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Scientists have introduced a form of quantum entanglement known as frequency-domain photon number-path entanglement. This advance in quantum physics involves an innovative tool called a frequency beam splitter, which has the unique ability to alter the frequency of individual photons with a 50% success rate.

For years, the scientific community has delved into spatial-domain photon number-path entanglement, a key player in the realms of quantum metrology and information science.

This concept involves photons arranged in a special pattern, known as NOON states, where they’re either all in one pathway or another, enabling applications like super-resolution imaging that surpasses traditional limits, the enhancement of quantum sensors, and the development of quantum computing algorithms designed for tasks requiring exceptional phase sensitivity.

An international collaboration of researchers, led by Philip Walther at University of Vienna, have achieved a significant breakthrough in quantum technology, with the successful demonstration of quantum interference among several single photons using a novel resource-efficient platform. The work published in the prestigious journal Science Advances represents a notable advancement in optical quantum computing that paves the way for more scalable quantum technologies.

Interference among photons, a fundamental phenomenon in quantum optics, serves as a cornerstone of optical quantum computing. It involves harnessing the properties of light, such as its wave-particle duality, to induce interference patterns, enabling the encoding and processing of quantum information.

In traditional multi-photon experiments, spatial encoding is commonly employed, wherein photons are manipulated in different spatial paths to induce interference. These experiments require intricate setups with numerous components, making them resource-intensive and challenging to scale.

In a future with more ‘mind reading,’ thanks to computer-brain interfaces, we may need to rethink freedom of thought.

Scaling up qubit counts in quantum computers is at the core of achieving quantum supremacy.

Among the troublesome hurdles of this scaling-up race is refining how qubits are measured. Devices called parametric amplifiers are traditionally used to do these measurements. But as the name suggests, the device amplifies weak signals picked up from the qubits to conduct the readout, which causes unwanted noise and can lead to decoherence of the qubits if not protected by additional large components. More importantly, the bulky size of the amplification chain becomes technically challenging to work around as qubit counts increase in size-limited refrigerators.

Cue the Aalto University research group Quantum Computing and Devices (QCD). They have a hefty track record of showing how thermal bolometers can be used as ultrasensitive detectors, and they just demonstrated in an April 10 Nature Electronics paper that bolometer measurements can be accurate enough for single-shot qubit readout.

Continue reading “New method of measuring qubits promises ease of scalability in a microscopic package” »

The newly discovered type of magnetic material could improve existing tech, including making better and faster hard drives.

Entanglement is a form of correlation between quantum objects, such as particles at the atomic scale. The laws of classical physics cannot explain this uniquely quantum phenomenon, yet it is one of the properties that explain the macroscopic behavior of quantum systems.

Because entanglement is central to the way quantum systems work, understanding it better could give scientists a deeper sense of how information is stored and processed efficiently in such systems.

Qubits, or quantum bits, are the building blocks of a quantum computer. However, it is extremely difficult to make specific entangled states in many-qubit systems, let alone investigate them. There are also a variety of entangled states, and telling them apart can be challenging.

Theoretical physicists at Utrecht University, together with experimental physicists at Sogang University in South Korea, have succeeded in building an artificial synapse. This synapse works with water and salt and provides the first evidence that a system using the same medium as our brains can process complex information.

The results appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the pursuit of enhancing the energy efficiency of conventional computers, scientists have long turned to the human brain for inspiration. They aim to emulate its extraordinary capacity in various ways.

From stabilizing qubits (the basic unit of information in a quantum computer) to maintaining the superconducting properties of materials and keeping NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope cool enough to observe the heavens, ultracold refrigeration is essential to the operation of many devices and sensors. For decades, the pulse tube refrigerator (PTR) has been the workhorse device for achieving temperatures as cold as the vacuum of outer space.

These refrigerators cyclically compress (heat) and expand (cool) high pressure helium gas to achieve the “Big Chill,” broadly analogous to the way a household refrigerator uses the transformation of freon from liquid to vapor to remove heat. For more than 40 years, the PTR has proven its reliability, but it is also power-hungry, consuming more electricity than any other component of an ultralow temperature experiment.

Photonic quantum computers are computational tools that leverage quantum physics and utilize particles of light (i.e., photons) as units of information processing. These computers could eventually outperform conventional quantum computers in terms of speed, while also transmitting information across longer distances.

Despite their promise, photonic quantum computers have not yet reached the desired results, partly due to the inherently weak interactions between individual photons. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, researchers at University of Science and Technology of China demonstrated a large cluster state that could facilitate quantum computation in a photonic system, namely three-photon entanglement.

“Photonic quantum computing holds promise due to its operational advantages at room temperature and minimal decoherence,” Hui Wang, co-author of the paper, told Phys.org.