Hugh Everett, creator of this radical idea during a drunken debate more than 60 years ago, died before he could see his theory gain widespread popularity.
The power of quantum technology in 2018: how does this develop nowadays
Quantum technology is a new field in physics, derived from quantum physics and, especially, quantum mechanics and it transposes their principles into every day use applications such as quantum computers, quantum cryptography or quantum imaging. Ever since the study of quantum technology has been taking very seriously across the globe, a lot of new technologies and applications were developed to make our lives easier, faster and more secure.
Quantum technology still needs to be promoted.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Los Alamos-based startup Ubiquitous Quantum Dots got a $750,000 boost this week to further develop and begin deploying technology that enables windows to generate electricity.
The National Science Foundation awarded a phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant for UbiQD LLC to continue building quantum dot-tinted windows, which can harness sunlight to power everyday consumer products, and eventually entire buildings.
The NSF previously awarded a $225,000 phase I grant in 2016, allowing UbiQD to test and validate its technology at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado.
Continue reading “Quantum dot startup wins $750,000 grant” »
Many physicists sidestep the philosophical puzzles altogether, preferring to “shut up and calculate.”
If quantum mechanics can be said to have a capital city it is surely Copenhagen, birthplace of the physicist Niels Bohr (1885−1962) and of the formalism he and others developed to make sense of the subatomic realm. Their approach, the “Copenhagen Interpretation,” is expounded in every textbook. Yet it has been questioned many times, and in “What Is Real?” Adam Becker tells a fascinating if complex story of quantum dissidents. Two of the most important not only displeased Bohr, they also attracted the attention of the FBI.
Self-organized criticality emerges in dynamical complex systems driven out of equilibrium and characterizes a wide range of classical phenomena in physics, geology, and biology. We report on a quantum coherence–controlled self-organized critical transition observed in the light localization behavior of a coherence-driven nanophotonic configuration. Our system is composed of a gain-enhanced plasmonic heterostructure controlled by a coherent drive, in which photons close to the stopped-light regime interact in the presence of the active nonlinearities, eventually synchronizing their dynamics. In this system, on the basis of analytical and corroborating full-wave Maxwell-Bloch computations, we observe quantum coherence–controlled self-organized criticality in the emergence of light localization arising from the synchronization of the photons. It is associated with two first-order phase transitions: one pertaining to the synchronization of the dynamics of the photons and the second pertaining to an inversionless lasing transition by the coherent drive. The so-attained light localization, which is robust to dissipation, fluctuations, and many-body interactions, exhibits scale-invariant power laws and absence of finely tuned control parameters. We also found that, in this nonequilibrium dynamical system, the effective critical “temperature” of the system drops to zero, whereupon one enters the quantum self-organized critical regime.
The self-organization of many nonequilibrium complex systems toward an “ordered” state is a profound concept in basic science, ranging from biochemistry to physics (2–4). Examples include the group movement of flocks of birds , motions of human crowds , neutrino oscillations in the early universe , and the formation of shapes (“morphogenesis”) in biological organisms (8, 9). An intriguing trait of this nonequilibrium, driven-dissipative systems (2, 3) is that their self-organization can lead them to a phase transition and to critical behavior—a phenomenon known as self-organized criticality (SOC) (10). Unlike equilibrium phase-transition phenomena, such as superconductivity or ferromagnetism, where an exogenous control parameter (for example, temperature or pressure) needs to be precisely tuned for the phase transition to occur, no such fine-tuning is needed in SOC systems (10–13): They can self-organize and reach their critical state even when driven far away from it.
Silke Weinfurtner is trying to build the universe from scratch. In a physics lab at the University of Nottingham—close to the Sherwood forest of legendary English outlaw Robin Hood—she and her colleagues will work with a huge superconducting coil magnet, 1 meter across. Inside, there’s a small pool of liquid, whose gentle ripples stand to mimic the matter fluctuations that gave rise to the structures we observe in the cosmos.
Weinfurtner isn’t an evil genius hell-bent on creating a world of her own to rule. She just wants to understand the origins of the one we already have.
The Big Bang is by far the most popular model of our universe’s beginnings, but even its fans disagree about how it happened. The theory depends on the existence of a hypothetical quantum field that stretched the universe ultra-rapidly and uniformly in all directions, expanding it by a huge factor in a fraction of a second: a process dubbed inflation. But that inflation or the field responsible for it—the inflaton—is impossible to prove directly. Which is why Weinfurtner wants to mimic it in a lab.
Continue reading “To Understand the Universe, Physicists Are Building Their Own” »
Hundreds of comments under his post today: http://www.newsweek.com/quantum-archaeology-quest-3d-bioprin…ife-837967
Exotic physics can happen when quantum particles come together and talk to each other. Understanding such processes is challenging for scientists, because the particle interactions can be hard to glimpse and even harder to control. Moreover, modern computer simulations struggle to make sense of all the intricate dynamics going on in a large group of particles. Luckily, atoms cooled to near zero temperatures can provide insight into this problem.
Lasers can make cold atoms mimic the physics seen in other systems—an approach that is familiar terrain for atomic physicists. They regularly use intersecting laser beams to capture atoms in a landscape of rolling hills and valleys called an optical lattice. Atoms, when cooled, don’t have enough energy to walk up the hills, and they get stuck in the valleys. In this environment, the atoms behave similarly to the electrons in the crystal structure of many solids, so this approach provides a straightforward way to learn about interactions inside real materials.
But the conventional way to make optical lattices has some limitations. The wavelength of the laser light determines the location of the hills and valleys, and so the distance between neighboring valleys—and with that the spacing between atoms—can only be shrunk to half of the light’s wavelength. Bringing atoms closer than this limit could activate much stronger interactions between them and reveal effects that otherwise remain in the dark.
Continue reading “Two-toned light pattern creates steep quantum walls for atoms” »
We all know that physics and maths can be pretty weird, but these three books tackle their mind-bending subjects in markedly contrasting ways. Clifford V. Johnson’s The Dialogues is a graphic novel, seeking to visualise cosmic ideas in comic-book style. Darling and Banerjee’s Weird Maths is a miscellany of fun oddities, ranging from chess-playing computers to prime-counting insects. Philip Ball’s Beyond Weird argues that we’ve got quantum mechanics all wrong: it’s not so weird actually, but quite sensible. All three books do a fine job for their respective audiences. Just make sure you know which target group you’re in.
The Dialogues is a sequence of illustrated conversations, often between pairs of youthful and attractive characters, scrupulously diverse in race and gender, who happen to meet in a café, gallery or train carriage, and find themselves talking about physics. Perhaps ‘The Lectures’ would be a better title, since one interlocutor is the expert, while the other is an interested lay person whose role is to feed questions at appropriate intervals.
The author shows himself to be a highly talented graphic artist as well as being a distinguished theoretician, and while the ping-pong chats may be somewhat lacking in narrative drive, they do provide a platform for some admirably lucid explanations of topics such as Maxwell’s equations or Einstein’s cosmological constant. Not the kind of comic book you roll up in your pocket, but a weighty hardback that would grace any coffee table.
