Lifeboat Foundation

Batteries are great, except that they take a long time to charge. When you are dealing with a lot of batteries, you have to have a lot of time to charge them. But what if you could reduce the charging time by adding more batteries? Sounds unreal? Probably, but that is what scientists at the University of Adelaide are going to try to achieve by creating world’s first quantum battery.

Compositional grading of colloidal quantum dots enables electrically driven amplification of light, bringing electrically driven lasers from these materials very close.

LED lights have been working on overcoming two challenges: Generating pleasing light, and being low-cost. QD Vision and Nexxus Lighting have been working together on the first of these. Nexxus made LED lamps with white LEDs, and QD Vision is providing a cover with a coating of specially tuned quantum dots that help make the light-color more pleasing to the eye (mostly by adding some red into the mix, making the final result closer to what people are used to).

Photo: Mark Lennihan

LED lighting systems could soon gain mainstream adoption with a new cost-effective hybrid LED and its solution-based process.

There is a new battery type being hyped, with terms such as “Quantum Glass” battery or even “The Jesus Battery” and a claim that “It Will Ignite the Global $3 Trillion Electric Car Revolution.” Go and see it for yourself at investorplace.com (video transcript available from me), Forbes, and other financial information services.

This touted breakthrough in battery technology is the latest in a slew of innovative ideas that include “batteries made with sand,” “stretchable batteries,” “foam batteries,” “pee powered batteries,” “laser-made micro-super-capacitors” and more (13 Amazing Battery Innovations That Could Change The World).

From the remarkable speed of enzyme-catalyzed reactions to the workings of the human brain, numerous biological puzzles are now being explored for evidence of quantum effects.

Researchers at the University of Chicago (UChicago) have recently reported an experimental observation of a matter field with thermal fluctuations that is in accordance with Unruh’s radiation predictions. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, could open up new possibilities for research exploring the dynamics of quantum systems in a curved spacetime.

“Our team at UChicago has been investigating a new quantum phenomena called Bose fireworks that we discovered two years ago,” Cheng Chin, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “Our paper reports its hidden connection to a gravitational phenomenon called Unruh radiation.”

The Unruh effect, or Unruh radiation, is closely connected to Hawking radiation. In 1974, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking predicted that the strong gravitational force near black holes leads to the emission of a thermal radiation of particles, which resembles the heat wave emitted by an oven. This phenomenon remains speculative with no direct experimental confirmation.

Continue reading “A quantum simulation of Unruh radiation” »

The special properties of quantum computers should make them ideal for accurately modelling chemical systems, Philip Ball discovers.

‘If you want to make a simulation of nature,’ the legendary physicist Richard Feynman advised in 1981, ‘you’d better make it quantum-mechanical.’ By ‘nature’, Feynman meant ‘stuff’: the particles and atoms and molecules we’re made from. His comment came in a talk published the following year, and is generally regarded as the founding text of quantum computing. It now looks even more prophetic than ever.

For although we are constantly told that the unique selling point of quantum computers is their enormous speed compared with the classical devices we currently use – a speed-up that exploits the counterintuitive laws of quantum mechanics – it seems that the most immediate benefit will be the one Feynman identified in the first place: we’ll be able to simulate nature better.

Continue reading “Quantum chemistry on quantum computers” »

I was hoping to post this earlier, but a heavy dose of writer’s block set in (I met a girl, and no, this blog didn’t help — but she is a physicist!) I also got lost in the rabbit hole that is quantum teleportation. My initial intention with this series of posts was simply to clarify common misconceptions and to introduce basic concepts in quantum information. However, while doing so, I started a whirlwind tour of deep questions in physics which become unavoidable as you think harder and deeper about quantum teleportation. I’ve only just begun this journey, but using quantum teleportation as a springboard has already led me to contemplate crazy things such as time-travel via coupling postselection with quantum teleportation and the subtleties of entanglement. In other words, quantum teleportation may not be the instantaneous Stargate style teleportation you had in mind, but it’s incredibly powerful in its own right. Personally, I think we’ve barely begun to understand the full extent of its ramifications.