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Nov 8, 2019

Engineers aren’t trained to be ethical—and that needs to change

Posted by in categories: business, energy

This summer, the FaceApp debate exploded on social media, as people questioned the motives of the Russian engineers behind the technology that scanned millions of people’s faces, with no indication of what happened to the data given to the app.

Privacy is presumably top of mind for the general public, but people’s urge to literally see the face of their own future selves seemed to outweigh that threat.

FaceApp may serve no benefit beyond entertainment. But today, every company effectively becomes a tech company by leveraging advanced data analytics to fuel their business.

Nov 8, 2019

Holographic Duality Yields Breakthrough in Black Hole Physics

Posted by in categories: cosmology, quantum physics

A group of Skoltech researchers led by Professor Anatoly Dymarsky studied the emergence of generalized thermal ensembles in quantum systems with additional symmetries. As a result, they found that black holes thermalize the same way ordinary matter does. The results of their study were published in Physical Review Letters.

The physics of black holes remains an elusive chapter of modern physics. It is the sharpest point of tension between quantum mechanics and the theory of general relativity. According to quantum mechanics, black holes should behave like other ordinary quantum systems. Yet, there are many ways in which this is problematic from the point of view of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Therefore, the question of understanding black holes quantum mechanically remains a constant source of physical paradoxes. The careful resolution of such paradoxes should provide us a clue as to how quantum gravity works. That is why the physics of black holes is the subject of active research in theoretical physics.

One particularly important question is how black holes thermalize. A recent study undertaken by a group of Skoltech researchers found that in this regard black holes are not that different from ordinary matter. Namely, the emergence of equilibrium can be explained in terms of the same mechanism as in the conventional case. An analytical study of black holes became possible due to the rapidly developing theoretical tools of the so-called holographic duality. This duality maps certain types of conventional quantum systems to particular cases of quantum gravity systems. Although additional work is necessary to extend this similarity to thermalization dynamics, this work provides additional support for the paradigm that important aspects of black holes and quantum gravity, in general, can be explained in terms of the collective dynamics of conventional quantum many-body systems.

Nov 8, 2019

Meet the scientist who thinks we all exist in multiple universes

Posted by in categories: alien life, information science, quantum physics

Have you ever laid wide-awake in the late hours of the night wondering what your life would look like if you took that other job, moved countries, or ended up with someone else? While there’s no definite answer — and probably never will be — the idea that there’s multiple versions of you, living in various universes, isn’t as make-believe as you might think.

According to Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology and author of Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, the increasingly popular theory of Many Worlds Interpretation suggests every fundamental event has multiple possible outcomes and splits the world into alternate realities.

This mind-bending idea originally came from Hugh Everett, a graduate student who wrote just one paper in the 1950s. Everett’s theory describes the universe as a “changing set of numbers, known as the wave function, that evolves according to a single equation.” According to Many Worlds, the universe continually splits into new branches, to produce multiple versions of ourselves. Carroll argues that, so far, this interpretation is the simplest possible explanation of quantum mechanics.

Nov 8, 2019

Microsoft’s better quantum computer tech is almost ready

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

Microsoft’s new approach to quantum computing is “very close,” an executive says.

Nov 8, 2019

An Introduction to Quantum Microwaves for Communication and Sensing

Posted by in categories: futurism, quantum physics

In this interview, AZoNano speaks to Frank Deppe, Junior Group Leader for Superconducting Quantum Circuits at the Walther-Meißner-Institut, about QMiCS and the work that it does.

Can you give a brief overview European Quantum Technology Flagship Program ‘QMiCS’?

The project acronym ‘QMiCS’ means “Quantum Microwaves for Communication and Sensing”. QMiCS is one out of 20 projects which got funded in the highly competitive first call of the European Quantum Technology Flagship Program. Within this program, QMiCS is still a basic science project, where academic research groups collaborate with selected commercial companies. The main task of QMiCS is to explore the potential of non-classical propagating microwaves, whose behavior is controlled by the laws of quantum mechanics, for future applications and commercial exploitation.

