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Category: quantum physics – Page 672

Found: A Quadrillion Ways for String Theory to Make Our Universe

Circa 2019

According to string theory, all particles and fundamental forces arise from the vibrational states of tiny strings. For mathematical consistency, these strings vibrate in 10-dimensional spacetime. And for consistency with our familiar everyday experience of the universe, with three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time, the additional six dimensions are “compactified” so as to be undetectable.

Different compactifications lead to different solutions. In string theory, a “solution” implies a vacuum of spacetime that is governed by Einstein’s theory of gravity coupled to a quantum field theory. Each solution describes a unique universe, with its own set of particles, fundamental forces and other such defining properties.

Some string theorists have focused their efforts on trying to find ways to connect string theory to properties of our known, observable universe—particularly the standard model of particle physics, which describes all known particles and all their mutual forces except gravity.

New Computer Chip with Human Brain Cells

How the Matrix begins…

The technology I want to talk about today is something out of this world, but also a bit controversial There is a startup in Australia who are actually growing live human neurons and then integrating it into traditional computer chips… mind-blowing stuff!

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Physicists Caught Sound Moving at Two Different Speeds in 3D Quantum Gas

After previously studying the phenomena of two sound waves in quantum liquids, scientists have now observed sound moving at two different speeds in a quantum gas.

If you were somehow immersed in the three-dimensional gas used for this study, you would hear every sound twice: each individual sound carried by two different sound waves moving at two different speeds.

This is an important development in the field of superfluidity – fluids with no viscosity that can flow without any loss of energy.

Collapsing a leading theory for the quantum origin of consciousness

The origin of consciousness is one of the greatest mysteries of science. One proposed solution, first suggested by Nobel Laureate and Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hammeroff, at Arizona State University, in Tucson, attributes consciousness to quantum computations in the brain. This in turn hinges on the notion that gravity could play a role in how quantum effects disappear, or “collapse.” But a series of experiments in a lab deep under the Gran Sasso mountains, in Italy, has failed to find evidence in support of a gravity-related quantum collapse model, undermining the feasibility of this explanation for consciousness. The result is reported in the journal Physics of Life Reviews.

“How consciousness arises in the brain is a huge puzzle,” says Catalina Curceanu, a member of the physics think tank, the Foundational Questions Institute, FQXi, and the lead physicist on the experiments at INFN in Frascati, Italy. “There are many competing ideas, but very few can be experimentally tested.”

Quantum physics famously tells us that cats can be alive and dead at the same time, at least in . Yet in practice we never see felines locked in such an unfortunate limbo state. One popular explanation for why not is because the “wavefunction” of a system–its quantum character allowing it to be in two contradictory states simultaneously–is more likely to “collapse” or be destroyed if it is more massive, leaving it in one defined state, either dead or alive, say, but not both at the same time. This model of collapse, related to gravity acting on heavy objects like cats, was invoked by Penrose and Hammeroff when developing their model of consciousness, ‘Orch OR theory’ (the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory), in the 1990s.

Theory suggests quantum computers should be exponentially faster on some learning tasks than classical machines

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S., including Google Quantum AI, and a colleague in Australia, has developed a theory suggesting that quantum computers should be exponentially faster on some learning tasks than classical machines. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their theory and results when tested on Google’s Sycamore quantum computer. Vedran Dunjko with Leiden University City has published a Perspective piece in the same journal issue outlining the idea behind combining quantum computing with machine learning to provide a new level of computer-based learning systems.

Machine learning is a system by which computers trained with datasets make informed guesses about new data. And quantum computing involves using sub-atomic particles to represent qubits as a means for conducting applications many times faster than is possible with . In this new effort, the researchers considered the idea of running machine-learning applications on quantum computers, possibly making them better at learning, and thus more useful.

To find out if the idea might be possible, and more importantly, if the results would be better than those achieved on classical computers, the researchers posed the problem in a novel way—they devised a task that would learn via experiments repeated many times over. They then developed theories describing how a quantum system could be used to conduct such experiments and to learn from them. They found that they were able to prove that a quantum could do it, and that it could do it much better than a classical system. In fact, they found a reduction in the required number of experiments needed to learn a concept to be four orders of magnitude lower than for classical systems. The researchers then built such a system and tested it on Google’s Sycamore quantum computer and confirmed their theory.

