Lifeboat Foundation

Now, almost 100 years later, the Department of Defence, through its Next Generation Technology Fund, has selected 11 projects that exploit the extraordinary properties of quantum mechanics to deliver improved security for Australians. The Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing (IPAS) at the University of Adelaide is involved in four of these ambitious projects.

IPAS will work closely with the Defence Science and Technology (DST) Group on four ambitious quantum technology projects. Three of the four projects focus on quantum detection.

One project explores whether ‘quantum’ radar can be used to detect stealth aircraft.

Continue reading “Quantum sensors to make Australia safer” »

A prototype quantum radar that has the potential to detect objects which are invisible to conventional systems has been developed by an international research team led by a quantum information scientist at the University of York.

The new breed of radar is a hybrid system that uses quantum correlation between microwave and optical beams to detect objects of low reflectivity such as cancer cells or aircraft with a stealth capability. Because the quantum radar operates at much lower energies than conventional systems, it has the long-term potential for a range of applications in biomedicine including non-invasive NMR scans.

The research team led by Dr Stefano Pirandola, of the University’s Department of Computer Science and the York Centre for Quantum Technologies, found that a special converter — a double-cavity device that couples the microwave beam to an optical beam using a nano-mechanical oscillator — was the key to the new system.

A world-record result in reducing errors in semiconductor ‘spin qubits’, a type of building block for quantum computers, has been achieved using the theoretical work of quantum physicists at the University of Sydney Nano Institute and School of Physics.

The experimental result by University of New South Wales engineers demonstrated error rates as low as 0.043 percent, lower than any other spin qubit. The joint research paper by the Sydney and UNSW teams was published this week in Nature Electronics and is the journal’s cover story for April.

“Reducing errors in quantum computers is needed before they can be scaled up into useful machines,” said Professor Stephen Bartlett, a corresponding author of the paper.

Continue reading “World-record quantum computing result for Sydney teams” »

The optical laser has grown to a $10 billion global technology market since it was invented in 1960, and has led to Nobel prizes for Art Ashkin for developing optical tweezing and Gerard Mourou and Donna Strickland for work with pulsed lasers. Now a Rochester Institute of Technology researcher has teamed up with experts at the University of Rochester to create a different kind of laser—a laser for sound, using the optical tweezer technique invented by Ashkin.

In the newest issue of Nature Photonics, the researchers propose and demonstrate a phonon laser using an optically levitated nanoparticle. A phonon is a quantum of energy associated with a sound wave and optical tweezers test the limits of quantum effects in isolation and eliminates physical disturbances from the surrounding environment. The researchers studied the mechanical vibrations of the nanoparticle, which is levitated against gravity by the force of radiation at the focus of an optical laser beam.

“Measuring the position of the nanoparticle by detecting the light it scatters, and feeding that information back into the tweezer beam allows us to create a laser-like situation,” said Mishkat Bhattacharya, associate professor of physics at RIT and a theoretical quantum optics researcher. “The mechanical vibrations become intense and fall into perfect sync, just like the electromagnetic waves emerging from an optical laser.”

Continue reading “New phonon laser could lead to breakthroughs in sensing and information processing” »

Qualcomm said it plans to begin testing its new Cloud AI 100 chip with partners such as Microsoft Corp later this year, with mass production likely to begin in 2020.

Qualcomm’s new chip is designed for what artificial intelligence researchers call “inference” – the process of using an AI algorithm that has been “trained” with massive amounts of data in order to, for example, translate audio into text-based requests.

Analysts believe chips for speeding up inference will be the largest part of the AI chip market.

Continue reading “Qualcomm Aims for Quantum AI Chips” »

Two European theoretical physicists have shown that it may be possible to build a near-perfect, entangled quantum battery. In the future, such quantum batteries might power the tiniest of devices — or provide power storage that is much more efficient than state-of-the-art lithium-ion battery packs.

