Lifeboat Foundation

The exotic particles are called non-Abelian anyons, or nonabelions for short, and their Borromean rings exist only as information inside the quantum computer. But their linking properties could help to make quantum computers less error-prone, or more ‘fault-tolerant’ — a key step to making them outperform even the best conventional computers. The results, revealed in a preprint on 9 May¹, were obtained on a machine at Quantinuum, a quantum-computing company in Broomfield, Colorado, that formed as the result of a merger between the quantum computing unit of Honeywell and a start-up firm based in Cambridge, UK.

“This is the credible path to fault-tolerant quantum computing,” says Tony Uttley, Quantinuum’s president and chief operating officer.

Other researchers are less optimistic about the virtual nonabelions’ potential to revolutionize quantum computing, but creating them is seen as an achievement in itself. “There is enormous mathematical beauty in this type of physical system, and it’s incredible to see them realized for the first time, after a long time,” says Steven Simon, a theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford, UK.

Scientists at a UK-based tech company believe they are now a step closer to building a quantum computer that can solve real-world problems, after making progress towards creating a system that protects against errors.

Experts at Quantinuum said they have made a “breakthrough” towards making quantum computing fault tolerant, which would give the system the ability to continue operating without interruption, even if one or more of its components fail.

The race to build a fully functional quantum computer has mostly focused on correcting errors that affect the system, but Ilyas Khan, the company’s founder and chief product officer, said no-one has shown “an actual demonstration of a step towards qubits, the quantum equivalent of what we refer to as a ‘bit’ in existing computers, that are naturally fault tolerant”.

Understanding the possible quantum-driven behaviors of biological systems could aid in treating injuries or in developing cures for diseases, but research in the field has been pushed to the sidelines. It’s time for that to change.

A quantum photonic device can perform some real-world tasks more efficiently than classical computers.

Experiments probing quasiparticles in semiconductor microcavities offer unprecedented insights into the dynamics of quantum fluids of light.

Superfluidity [1, 2], the ability of a fluid to flow without friction, isn’t restricted to systems described by hydrodynamics. Over a decade ago, optics researchers started to take an interest in superfluids and other quantum fluids [3], driven by the realization that light propagating in a nonlinear medium can exhibit quantum hydrodynamics features [4]. Two platforms emerged for the study of these “fluids of light”: semiconductor microcavities in which photons are confined [5] and propagating geometries in which photons travel in a bulk medium [6–8]. Both configurations allow photons to acquire an effective mass and experience an effective mutual interaction—properties that can lead them to collectively behave as a quantum fluid.

Physicists have discovered “stacked pancakes of liquid magnetism” that may account for the strange electronic behavior of some layered helical magnets.

The materials in the study are magnetic at cold temperatures and become nonmagnetic as they thaw. Experimental physicist Makariy Tanatar of Ames National Laboratory at Iowa State University noticed perplexing electronic behavior in layered helimagnetic crystals and brought the mystery to the attention of Rice theoretical physicist Andriy Nevidomskyy, who worked with Tanatar and former Rice graduate student Matthew Butcher to create a computational model that simulated the quantum states of atoms and electrons in the layered materials.

Magnetic materials undergo a “thawing” transition as they warm up and become nonmagnetic. The researchers ran thousands of Monte Carlo computer simulations of this transition in helimagnets and observed how the magnetic dipoles of atoms inside the material arranged themselves during the thaw. Their results were published in a recent study in Physical Review Letters.

Loophole-free Bell experiment performed over 30 metres.

A group of researchers led by Andreas Wallraff, Professor of Solid State Physics at ETH Zurich, has performed a loophole-free Bell test to disprove the concept of “local causality” formulated by Albert Einstein in response to quantum mechanics.

By showing that quantum mechanical objects that are far apart can be much more strongly correlated with each other than is possible in conventional systems, the researchers have provided further confirmation for quantum mechanics. What’s special about this experiment is that the researchers were able for the first time to perform it using superconducting circuits, which are considered to be promising candidates for building powerful quantum computers.

A Bell test is based on an experimental setup that was initially devised as a thought experiment by British physicist John Bell in the 1960s. Bell wanted to settle a question that the greats of physics had already argued about in the 1930s: Are the predictions of quantum mechanics, which run completely counter to everyday intuition, correct, or do the conventional concepts of causality also apply in the atomic microcosm, as Albert Einstein believed?

In a result decades in the making, Los Alamos scientists have achieved light amplification with electrically driven devices based on solution-cast semiconductor nanocrystals—tiny specs of semiconductor matter made via chemical synthesis and often called colloidal quantum dots.

This demonstration, reported in the journal Nature, opens the door to a completely new class of electrically pumped lasing devices—highly flexible, solution-processable laser diodes that can be prepared on any crystalline or non-crystalline substrate without the need for sophisticated vacuum-based growth techniques or a highly controlled clean-room environment.

“The capabilities to attain light amplification with electrically driven colloidal quantum dots have emerged from decades of our previous research into syntheses of nanocrystals, their photophysical properties and optical and electrical design of quantum dot devices,” said Victor Klimov, Laboratory Fellow and leader of the quantum dot research initiative.