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Category: quantum physics – Page 402

Photonic Quantum Computer Claims Speedup “Advantage”

O.o!!!! Year 2022

A new photonic quantum computer takes just 36 microseconds to perform a task that would take a conventional supercomputer more than 9,000 years to complete. The new device, named Borealis, is the first quantum computer from a startup to display such “quantum advantage” over regular computers. Borealis is also the first machine capable of quantum advantage to be made available to the public over the cloud.

Quantum computers can theoretically achieve a quantum advantage that enables them to find the answers to problems no classical computers could ever solve. The more components known as qubits that a quantum computer has, the greater its computational power can grow, in an exponential fashion.

Many companies, including giants such as Google, IBM, and Amazon as well as startups such as IonQ, rely on qubits based on superconducting circuits or trapped ions. One drawback with these approaches is that they both demand temperatures colder than those found in deep space, because heat can disrupt the qubits. The expensive, bulky cryogenic systems required to hold qubits at such frigid temperatures can also make it a major challenge to scale these platforms up to high numbers of qubits—or to smaller and more portable form factors.

Study reports first realization of a Laughlin state in ultracold atoms

The discovery of the quantum Hall effects in the 1980s revealed the existence of novel states of matter called “Laughlin states,” in honor of the American Nobel prize winner who successfully characterized them theoretically. These exotic states specifically emerge in 2D materials, at very low temperature and in the presence of an extremely strong magnetic field.

In a Laughlin state, electrons form a peculiar liquid, where each electron dances around its congeners while avoiding them as much as possible. Exciting such a generates collective states that physicists associate with fictitious particles, whose properties drastically differ from : these “anyons” carry a fractional charge (a fraction of the elementary charge) and they surprisingly defy the standard classification of particles in terms of bosons or fermions.

For many years, physicists have explored the possibility of realizing Laughlin states in other types of systems than those offered by solid-state materials, in view of further analyzing their peculiar properties. However, the required ingredients (the 2D nature of the system, the intense magnetic field, the strong correlations among the particles) has proved extremely challenging.

Microsoft places its bets on quantum computing

Microsoft today announced its roadmap for building its own quantum supercomputer, using the topological qubits the company’s researchers have been working on for quite a few years now. There are still plenty of intermediary milestones to be reached, but Krysta Svore, Microsoft’s VP of advanced quantum development, told us that the company believes that it will take fewer than 10 years to build a quantum supercomputer using these qubits that will be able to perform a reliable one million quantum operations per second. That’s a new measurement Microsoft is introducing as the overall industry aims to move beyond the current era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing.

We think… More.

At its Ignite conference, Microsoft today put its stake in the ground and discussed its progress in building a quantum computer and giving developers tools to experiment with this new computing paradigm on their existing machines.

There’s a lot to untangle here, and few people will claim that they understand the details of quantum computing. What Microsoft has done, though, is focus on a different aspect of how quantum computing can work — and that may just allow it to get a jump on IBM, Google and other competitors that are also looking at this space. The main difference between what Microsoft is doing is that its system is based on advances in topology that the company previously discussed. Most of the theoretical work behind this comes from Fields Medal-recipient Michael Freedman, who joined Microsoft Research in 1997, and his team.


What topology does is that it gives you this ability to have much better fidelity, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for quantum research Todd Holmdahl told me. If you look at our competitors, some of them have three nines of fidelity and we could be at a thousand or ten thousand times that. That means a logical qubit, we could potentially implement it with 10 physical qubits. What the team essentially did is use Freedman’s theories to implement the error correction that’s so central to quantum computing at the physical level. I’m not going to pretend I really understand what topological qubits are, but it’s essentially harder to disturb than classical qubits (and in quantum computing, even at at the lowest currently achievable temperatures, you always need to account for some noise that can disturb the system’s state).

The quantum internet just got one step closer to reality thanks to new resonator breakthrough

A new kind of resonator has the ability to transmit quantum information using single photons from a silicon device tipped with a few dozen erbium atoms.

The quantum internet just got one step closer to reality thanks to a new breakthrough that allows the encoded quantum information to be transmitted over distance.

The quantum internet offers the promise of perfect information security on a quantum mechanical level in the transmission of information using qubits, which will decompose into random information if anyone were to try and intercept it.

Chinese researchers used a quantum processor to simulate black hole-like conditions

They created a quantum system with properties analogous to black holes.

A collaborative effort from research teams across multiple organizations in China was successful in using quantum computing technology to test Hawking Radiation, the theory proposed by renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, the South China Morning Post.

Quantum computing is a complex field that involves using mathematics, computer science, and physics to solve complex problems. Interesting Engineering recently reported how a quantum computer recently beat a conventional supercomputer at complex math.

Record Temperatures in the North Atlantic

Lot’s of science news, stay till the end for the climate stuff.

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Today we’ll talk about plants that use quantum mechanics, the first data from a new galaxy survey, quantum utility, online hate groups, photonic computing, the most sensitive power measurement ever, how to map a tunnel with muons, bad climate news that I don’t want to talk about, and you don’t want to hear, but that we need to talk about anyway. And of course, the telephone will ring.

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Waves of Light Can Be ‘Frozen’ in 3D Materials, According to a New Simulation

Scientists have solved a decades-long mystery on whether light can be effectively trapped in a 3D forest of microscopic particles.

Using a new method for crunching vast sums in a model of particle interactions, a team of physicists in the US and France revealed conditions under which a wave of light can be brought to a standstill by defects in the right kind of material.

Known as Anderson localization, after US theoretical physicist Philip W. Anderson, electrons can become trapped (localized) in disordered materials with randomly distributed abnormalities. Its proposal in 1958 was a significant moment in contemporary condensed matter physics, applying across quantum as well as classical mechanics.