the quantum level.

It makes working with quantum systems incredibly difficult; but what if we could make quantum predictions? A team of physicists believes it’s possible.

In a study published last year, they demonstrated their ability to predict something called a quantum jump, and even reverse the process after it’s started.