Nov 8, 2019

Even In A Quantum Universe, Space And Time Might Be Continuous, Not Discrete

Posted by in category: quantum physics

When you hear ‘quantum,’ you probably think of splitting everything into discrete, indivisible chunks. That’s not necessarily right.

Nov 8, 2019

Google’s Sycamore breakthrough doesn’t spell the end for China’s hopes of winning quantum computer race

Posted by in categories: quantum physics, supercomputing

After the US tech giant announced it had developed a chip that dramatically outperformed supercomputers, Chinese researchers remain confident they can find the ‘holy grail’ of technology.

Nov 8, 2019

Frequency combs shape the future of light

Posted by in categories: physics, transportation

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the first time an optical-frequency comb was used to measure the atomic hydrogen 1S-2S optical transition frequency, which was achieved at the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik (MPQ) in Garching, Germany. Menlo Systems, which was founded soon afterwards as a spin-off from MPQ, has been commercializing and pioneering the technology ever since.

Today, optical frequency combs (OFCs) are routinely employed in applications as diverse as time and frequency metrology, spectroscopy, telecommunications, and fundamental physics. The German company’s fibre-based systems, and its proprietary “figure 9” laser mode-locking technology, have set the precedent for the most stable, reliable, robust, and compact optical frequency combs available on the market today.

An optical frequency comb exploits laser light that comprises up to 106 equidistant, phase-stable frequencies to measure other unknown frequencies with exquisite precision, and with absolute traceability when compared against a radiofrequency standard. The most common and versatile approach to create an OFC is to stabilize an ultrafast mode-locked laser, in which pulses of light bounce back and forth in an optical cavity. The frequency spectrum of the resulting pulse train is a series of very sharp peaks that are evenly spaced in frequency, like the teeth of a comb.

Nov 8, 2019

Researchers model avalanches in two dimensions

Posted by in category: food

There’s a structural avalanche waiting inside that box of Rice Krispies on the supermarket shelf. Cornell researchers are now closer to understanding how those structures behave — and in some cases, behave unusually.

The researchers, led by James Sethna, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, have for the first time rendered a model for crackling noise in two dimensions. Their paper, “Unusual Scaling for Two-Dimensional Avalanches: Curing the Faceting and Scaling in the Lower Critical Dimension,” was published Oct. 30 in Physical Review Research. The paper’s lead author was Lorien X. Hayden, M.S. ‘15, Ph.D. ‘19, and co-author was Archishman Raju, M.S. ‘16, Ph.D. ‘18.

Milk enters Rice Krispies through a process known as “fluid invasion,” which is similar to the oil industry’s method of pumping pressurized water into porous sandstone to push out oil. The resulting noise — the cereal’s famous “snap, crackle and pop” — is a type of tiny “avalanche” that indicates a burst of milk invading pores in the puffed rice. Each avalanche is essentially composed of smaller-scale versions of itself, a proportionality shaped by “power law” distribution. Crackling noise also describes earthquakes, magnets and many other systems.

Nov 8, 2019

DSU gets nearly $240,000 research grant from Army

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, military, quantum physics

The Department of Defense has awarded Dr. Gour Pati, professor of Physics and Engineering at Delaware State University a $239,908 grant from the U.S. Army to develop and build a millimeter-wave quantum sensing system at DSU.

Dr. Pati – the principal investigator – and his researchers have recognized the increasing importance of millimeter-wave sensing and imaging in commercial and military sectors, as well as how it is driving the development of low-cost sensors. Dr. Pati’s success in winning the DoD grant engages DSU scientists and students in the work of furthering this advancement.

Rydberg atoms have a hypersensitive response to microwave, millimeter-wave and terahertz radiation. They have the potential for applications in modern communications, remote sensing and many other fields, including medical science. Pati and his team will develop a real-time millimeter-wave sensor using laser-induced fluorescence in Rydberg atoms.