Lifeboat Foundation

In a significant leap for the field of quantum computing, Google has reportedly engineered a quantum computer that can execute calculations in mere moments that would take the world’s most advanced supercomputers nearly half a century to process.

The news, reported by the Daily Telegraph, could signify a landmark moment in the evolution of this emerging technology.

Quantum computing, a science that takes advantage of the oddities of quantum physics, remains a fast-moving and somewhat contentious field.

Google claims to have proved its supremacy over conventional machines with new quantum computer.

Google has developed a quantum computer that instantly makes calculations that would take the best existing supercomputers 47 years, in a breakthrough meant to establish beyond doubt that the experimental machines can outperform conventional rivals.

A paper from researchers at Google published online claims that the company’s latest technology is “beyond the capabilities of existing classical supercomputers”.

Whether it’s baking a cake, constructing a building, or creating a quantum device, the caliber of the finished product is greatly influenced by the components or fundamental materials used. In their pursuit to enhance the performance of superconducting qubits, which form the bedrock of quantum computers, scientists have been probing different foundational materials aiming to extend the coherent lifetimes of these qubits.

Coherence time serves as a metric to determine the duration a qubit can preserve quantum data, making it a key performance indicator. A recent revelation by researchers showed that the use of tantalum in superconducting qubits enhances their functionality. However, the underlying reasons remained unknown – until now.

Scientists from the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), the Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage (C2QA), and Princeton University investigated the fundamental reasons that these qubits perform better by decoding the chemical profile of tantalum.

Today’s encryption schemes will be vulnerable to future quantum computers, but new algorithms and a quantum internet could help.

A system using photonics-based synthetic dimensions could be used to help explain complex natural phenomena.

Researchers at the University of Rochester have developed a chip-scale optical quantum simulation system using controlled photon.

A photon is a particle of light. It is the basic unit of light and other electromagnetic radiation, and is responsible for the electromagnetic force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature. Photons have no mass, but they do have energy and momentum. They travel at the speed of light in a vacuum, and can have different wavelengths, which correspond to different colors of light. Photons can also have different energies, which correspond to different frequencies of light.

Computers are built around logic: performing mathematical operations using circuits. Logic is built around things such as Adders—not the snake; the basic circuit that adds together two numbers. This is as true of today’s microprocessors as all those going back to the very beginning of computing history. You could go back to an abacus and find that, at some fundamental level, it does the same thing as your shiny gaming PC. It’s just much, much less capable.

Nowadays, processors can do a lot of mathematical calculations using any number of complex circuits in a single clock. And a lot more than just add two numbers together, too. But to get to your shiny new gaming CPU, there has been a process of iterating on the classical computers that came before, going back centuries.

A team led by Academician Prof. Guangcan Guo from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) provides a comprehensive overview of the progress achieved in the field of quantum teleportation. The team, which includes Prof. Xiaomin Hu, Prof. Yu Guo, Prof. Biheng Liu, and Prof. Chuanfeng Li from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), CAS, was invited to publish a review paper on quantum teleportation in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Review Physics. The paper was officially released online on May 24.

As one of the most important protocols in the field of quantum information, quantum teleportation has attracted great attention since it was proposed in 1993. Through entanglement distribution and Bell-state measurement, quantum teleportation enables the nonlocal transmission of an unknown quantum state, which has deepened the understanding of quantum entanglement. More importantly, quantum teleportation can effectively overcome the distance limitation of direct transmission of quantum states in quantum communication, as well as realize long-range interactions between different quantum bits in quantum computing.

Performing computation using quantum-mechanical phenomena such as superposition and entanglement.

Quantum physics governs the world of the very small and that of the very cold. Your dog cannot quantum-tunnel her way through the fence, nor will you see your cat exhibit wave-like properties. But physics is funny, and it is continually surprising us. Quantum physics is starting to show up in unexpected places. Indeed, it is at work in animals, plants, and our own bodies.

We once thought that biological systems are too warm, too wet, and too chaotic for quantum physics to play any part in how they work. But it now seems that life is employing feats of quantum physics every day in messy, real-world systems, including quantum tunneling, wave-particle duality, and even entanglement. To see how it all works, we can start by looking right inside our own noses.

The human nose can distinguish over one trillion smells. But how exactly the sense of smell works is still a mystery. When a molecule referred to as an odorant enters our nose, it binds to receptors. Initially, the prevailing theory held that these receptors used the shape of the odorants to differentiate smells. The so-called lock and key model suggests that when an odorant finds the right receptor, it fits into it and triggers a specific smell. But the lock and key model ran into trouble when tested. Subjects were able to tell two scents apart, even when the odorant molecules were identical in shape. Some other process must be at work.

The discovery of quantum Hall effects during the 1980s unveiled new forms of matter termed “Laughlin states”, named after the American Nobel laureate who successfully characterized them theoretically.

These exotic states uniquely appear in two-dimensional materials, under extremely cold conditions, and when subjected to a profoundly strong magnetic field. In a Laughlin state, electrons constitute an unusual liquid, where each electron dances around its congeners while avoiding them as much as possible.

Exciting such a quantum liquid generates collective states that physicists associate with fictitious particles, whose properties drastically differ from electrons: 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.