Lifeboat Foundation

Superconductors have intrigued physicists for decades. But these materials, which allow the perfect, lossless flow of electrons, usually only exhibit this quantum-mechanical peculiarity at temperatures so low—a few degrees above absolute zero—as to render them impractical.

A research team led by Harvard Professor of Physics and Applied Physics Philip Kim has demonstrated a new strategy for making and manipulating a widely studied class of higher-temperature superconductors called cuprates, clearing a path to engineering new, unusual forms of superconductivity in previously unattainable materials.

Using a uniquely low-temperature device fabrication method, Kim and his team report in the journal Science a promising candidate for the world’s first high-temperature, superconducting diode—essentially, a switch that makes current flow in one direction—made out of thin cuprate crystals.

“Even now, quantum systems can serve as scientific tools,” Oliver Dial, IBM Quantum CTO told IE in an interview. Quantum utility might already be here, but will we soon see a company achieve quantum advantage?

But what exactly does that mean?

Continue reading “IBM’s Quantum System Two will help it unlock the ‘full power of quantum computing’” »

Quantum computers could become more useful now researchers at Google have designed an algorithm that can translate complex physical problems into the language of quantum physics.

By Alex Wilkins

Growing old may come with more aches and pains attached, but new research suggests there’s a bigger picture to look at: by reaching our dotage, we might actually be helping the evolution of our species.

Once assumed to be an inevitable consequence of living in a rough-and-tumble world, aging is now considered something of a mystery. Some species barely age at all, for example. One of the big questions is whether aging is simply a by-product of biology, or something that comes with an evolutionary advantage.

The new research is based on a computer model developed by a team from the HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research in Hungary which suggests old age can be positively selected for in the same way as other traits.

Germany-based startup Zander Laboratories signed a contract worth €30 million ($32.9 million) to develop neurotechnological prototypes. Zander signed the contract with The German Agency for Innovation…

“Now, it is possible to teleport information so that it never physically travels across the connection — a “Star Trek” technology made real,” said researcher.

Scientists have been making discoveries in the quantum computing realm. In another leap, researchers successfully deployed the principles of quantum physics and transported information in the form of light patterns without physically moving the image itself.

According to a statement by the researchers, scientists demonstrated the quantum transport of the highest dimensionality of information to date. Particularly highlighting, the use of a teleportation-inspired configuration so that the information does not physically travel between the two communicating parties.

Continue reading “Quantum-inspired tech teleports data with light, like ‘Star Trek’” »

Much like the humans that created them, computers find physics hard, but quantum mechanics even harder. But a new technique created by three University of Chicago scientists allows computers to simulate certain challenging quantum mechanical effects in complex electronic materials with far less effort.

By making these simulations more accurate and efficient, the scientists hope the technique could help discover new molecules and materials, such as new types of solar cells or quantum computers.

“This advance holds immense potential for furthering our understanding of molecular phenomena, with significant implications for chemistry, material science, and related fields,” said scientist Daniel Gibney, a University of Chicago Ph.D. student in chemistry and first author on the paper, published Dec. 14 in Physical Review Letters.

IBM introduces introducing two new metrics — error per layered gate (EPLG) and CLOPSh — to fully encapsulate the performance of 100+ qubit processors powering this utility-scale era.

Layer fidelity provides a benchmark that encapsulates the entire processor’s ability to run circuits while revealing information about individual qubits, gates, and crosstalk. It expands on a well-established way to benchmark quantum computers, called randomized benchmarking. With randomized benchmarking, we add a set of randomized Clifford group gates (that’s the basic set of gates we use: X, Y, Z, H, SX, CNOT, ECR, CZ, etc.) to the circuit, then run an operation that we know, mathematically, should represent the inverse of the sequence of operations that precede it.

If any of the qubits do not return to their original state by the inverse operation upon measurement, then we know there was an error. We extract a number from this experiment by repeating it multiple times with more and more random gates, plotting on a graph how the errors increase with more gates, fitting an exponential decay to the plot, and using that line to calculate a number between 0 and 1, called the fidelity.

Continue reading “Updating how we measure quantum quality and speed” »

Companies and countries are in a race to develop quantum computers. The machines could revolutionize problem solving in medicine, physics, chemistry and engineering.