Glimpses of quantum computing phase changes show researchers the tipping point

Researchers at Duke University and the University of Maryland have used the frequency of measurements on a quantum computer to get a glimpse into the quantum phenomena of phase changes—something analogous to water turning to steam.

By measuring the number of operations that can be implemented on a quantum computing system without triggering the collapse of its quantum state, the researchers gained insight into how other systems—both natural and computational—meet their tipping points between phases. The results also provide guidance for working to implement that will eventually enable quantum computers to achieve their full potential.

The results appeared online June 3 in the journal Nature Physics.

Pink Noise as a Probe of Quantum Transport

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Noise in an electronic circuit is a nuisance that can scramble information or reduce a detector’s sensitivity. But noise also offers a way to learn about the microscopic quantum mechanisms at play in a material or device. By measuring a circuit’s “shot noise,” a form of white noise, researchers have previously shed light on conduction in quantum Hall and spintronic systems, for instance. Now, a collaboration led by Oren Tal at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, and by Dvira Segal at the University of Toronto, Canada, has shown that an easier-to-measure form of noise, called “flicker noise,” can also be a powerful probe of quantum effects [1].

Flicker noise is a type of pink noise, whose spectrum is dominated by low frequencies—the kind of noise associated with light rainfall. Flicker noise also appears in electrical circuits, but its connection to microscopic transport channels remains poorly understood. To investigate this connection, the team studied an atomic-scale junction between two wires. They modeled the electrons passing through the junction as coherent quantum-mechanical waves that scatter off fluctuating defects located near the junction. These fluctuations can represent the trapping and releasing of electrons by static defects, the movement of charged impurities between lattice sites, and the fluctuations of atoms and molecules adsorbed on surfaces.

By comparing calculations with experiments on junctions with different parameters, the team showed that flicker noise can be connected to the number of quantum conduction channels and to the contributions of the individual channels to the overall conduction, providing similar information to shot noise. Since flicker-noise measurements are widely used, they could now be applied to shed light on quantum and many-body effects in a broad range of nanoscale electronic devices, the researchers say.

New Class of Atom Cooled to Near Absolute Zero

Researchers have cooled indium atoms to a temperature close to 1 mK, making indium the first group-III atom to be made ultracold.

At temperatures near to absolute zero, atoms move slower than a three-toed sloth, allowing physicists to gain unprecedented experimental control over these systems. New phases of matter can form when atoms become ultracold and quirky quantum properties can emerge, yet much of the periodic table remains unexplored in the ultracold regime. Now, Travis Nicholson of the National University of Singapore and colleagues have successfully cooled indium to close to 1 mK [1]. Indium is the first “main group-III” atom—a specific group of transition metals on the periodic table—to be cooled to such a low temperature. The demonstration opens the door to studying systems with properties previously unexplored by ultracold physicists.

For their experiments, Nicholson and colleagues used a magneto-optical trap—a standard tool for trapping and cooling atoms. But because this was the first attempt at making indium atoms ultracold, the team had to make their own version of the apparatus rather than using one designed to cool other atoms. “The systems used for this research are highly customized to specific atoms,” Nicholson says. So every part of the setup from designing the laser systems to picking the screws had to be “hashed out by us.” With their custom setup, the group loaded 500,000,000 indium atoms into the trap using a laser beam and then cooled them.

Eternal matter waves

Imagining our everyday life without lasers is difficult. We use lasers in printers, CD players, pointers, measuring devices, etc. What makes lasers so special is that they use coherent waves of light: all the light inside a laser vibrates completely in sync.

Meanwhile, quantum mechanics tells us that particles like atoms should also be considered waves. As a result, we can build ‘atom lasers’ containing coherent waves of matter. But can we make these matter waves last so they may be used in applications? In research that was published in Nature, a team of Amsterdam physicists shows that the answer to this question is affirmative.

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