To understand the concept of quantum batteries, we need to start (unsurprisingly) at a very low level. Today, most devices and machines that you interact with are governed by the rules of classical mechanics (Newton’s laws, friction, and so on). Classical mechanics are very accurate for larger systems, but they fall apart as we begin to analyze microscopic (atomic and sub-atomic) systems — which led to a new set of laws and theories that describe quantum mechanics.

In recent years, as our ability to observe and manipulate quantum systems has grown — thanks to machines such as the Large Hadron Collider and scanning tunneling electron microscopes — physicists have started theorizing about devices and machines that use quantum mechanics, rather than classical. In theory, these devices could be much smaller, more efficient, or simply act in rather unsurprising ways. In this case, Robert Alicki of the University of Gdansk in Poland, and Mark Fannes of the University of Leuven in Belgium, have defined a battery that stores and releases energy using quantum mechanics.

Continue reading “Quantum entangled batteries could be the perfect power source” »

In quantum physics, a vacuum is not empty, but rather steeped in tiny fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. Until recently it was impossible to study those vacuum fluctuations directly. Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a method that allows them to characterize the fluctuations in detail.

Emptiness is not really empty – not according to the laws of quantum physics, at any rate. The vacuum, in which classically there is supposed to be “nothing,” teems with so-called vacuum fluctuations according to quantum mechanics. Those are small excursions of an electromagnetic field, for instance, that average out to zero over time but can deviate from it for a brief moment. Jérôme Faist, professor at the Institute for Quantum Electronics at ETH in Zurich, and his collaborators have now succeeded in characterizing those vacuum fluctuations directly for the first time.

“The vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field have clearly visible consequences, and among other things, are responsible for the fact that an atom can spontaneously emit light,” explains Ileana-Cristina Benea-Chelmus, a recently graduated Ph.D. student in Faists laboratory and first author of the study recently published in the scientific journal Nature. “To measure them directly, however, seems impossible at first sight. Traditional detectors for light such as photodiodes are based on the principle that light particles – and hence energy – are absorbed by the detector. However, from the vacuum, which represents the lowest energy state of a physical system, no further energy can be extracted.”

Continue reading “Fluc­tu­a­tions in the void” »

Ultra-secure online communications, completely indecipherable if intercepted, is one step closer with the help of a recently published discovery by University of Oregon physicist Ben Alemán.

Alemán, a member of the UO’s Center for Optical, Molecular, and Quantum Science, has made artificial atoms that work in ambient conditions. The research, published in the journal Nano Letters, could be a big step in efforts to develop secure quantum communication networks and all-optical quantum computing.

“The big breakthrough is that we’ve discovered a simple, scalable way to nanofabricate artificial atoms onto a microchip, and that the artificial atoms work in air and at room temperature,” said Alemán, also a member of the UO’s Materials Science Institute.

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In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle prevents an external observer from measuring both the position and speed (referred to as momentum) of a particle at the same time. They can only know with a high degree of certainty either one or the other—unlike what happens at large scales where both are known. To identify a given particle’s characteristics, physicists introduced the notion of quasi-distribution of position and momentum. This approach was an attempt to reconcile quantum-scale interpretation of what is happening in particles with the standard approach used to understand motion at normal scale, a field dubbed classical mechanics.

In a new study published in EPJ ST, Dr. J.S. Ben-Benjamin and colleagues from Texas A&M University, USA, reverse this approach; starting with quantum mechanical rules, they explore how to derive an infinite number of quasi-distributions, to emulate the classical mechanics approach. This approach is also applicable to a number of other variables found in quantum-scale particles, including particle spin.

For example, such quasi-distributions of position and momentum can be used to calculate the quantum version of the characteristics of a gas, referred to as the second virial coefficient, and extend it to derive an infinite number of these quasi-distributions, so as to check whether it matches the traditional expression of this physical entity as a joint distribution of position and momentum in classical mechanics.

Continue reading “Infinite number of quantum particles gives clues to big-picture behavior at large scale” »