Digitising Business —
At the bleeding edge of AI: Quantum grocery picking and transfer learning.
Computer vision, neural nets, and deep learning are hot topics at UK R&D centres.
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Category: quantum physics – Page 803
After some weeks’ hiatus, Quanta for Breakfast is back! Today I want to give my thoughts on the Fault-Tolerant Quantum Technologies Workshop that I attended this summer in Benasque, Spain. It was my first time visiting the beautiful town and both the location and the workshop definitely lived up to my expectations.
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Stockholm: The Nobel Physics prize was the second of the awards to be given away, on Tuesday, to a Birtish trio — scientists David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz for revealing the secrets of exotic matter.
Thouless, 82, is professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. Haldane, 65, is a professor at Princeton University, and Kosterlitz, born in 1942, teaches at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. The laureates will share the eight million Swedish kronor (around $931,000 or 834,000 euros) prize sum. Thouless won one-half of the prize, while Haldane and Hosterlitz share the other half.
“This year’s laureates opened the door on an unknown world where matter can assume strange states. They have used advanced mathematical methods to study unusual phases, or states, of matter, such as superconductors, superfluids or thin magnetic films. Thanks to their pioneering work, the hunt is now on for new and exotic phases of matter,” said the Nobel jury.
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Single neutral atoms trapped individually in optical microtraps are incredibly useful tools for studying quantum physics, as the atoms then exist in complete isolation from the environment. Arrays of optical microtraps containing single atoms could enable quantum logic devices, quantum information processing, and quantum simulation.
While single atom trapping has already been achieved, there are still many challenges to overcome. One such challenge is making sure each trap holds no more than one atom at a time, and also keeping it there so it won’t escape. This requires uniform optical microtraps, which have yet been fully realized.
Now, Ken’ichi Nakagawa and co‐workers at the University of Electro‐Communications, Tokyo, Japan, together with scientists across Japan and China, have successfully demonstrated an optimization method for ensuring the creation of uniform holographic microtrap arrays to capture single rubidium (87Rb) atoms.
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This type of computer not really 4 personal use. Because it calculates in every possible way its task in a fraction of second. I belive that this type of computer is built to run ai. Or to run recognition software just to give example. But just imagine the possibilities.
Quantum physics, with its descriptions of bizarre properties like entanglement and superposition, can sound like a science fiction fever dream. Yet this branch of physics, no matter how counterintuitive it seems sometimes, describes the universe all around us: As physicists have told often told me, we live in a quantum world. Soon, this will be better reflected in our technology, and everything it can do.
“We’re moving towards a new paradigm for computation,” quantum information scientist Michele Mosca, who’s based at the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, recently told me. He compared this shift in thinking to when humanity abandoned the flat Earth hypothesis and accepted that our world is round.
Most people will be familiar with Moore’s Law which states that the number of transistors it’s possible to get on a microprocessor doubles every 18 months. If this holds true it means that some time in the 2020s we’ll be measuring these circuits on an atomic scale.
You might think that that’s where everything comes to a juddering halt. But the next step from this is the creation of quantum computers which use the properties of atoms and molecules to perform processing and memory tasks.
If this all sounds a bit sci-fi, it’s because practical quantum computers are still some way in the future. However, scientists have already succeeded in building basic quantum computers that can perform certain calculations. And when practical quantum computing does arrive it has the potential to bring about a change as great as that delivered by the microchip.
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In Brief.
Researchers have published a paper demonstrating how they were able to create the first fully programmable and reprogrammable quantum computer in the world. Other quantum computers in existence at the moment can only run one type of operation.
While several other teams and companies, including computer technology giant IBM, are in on the race towards quantum computing, all the quantum computers presented thus far can only run one type of operation—which is ironic, seeing as quantum computers can theoretically run more operations than there are atoms in the universe.
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Machines enrich and enhance our lives, whether it’s the smartphones that allow us to stay connected or the supercomputers that solve our toughest computational problems. Imagine how much more productive and innovative our world will be when computers become infinitely more powerful. Indeed, the growing field of quantum computing may make our current technological capacities look feeble and primitive in comparison. It could even transform the workings of the human brain and revolutionize how we think in ways we can’t begin to imagine.
Today, computers operate at the most basic level by manipulating two states: a zero or a one. In contrast, quantum computers are not limited to two states, but can encode information in multiple states that exist in superposition, also known as quantum bits or qubits.
In other words, this technology takes advantage of one of the most fascinating properties of the quantum world: the ability of subatomic particles to exist in more than one state at any given time. Consequently, a quantum computer can perform many calculations at the same time, whereas a traditional Turing machine can only perform a single calculation at once. Such quantum machines will be millions of times more powerful than our most powerful current computers.
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If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? The obvious answer is yes—a tree falling makes a sound whether or not we hear it—but certain experts in quantum mechanics argue that without an observer, all possible realities exist. That means that the tree both falls and doesn’t fall, makes a sound and is silent, and all other possibilities therein. This was the crux of the debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein. Learn more about it in the video below.
Does reality exist when we’re not watching?
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Winfried Hensinger is the director of the Sussex Centre for Quantum Technologies in England, and he has spent a lifetime devoted to studying the ins and outs of quantum mechanics and just what it can do for us. When Hensinger first started in the field, quantum computing was still very much a theory, but now it is all around us, and various projects are within reach of creating a universal quantum computer. So, now that scientists are taking quantum computing more seriously it won’t be long before the field begins to explode and applications that we never even imagined possible will become available to use.
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