Particles with unusual properties called anyons have long been sought after as a potential building block for advanced quantum computers, and now researchers have found one – using a quantum computer.
By Alex Wilkins
Experiments that imitate solid materials with light waves reveal the quantum basis of exotic physical effects.
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Imagine having a building made of stacks of bricks connected by adaptable bridges. You pull a knob that modifies the bridges and the building changes functionality. Wouldn’t it be great?
A team of researchers led by Prof. Aitor Mugarza, from the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) and ICREA, together with Prof. Diego Peña from the Center for Research in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Materials of the University of Santiago de Campostela (CiQUS-USC), Dr. Cesar Moreno, formerly a member of ICN2’s team and currently a researcher at the University of Cantabria, and Dr. Aran Garcia-Lekue, from the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) and Ikerbasque Foundation, has done something analogous, but at the single-atom scale, with the aim of synthesizing new carbon-based materials with tunable properties.
Continue reading “Engineering graphene-based quantum circuits with atomic precision” »
Something not musk:
No one will ever be able to see a purely mathematical construct such as a perfect sphere. But now, scientists using supercomputer simulations and atomic resolution microscopes have imaged the signatures of electron orbitals, which are defined by mathematical equations of quantum mechanics and predict where an atom’s electron is most likely to be.
Scientists at UT Austin, Princeton University, and ExxonMobil have directly observed the signatures of electron orbitals in two different transition-metal atoms, iron (Fe) and cobalt (Co) present in metal-phthalocyanines. Those signatures are apparent in the forces measured by atomic force microscopes, which often reflect the underlying orbitals and can be so interpreted.
Continue reading “Supercomputing simulations spot electron orbital signatures” »
Out of all common refrains in the world of computing, the phrase “if only software would catch up with hardware” would probably rank pretty high. And yet, software does sometimes catch up with hardware. In fact, it seems that this time, software can go as far as unlocking quantum computations for classical computers. That’s according to researchers with the RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing, Japan, who have published work on an algorithm that significantly accelerates a specific quantum computing workload. More significantly, the workload itself — called time evolution operators — has applications in condensed matter physics and quantum chemistry, two fields that can unlock new worlds within our own.
Normally, an improved algorithm wouldn’t be completely out of the ordinary; updates are everywhere, after all. Every app update, software update, or firmware upgrade is essentially bringing revised code that either solves problems or improves performance (hopefully). And improved algorithms are nice, as anyone with a graphics card from either AMD or NVIDIA can attest. But let’s face it: We’re used to being disappointed with performance updates.
Albert Einstein wasn’t entirely convinced about quantum mechanics, suggesting our understanding of it was incomplete. In particular, Einstein took issue with entanglement, the notion that a particle could be affected by another particle that wasn’t close by.
Experiments since have shown that quantum entanglement is indeed possible and that two entangled particles can be connected over a distance. Now a new experiment further confirms it, and in a way we haven’t seen before.
In the new experiment, scientists used a 30-meter-long tube cooled to close to absolute zero to run a Bell test: a random measurement on two entangled qubit (quantum bit) particles at the same time.
Year 2021 face_with_colon_three
Georgia Tech quantum field theory researcher Tim Andersen grounds reality in Will, rather than Mind, as envisioned by Bernardo Kastrup and the cosmopsychists.
Summary: For the first time, Google Quantum AI has observed the peculiar behavior of non-Abelian anyons, particles with the potential to revolutionize quantum computing by making operations more resistant to noise.
Non-Abelian anyons have the unique feature of retaining a sort of memory, allowing us to determine when they have been exchanged, even though they are identical.
The team successfully used these anyons to perform quantum computations, opening a new path towards topological quantum computation. This significant discovery could be instrumental in the future of fault-tolerant topological quantum computing.
