Lifeboat Foundation

It was Arthur C. Clarke who famously said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (although I’d argue that Jack Kirby and Jim Starlin rather perfected the idea). Now, a group of real-life scientists at the RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences in Japan have taken it a step further: by identifying a new quantum property to measure the weirdness of spacetime, and officially calling it “magic.” From the scientific paper “Probing chaos by magic monotones,” recently published in the journal Physical Review D:

Northeastern researchers have made what they describe as a groundbreaking discovery in the field of quantum mechanics.

Wei-Chi Chiu, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern reporting to Arun Bansil, university distinguished professor of physics at Northeastern, tells Northeastern Global News that his team has published a novel study examining the nature of a specific class of subatomic particles, whose very existence has eluded quantum physicists for nearly a century.

Chiu and his colleagues propose a new theoretical framework to explain how these particles, called Weyl fermions, interact with each other in certain materials. The findings, published in Nature Communications earlier this month, look beyond the framework of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity to probe these mysterious particles, Chiu says.

A tiny vibrating crystal weighing little more than a grain of sand has become the heaviest object ever to be recorded in a superposition of locations.

Physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich coupled a mechanical resonator to a type of superconducting circuit commonly used in quantum computing to effectively replicate Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment on an unprecedented scale.

Ironically, Schrödinger would be somewhat skeptical that anything so large – well, anything at all – could exist in a nebulous state of reality.

Encoding breakthrough allows for solving wider set of applications using neutral-atom quantum computers. QuEra Computing and university researchers have developed a method to expand the optimization calculations possible with neutral-atom quantum computers. This breakthrough, published in PRX Quantum, overcomes hardware limitations, enabling solutions to more complex problems, thus broadening applications in industries like logistics and pharmaceuticals.

Topological superconductors are superconducting materials with unique characteristics, including the appearance of so-called in-gap Majorana states. These bound states can serve as qubits, making topological superconductors particularly promising for the creation of quantum computing technologies.

Some physicists have recently been exploring the potential for creating quantum systems that integrate superconductors with swirling configurations of atomic magnetic dipoles (spins), known as quantum skyrmion crystals. Most of these efforts suggested sandwiching quantum skyrmion crystals between superconductors to achieve topological superconductivity.

Kristian Mæland and Asle Sudbø, two researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, have recently proposed an alternative model system of topological superconductivity, which does not contain superconducting materials. This theoretical model, introduced in Physical Review Letters, would instead use a sandwich structure of a heavy metal, a magnetic insulator, and a normal metal, where the heavy metal induces a quantum skyrmion crystal in the magnetic insulator.

Advances in quantum computation for electronic structure, and particularly heuristic quantum algorithms, create an ongoing need to characterize the performance and limitations of these methods. Here we discuss some potential pitfalls connected with the use of hardware-efficient Ansätze in variational quantum simulations of electronic structure. We illustrate that hardware-efficient Ansätze may break Hamiltonian symmetries and yield nondifferentiable potential energy curves, in addition to the well-known difficulty of optimizing variational parameters. We discuss the interplay between these limitations by carrying out a comparative analysis of hardware-efficient Ansätze versus unitary coupled cluster and full configuration interaction, and of second-and first-quantization strategies to encode Fermionic degrees of freedom to qubits.

The quest to understand quantum mechanics has led to remarkable technological advancements, granting us power and control over the natural world. However, despite these successes, the paradoxes and mysteries surrounding the theory continue to challenge our understanding of reality. This raises the question of whether science, particularly quantum mechanics, provides us with true comprehension of the world or merely equips us with power without deeper understanding, writes John Horgan.

Understanding the interactions between quantum physics and gravity within a black hole is one of the thorniest problems in physics, but quantum computers could soon offer an answer.

By Alex Wilkins

What does quantum computing have in common with the Oscar-winning movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once”? One is a mind-blowing work of fiction, while the other is an emerging frontier in computer science — but both of them deal with rearrangements of particles in superposition that don’t match our usual view of reality.

Fortunately, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has provided a guidebook to the real-life frontier, titled “Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything.”

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