Lifeboat Foundation

Recently, a team of chemists, mathematicians, physicists and nano-engineers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands developed a device to control the emission of photons with unprecedented precision. This technology could lead to more efficient miniature light sources, sensitive sensors, and stable quantum bits for quantum computing.

A new method developed by Amsterdam researchers uses non-Gaussian states to efficiently describe and configure quantum spin-boson systems, promising advancements in quantum computing and sensing.

Many modern quantum devices operate using groups of qubits, or spins, which have just two energy states: ‘0’ and ‘1’. However, in actual devices, these spins also interact with photons and phonons, collectively known as bosons, making the calculations much more complex. In a recent study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers from Amsterdam have developed a method to effectively describe these spin-boson systems. This breakthrough could help in efficiently setting up quantum devices to achieve specific desired states.

Quantum devices use the quirky behavior of quantum particles to perform tasks that go beyond what ‘classical’ machines can do, including quantum computing, simulation, sensing, communication, and metrology. These devices can take many forms, such as a collection of superconducting circuits, or a lattice of atoms or ions held in place by lasers or electric fields.

Water is usually something you’d want to keep away from electronic circuits, but engineers in Germany have now developed a new concept for water-based switches that are much faster than current semiconductor materials.

Transistors are a fundamental component of electronic systems, and in a basic sense they process data by switching between conductive and non-conductive states – zeroes and ones – as the semiconductor materials in them encounter electrical currents. The speed of this switching (along with the number of transistors in a chip) is a primary factor in how fast a computer system can be.

Now, researchers at Ruhr University Bochum have developed a new type of circuit that can switch much faster than existing semiconductor materials. The key ingredient is, surprisingly, water, with iodide ions dissolved into it to make it salty. A custom-made nozzle fans this water out into a flattened jet only a few microns thick.

The team spent years perfecting an intricate process for manufacturing two-dimensional arrays of atom-sized qubit microchiplets and transferring thousands of them onto a carefully prepared complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) chip. This transfer can be performed in a single step.

“We will need a large number of qubits, and great control over them, to really leverage the power of a quantum system and make it useful. We are proposing a brand new architecture and a fabrication technology that can support the scalability requirements of a hardware system for a quantum computer,” says Linsen Li, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on this architecture.

The gallium nitride purple surface-emitting laser with a power conversion efficiency of more than 20%. Credit: Tetsuya Takeuchi / Meijo University.

Gallium nitride (GaN) vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) are semiconductor laser diodes with promising applications in various fields, including adaptive headlights, retinal scanning displays, point-of-care testing systems, and high-speed visible light communication systems. Their high efficiency and low manufacturing costs make them especially appealing for these applications.

GaN-VCSELs are composed of two layers of special semiconductor mirrors, called distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs), separated by active GaN-semiconductor layers, which form the optical resonant cavity, where laser light is generated. The length of this resonant cavity is crucial for controlling the target laser wavelength, called the resonance wavelength.

Ask anyone working in quantum computing and they may tell you they have been dealing with the frustratingly contrarian and intricately delicate state of entanglement since the beginning of time. However, a new study suggests this might be impossible. In fact, entanglement may have been absent in the earliest moments of the universe, researchers are reporting — a hypothesis that would — if validated — challenge our understanding of quantum mechanics and the nature of time itself.

The research, detailed in a paper by Jim Al-Khalili, of the University of Surrey and Eddy Keming Chen, University of California, San Diego and published on the pre-print server ArXiv, explores the so-called entanglement past hypothesis. In the study, the researchers explore why time only flows in one direction, a fundamental concept in both quantum physics and thermodynamics.

According to the researchers the concept of quantum entanglement, where two particles become so deeply linked that their properties seem to remain interconnected regardless of the distance between them, is central to modern quantum mechanics. It’s also a key ingredient for the potential of quantum computers to tackle massively complex calculations. It’s also why quantum computing is so vexing, because entanglement can be disrupted by external influences, leading to a process known as decoherence.

Swiss startup claims its Neuroplatform is a first for biocomputing.

Transistors are the basis for microchips and the whole electronic industry. The invention of transistors, by Bardeen and Brattain in 1947, awarded with a Nobel prize, is regarded as one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century.

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The rate at which the universe is currently expanding is known as the Hubble Rate. In recent years, different measurements have given different results for the Hubble rate, a discrepancy between theory and observation that’s been called the “Hubble tension”. Now, a team of astrophysicists claims the Hubble tension is gone and it’s the fault of supernovae data. Let’s have a look.

Continue reading “A Huge Cosmology Problem Might Just Have Disappeared” »