A multi-institutional team of scientists in the United States, led by physicist Peng Wei at the University of California, Riverside, has developed a new superconductor material that could potentially be used in quantum computing and be a candidate “topological superconductor.”
The most recent email you sent was likely encrypted using a tried-and-true method that relies on the idea that even the fastest computer would be unable to efficiently break a gigantic number into factors.
Quantum computers, on the other hand, promise to rapidly crack complex cryptographic systems that a classical computer might never be able to unravel. This promise is based on a quantum factoring algorithm proposed in 1994 by Peter Shor, who is now a professor at MIT.
But while researchers have taken great strides in the last 30 years, scientists have yet to build a quantum computer powerful enough to run Shor’s algorithm.
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) scientists confirm the identification of a new class of semiconductor nanocrystals with bright ground-state excitons, a significant advancement in the field of optoelectronics, in an article published in the American Chemical Society (ACS) journal ACS Nano.
The groundbreaking theoretical research could revolutionize the development of highly efficient light-emitting devices and other technologies.
Generally, the lowest-energy exciton in nanocrystals is poorly emitting, earning the name “dark” exciton. Because it slows the emission of light, the dark exciton limits the performance of nanocrystal-based devices like lasers or light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Scientists have long sought to overcome the dark exciton.
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A new approach to quantum computing — working with photons, or \.
A device that sorts photon states could lead to a basic component of an all-optical quantum computer.
But despite creating all these breakthrough technologies, physicists and philosophers who study quantum mechanics still haven’t come up with the answers to some big questions raised by the field’s founders. Given recent developments in quantum information science, researchers like me are using quantum information theory to explore new ways of thinking about these unanswered foundational questions. And one direction we’re looking into relates Albert Einstein’s relativity principle to the qubit.
Quantum computers
Quantum information science focuses on building quantum computers based on the quantum “bit” of information, or qubit. The qubit is historically grounded in the discoveries of physicists Max Planck and Einstein. They instigated the development of quantum mechanics in 1900 and 1905, respectively, when they discovered that light exists in discrete, or “quantum,” bundles of energy.
Amid ongoing human clinical trials, there is still a long way to go before neural chips are commonplace in clinics.
Engineers have developed the world’s first quantum microprocessor chip for simulating large and complex molecular structures.
Researchers have advanced smart coatings by manipulating nanoparticles to reconfigure themselves by using microscopy and computer simulation.
