Lifeboat Foundation

Noisy intermediate-scale quantum algorithms, which run on noisy quantum computers, should be carefully designed to boost the output state fidelity. While several compilation approaches have been proposed to minimize circuit errors, they often omit the detailed circuit structure information that does not affect the circuit depth or the gate count. In the presence of spatial […]…

Entangled photons of light have been sent through a loop of conventional optical fibre under the noisy New York streets – a starting point to building an unhackable quantum internet.

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Humongous Fungus, a specimen of Armillaria ostoyae, has claimed the title of world’s largest single organism. Though it features honey mushrooms above ground, the bulk of this creature’s mass arises from its vast subterranean mycelial network of filamentous tendrils. It has spread across more than 2,000 acres of soil and weighs over 30,000 metric tons. Yet I would contend that Humongous Fungus represents a mere microcosm of the world’s true largest organism, a creature that I will call Cyborg Earth. What is Cyborg Earth? Eastern religions have suggested that all life is fundamentally interconnected. Cyborg Earth represents an extension of this concept.

All across the globe, biological life thrives. Quintillions upon quintillions of biomolecular computations happen every second, powering all life. Mycoplasma bacteria. Communities of leafcutter ants. The Humongous Fungus. Beloved beagles. Seasonal influenza viruses. Parasitic roundworms. Families of Canadian elk. Vast blooms of cyanobacteria. Humanity. Life works because of complexity that arises from simplicity that in turn arises from whatever inscrutable quantum mechanical rules lay beneath the molecular scale.

All creatures rearrange atoms in various ways. Termites and beavers rearrange larger bunches of atoms than most organisms. As humans progressed from paleolithic to metalwork to industrialization and then to the space age, information revolution, and era of artificial intelligence, they learned to converse with the atoms around them in an ever more complex fashion. We are actors in an operatic performance, we are subroutines of evolution, we are interwoven matryoshka patterns, an epic chemistry.

Decide: mapping a path forward

Once you have put your organization in context and understood exposure to risk, the third step is making suggestions toward a response plan.

Learn how to use the quantum Fourier transform (QFT) to do basic arithmetic.

Shortly after Max Planck shook the scientific world with ideas about the fundamental quantization of energy, researchers built and leveraged theories of quantum mechanics to resolve physical phenomena that had previously been unexplainable, including the behavior of heat in solids and light absorption on an atomic level. In the 120-plus years since, researchers have looked beyond physics and used quantum theory’s same perplexing — even “spooky,” according to Einstein — laws to solve inexplicable phenomena in a variety of other disciplines.

Today, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, are applying quantum mechanics to biology to better understand of one of nature’s biggest mysteries — magnetosensitivity, an organism’s ability to sense Earth’s magnetic field and use it as a tool to adjust some biological processes. And they’ve found some surprising results.

Continue reading “Researchers Use Quantum Biology to Understand Human Response to Earth’s Magnetic Field” »

Exciting.

The search for the chemical origins of life represents a long-standing and continuously debated enigma. Despite its exceptional complexity, in the last decades the field has experienced a revival, also owing to the exponential growth of the computing power allowing for efficiently simulating the behavior of matter—including its quantum nature—under disparate conditions found, e.g., on the primordial Earth and on Earth-like planetary systems (i.e., exoplanets). In this minireview, we focus on some advanced computational methods capable of efficiently solving the Schrödinger equation at different levels of approximation (i.e., density functional theory)—such as ab initio molecular dynamics—and which are capable to realistically simulate the behavior of matter under the action of energy sources available in prebiotic contexts.

Some classical computers have error correction built into their memories based on bits; quantum computers, to be workable in the future, will need error correction mechanisms, too, based on the vastly more sensitive qubits.

Cornell researchers have recently taken a step toward fault-tolerant quantum computing: they constructed a simple model containing exotic particles called non-Abelian anyons, compact and practical enough to run on modern quantum hardware. Realizing these particles, which can only exist in two dimensions, is a move towards implementing it in the real world.

Thanks to some creative thinking, Yuri Lensky, a former Bethe/Wilkins/Kavli Institute at Cornell (KIC) postdoctoral fellow in physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), collaborating with Eun-Ah Kim, professor of physics (A&S), came up with a simple “recipe” that could be used for robustly computing with non-Abelian anyons, including specific instructions for executing the effect experimentally on devices available today.

A team led by Prof. Zeng Changgan and Associate Researcher Li Lin from the University of Science and Technology (USTC) / Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Key Laboratory of Strongly-Coupled Quantum Matter Physics, collaborating with Prof. Feng Ji’s team from Peking University, revealed significant quantum interference effect in inter-layer transport process for the first time using graphene-based electronic double-layer systems. Their work was published in Nature Communications.

Coulomb drag is an effect that occurs between two conductive layers in proximity but insulated from each other, wherein moving carriers in one layer (active layer) induces the transport of carriers in the other layer (passive layer), thereby generating an open-circuit voltage in the passive layer.

Coulomb drag has been widely applied in previous studies of long-range interactions between carriers, such as the Bose-Einstein condensation of indirect excitons. However, there is a lack of research on the external field response and possible quantum effects of the Coulomb drag.