Researchers at the University of Basel and Ruhr University Bochum have developed a source of single photons that can produce billions of these quantum particles per second. With its record-breaking efficiency, the photon source represents a new and powerful building-block for quantum technologies.
BMW takes first steps into the quantum computing revolution.
A radically different type of computation is gradually maturing.
Fast-forwarding quantum calculations skips past the time limits imposed by decoherence, which plagues today’s machines.
A new algorithm that fast forwards simulations could bring greater use ability to current and near-term quantum computers, opening the way for applications to run past strict time limits that hamper many quantum calculations.
“Quantum computers have a limited time to perform calculations before their useful quantum nature, which we call coherence, breaks down,” said Andrew Sornborger of the Computer, Computational, and Statistical Sciences division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and senior author on a paper announcing the research. “With a new algorithm we have developed and tested, we will be able to fast forward quantum simulations to solve problems that were previously out of reach.”
Well, maybe they would be good memories. 😃
Quantum computers, according to experts, will one day be capable of performing incredible calculations and nearly unfathomable feats of logic. In the near future, we know they’ll help us discover new drugs to fight disease and new materials to build with. But the far future potential for these enigmatic machines is as vast as the universe itself.
The realm of classic science fiction is littered with ideas that today’s experts believe lie within the realm of reality – if not today’s reality, then perhaps tomorrow’s quantum computer-laden one. One of those ideas comes straight out of a Paul Verhoeven film from over thirty years ago: Total Recall.
In fairness, the film (we’re talking about the 1990 one starring the former governor of California not the 2012 remake) was based on a short story by Phillip K Dick. But for the purposes of this article we’ll be discussing the movie’s depiction of “Rekall,” a mysterious company portrayed in the film.
Researchers perform experiments that can add or subtract a single quantum of sound—with surprising results when applied to noisy sound fields.
Quantum mechanics tells us that physical objects can have both wave and particle properties. For instance, a single particle—or quantum—of light is known as a photon, and, in a similar fashion, a single quantum of sound is known as a phonon, which can be thought of as the smallest unit of sound energy.
A team of researchers spanning Imperial College London, University of Oxford, the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Bath, and the Australian National University have performed an experiment that can add or subtract a single phonon to a high-frequency sound field using interactions with laser light.
“With this approach, we don’t try to eliminate noise in the surroundings; instead, we “trick” the system into thinking it doesn’t experience the noise,” first author Kevin Miao, postdoctoral researcher at UChicago, said in the statement.
They used both electromagnetic pulses and a continuous alternating magnetic field to keep the quantum system under control. They then tuned this magnetic field in just such a way, that the rest of the noise was simply tuned out.
“To get a sense of the principle, it’s like sitting on a merry-go-round with people yelling all around you,” Miao explained in the statement. “When the ride is still, you can hear them perfectly, but if you’re rapidly spinning, the noise blurs into a background.”
Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have put forward a detailed plan of how faster and better defined quantum bits — qubits — can be created. The central elements are magnetic atoms from the class of so-called rare-earth metals, which would be selectively implanted into the crystal lattice of a material. Each of these atoms represents one qubit. The researchers have demonstrated how these qubits can be activated, entangled, used as memory bits, and read out. They have now published their design concept and supporting calculations in the journal PRX Quantum.
On the way to quantum computers, an initial requirement is to create so-called quantum bits or “qubits”: memory bits that can, unlike classical bits, take on not only the binary values of zero and one, but also any arbitrary combination of these states. “With this, an entirely new kind of computation and data processing becomes possible, which for specific applications means an enormous acceleration of computing power,” explains PSI researcher Manuel Grimm, first author of a new paper on the topic of qubits.
Researchers at Osaka City University use quantum superposition states and Bayesian inference to create a quantum algorithm, easily executable on quantum computers, that accurately and directly calculates energy differences between the electronic ground and excited spin states of molecular systems in polynomial time.
Understanding how the natural world works enables us to mimic it for the benefit of humankind. Think of how much we rely on batteries. At the core is understanding molecular structures and the behavior of electrons within them. Calculating the energy differences between a molecule’s electronic ground and excited spin states helps us understand how to better use that molecule in a variety of chemical, biomedical and industrial applications. We have made much progress in molecules with closed-shell systems, in which electrons are paired up and stable. Open-shell systems, on the other hand, are less stable and their underlying electronic behavior is complex, and thus more difficult to understand. They have unpaired electrons in their ground state, which cause their energy to vary due to the intrinsic nature of electron spins, and makes measurements difficult, especially as the molecules increase in size and complexity.
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory and collaborators at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the University of Alabama at Birmingham have discovered a new light-induced switch that twists the crystal lattice of the material, switching on a giant electron current that appears to be nearly dissipationless. The discovery was made in a category of topological materials that holds great promise for spintronics, topological effect transistors, and quantum computing.
Weyl and Dirac semimetals can host exotic, nearly dissipationless, electron conduction properties that take advantage of the unique state in the crystal lattice and electronic structure of the material that protects the electrons from doing so. These anomalous electron transport channels, protected by symmetry and topology, don’t normally occur in conventional metals such as copper. After decades of being described only in the context of theoretical physics, there is growing interest in fabricating, exploring, refining, and controlling their topologically protected electronic properties for device applications. For example, wide-scale adoption of quantum computing requires building devices in which fragile quantum states are protected from impurities and noisy environments. One approach to achieve this is through the development of topological quantum computation, in which qubits are based on “symmetry-protected” dissipationless electric currents that are immune to noise.
“Light-induced lattice twisting, or a phononic switch, can control the crystal inversion symmetry and photogenerate giant electric current with very small resistance,” said Jigang Wang, senior scientist at Ames Laboratory and professor of physics at Iowa State University. “This new control principle does not require static electric or magnetic fields, and has much faster speeds and lower energy cost.”
