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Category: computing – Page 255

Another concern was the dissipation of electrical power on the Enchilada Trap, which could generate significant heat, leading to increased outgassing from surfaces, a higher risk of electrical breakdown and elevated levels of electrical field noise. To address this issue, production specialists designed new microscopic features to reduce the capacitance of certain electrodes.

“Our team is always looking ahead,” said Sandia’s Zach Meinelt, the lead integrator on the project. “We collaborate with scientists and engineers to learn about the kind of technology, features and performance improvements they will need in the coming years. We then design and fabricate traps to meet those requirements and constantly seek ways to further improve.”

Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Sandia Labs has major research and development responsibilities in nuclear deterrence, global security, defense, energy technologies and economic competitiveness, with main facilities in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Livermore, California.

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Graphene nanoribbons have outstanding properties that can be precisely controlled. Researchers from Empa and ETH Zurich, in collaboration with partners from Peking University, the University of Warwick and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, have succeeded in attaching electrodes to individual atomically precise nanoribbons, paving the way for precise characterization of the fascinating ribbons and their possible use in quantum technology.

Quantum technology is promising, but also perplexing. In the coming decades, it is expected to provide us with various technological breakthroughs: smaller and more precise sensors, highly secure communication networks, and powerful computers that can help develop new drugs and materials, control financial markets, and predict the weather much faster than current computing technology ever could.

To achieve this, we need so-called quantum materials: substances that exhibit pronounced quantum . One such material is . This two-dimensional structural form of carbon has unusual physical properties, such as extraordinarily high tensile strength, thermal and electrical conductivity—as well as certain . Restricting the already two-dimensional material even further, for instance, by giving it a ribbon-like shape, gives rise to a range of controllable quantum effects.

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“There’s no road map,” said Michael Sipser, a veteran complexity theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who spent years grappling with the problem in the 1980s. “It’s like you’re going into the wilderness.”

It seems that proving that computational problems are hard to solve is itself a hard task. But why is it so hard? And just how hard is it? Carmosino and other researchers in the subfield of meta-complexity reformulate questions like this as computational problems, propelling the field forward by turning the lens of complexity theory back on itself.

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Computer simulations confirm that the African Superplume causes the unusual deformations and rift-parallel seismic anisotropy detected below the East African Rift System.

Continental rifting involves a combination of stretching and fracturing that penetrates deep within the Earth, explains geophysicist D. Sarah Stamps. This process pertains to the elongation of the lithosphere, Earth’s rigid outer layer. As it becomes more taut, the lithosphere’s upper sections undergo brittle changes, leading to rock fractures and earthquakes.

Stamps, who studies these processes by using computer modeling and GPS.

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Trinity’s quantum physicists in collaboration with IBM Dublin have successfully simulated super diffusion in a system of interacting quantum particles on a quantum computer.

This is the first step in doing highly challenging quantum transport calculations on quantum hardware and, as the hardware improves over time, such work promises to shed new light in condensed matter physics and materials science.

The work is one of the first outputs of the TCD-IBM predoctoral scholarship programwhich was recently established where IBM hires Ph.D. students as employees while being co-supervised at Trinity. The paper was published recently in npj Quantum Information.

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Not many pure-play quantum computing start-ups have dared to go public. So far, the financial markets have tended to treat the newcomers unsparingly. One exception is IonQ, who along with D-Wave and Rigetti, reported quarterly earnings last week. Buoyed by hitting key technical and financial goals, IonQ’s stock is up ~400% (year-to-date) and CEO Peter Chapman is taking an aggressive stance in the frothy quantum computing landscape where error correction – not qubit count – has increasingly taken center stage as the key challenge.

This is all occurring at a time when a wide variety of different qubit types are vying for dominance. IBM, Google, and Rigetti are betting on superconducting-based qubits. IonQ and Quantinuuum use trapped ions. Atom Computing and QuEra use neutral atoms. PsiQuantum and Xanadu rely on photonics-based qubits. Microsoft is exploring topological qubits based on the rare Marjorana particle. And more are in the works.

It’s not that the race to scale up qubit-count has ended. IBM has a 433-plus qubit device (Osprey) now and is scheduled to introduce 1100-qubit device (Condor) late this year. Several other quantum computer companies have devices in the 50–100 qubit range. IonQ’s latest QPU, Forte, has 32 qubits. The challenge they all face is that current error rates remain so high that it’s impractical to reliably run most applications on the current crop of QPUs.

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Published: August 8, 2023 8.29am EDT

Alexis souchet, university of southern california.

The big idea.

Some employers are excited about swapping out computer monitors for virtual reality headsets, but the side effects of using VR are not completely understood. In a recent study, my colleagues and I propose 90 factors that could influence VR side effects in the workplace. In another study, we suggest guidelines to reduce these negative symptoms.

-In defense everything has negative syptoms. Nothing is perfect, and everything has negative things in it. If things were perfect we would be living in a much better world. Take religion for example, and they pay no tax.

Trading in PC monitors for VR headsets can cause workers to experience dizziness, headaches and nausea. Researchers are beginning to understand why and what can be done to minimize the effects.

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Researchers have found a way to control the interaction of light and quantum ‘spin’ in organic semiconductors, that works even at room temperature.

Spin is the term for the intrinsic angular momentum of electrons, which is referred to as up or down. Using the up/down spin states of electrons instead of the 0 and 1 in conventional computer logic could transform the way in which computers process information. And sensors based on quantum principles could vastly improve our abilities to measure and study the world around us.

An international team of researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, has found a way to use particles of light as a ‘switch’ that can connect and control the spin of electrons, making them behave like tiny magnets that could be used for quantum applications.

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Research is underway around the world to find alternatives to our current electronic computing technology, as great, electron-based systems have limitations. A new way of transmitting information is emerging from the field of magnonics. Instead of electron exchange, the waves generated in magnetic media could be used for transmission, but magnonics-based computing has been (too) slow to date.

Scientists at the University of Vienna have now discovered a significant new method. When the intensity is increased, the spin become shorter and faster—another step towards magnon computing. The results are published in the journal Science Advances.

Magnonics is a relatively new field of research in magnetism in which spin waves play a central role. A local disturbance in the magnetic order of a magnet can propagate as waves through a material. These waves are called spin waves, and the associated quasiparticles are called magnons. They carry information in the form of angular momentum pulses. Because of this property, they can be used as low-power data carriers in smaller and more energy-efficient computers of the future.

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