In a new Physical Review Letters study, scientists have demonstrated the first experimental observation of non-Hermitian edge burst in quantum dynamics using a carefully designed photonic quantum walk setup.
The apparent weirdness of the quantum world is often exemplified by the paradox of Schrödinger’s imaginary cat that exists in a limbo state of being both alive and dead until looked upon by an observer. But in the real world we never encounter such zombie felines.
Although systems consisting of many interacting small particles can be highly complex and chaotic, some can nonetheless be described using simple theories. Does this also pertain to the world of quantum physics?
Solving the problem of error is essential for the practical application of quantum computing technologies that surpass the performance of digital computers. Information input into a qubit, the smallest unit of quantum computation, is quickly lost and error-prone.
According to Zander, the company’s recent work builds on a blockbuster advance that Microsoft and Quantinuum announced in the spring.
Zander writes: “In April, we announced that we’re entering the next phase for solving meaningful problems with reliable quantum computers by demonstrating the most reliable logical qubits with an error rate 800x better than physical qubits.” He adds, “In less than six months, our improved qubit-virtualization system tripled reliable logical qubit counts.”
The advance goes to the heart of a primary challenge in quantum computing today: the unreliability of physical qubits, which are prone to errors due to their highly sensitive nature. Microsoft addressed this issue by creating logical qubits, which are collections of physical qubits working together to correct errors and maintain coherence.
Typically, electrons are free agents that can move through most metals in any direction. When they encounter an obstacle, the charged particles experience friction and scatter randomly like colliding billiard balls.
But in certain exotic materials, electrons can appear to flow with single-minded purpose. In these materials, electrons may become locked to the material’s edge and flow in one direction, like ants marching single-file along a blanket’s boundary. In this rare “edge state,” electrons can flow without friction, gliding effortlessly around obstacles as they stick to their perimeter-focused flow. Unlike in a superconductor, where all electrons in a material flow without resistance, the current carried by edge modes occurs only at a material’s boundary.
Now MIT physicists have directly observed edge states in a cloud of ultracold atoms. For the first time, the team has captured images of atoms flowing along a boundary without resistance, even as obstacles are placed in their path. The results, which appear in Nature Physics (“Observation of chiral edge transport in a rapidly rotating quantum gas”), could help physicists manipulate electrons to flow without friction in materials that could enable super-efficient, lossless transmission of energy and data.
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I got a bunch of requests to comment on a new attempt at a theory of everything that supposedly combines quantum physics with general relativity. I had a look, and this is a quick comment. First reaction, basically. Didn’t get far in the paper, as you will see. I am sorry in case I appear unkind, but this kind of stuff really pisses me off.
Continue reading “A New Theory of Everything Just Dropped!” »
While it has been suggested that low-energy experiments might allow to find evidence for quantization of gravity, direct detection of single gravitons has normally been considered a hopeless task. Here, the authors suggest that a massive body cooled to the ground state in a gravitational wave background should display detectable stimulated single gravitonions.
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Could something in the future alter the past, so that effect came before cause? Does quantum mechanics truly allow this, as often hinted?
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The graviton – a hypothetical particle that carries the force of gravity – has eluded detection for over a century. But now physicists have designed an experimental setup that could in theory detect these tiny quantum objects.
In the same way individual particles called photons are force carriers for the electromagnetic field, gravitational fields could theoretically have its own force-carrying particles called gravitons.
The problem is, they interact so weakly that they’ve never been detected, and some physicists believe they never will.
