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Madhumita Murgia Hi, my name is Madhumita Murgia, and I’m one of the presenters of Tech Tonic. We’re looking for some feedback from our listeners about the show. So if you have a second, please fill out our brief listener survey, which you can find at ft.com/techtonicsurvey.

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In this season of Tech Tonic, we’ve been talking about quantum computers and why some people think they’re so revolutionary. But so far we’ve mainly talked about the things quantum computers can do, or at least what they might be able to do in the future that makes them so groundbreaking: performing calculations that should take centuries in minutes, cracking the unbreakable codes of the internet, dramatically speeding up the development of new drugs and materials. But what we haven’t done yet is look at why they’re able to do these things. What’s going on inside a quantum computer that makes them so extraordinary, so completely different to any computer that’s come before.

A model system created by stacking a pair of monolayer semiconductors is giving physicists a simpler way to study confounding quantum behavior, from heavy fermions to exotic quantum phase transitions.

The group’s paper, “Gate-Tunable Heavy Fermions in a Moiré Kondo Lattice,” published March 15 in Nature. The lead author is postdoctoral fellow Wenjin Zhao in the Kavli Institute at Cornell.

The project was led by Kin Fai Mak, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Jie Shan, professor of applied and engineering physics in Cornell Engineering and in A&S, the paper’s co-senior authors. Both researchers are members of the Kavli Institute; they came to Cornell through the provost’s Nanoscale Science and Microsystems Engineering (NEXT Nano) initiative.

This appears to be the year that IBM’s Quantum Computing program reaches the tipping point. IBM and the Cleveland Clinic Foundation just announced the first deployment of an onsite, private sector, IBM-managed quantum computer in the United States. However, beyond the placement of a 127-qubit IBM Eagle quantum processor in a cafeteria at Cleveland Clinic’s main campus, this announcement signals a major leap forward for quantum computing applications.

Of course, the most immediate question is, why install a quantum computer in a cafeteria? Although this may seem like a frivolous question, it gets to a major point of this article. The IBM Eagle class quantum processor has been installed in a highly visible location in the Cleveland Clinic so that biomedical researchers and physicians can start thinking about the most productive ways to use this resource. These are very early days for the development of quantum computing applications, so installing the IBM Eagle quantum processor in the cafeteria, visited daily by nearly everyone working at the Cleveland Clinic, seems like an extremely creative way of keeping the machine ever present in the minds of people working at the facility.

Dr Lara Jehi, who became Cleveland Clinic’s first Chief Research Information Officer in 2020, said that there are many areas of interest in medical research with computational ceilings that block further advances. Quantum processing may help break through those ceilings. Researchers at Cleveland Clinic, working with IBM data scientists, combed through the possible avenues for research, discipline by discipline, to identify the projects most likely to bear fruit when matched to quantum processing’s current capabilities. “Quantum is still a nascent technology,” said Jehi.

“We have taken a vital first step towards harnessing quantum light for practical use.”

Scientists have for the first time shown that they can control and distinguish tiny quantities of interacting photons — or packets of light energy — with high correlation, according to a study published in Nature.

Harnessing quantum light for practical use.

Continue reading “Scientists ‘control’ quantum light for the first time, achieving landmark” »

Quantum ‘turnout’ device has a switching speed four to five orders of magnitude faster than that of current solid-state transistors.

Australian scientists have recreated a famous experiment and confirmed quantum physics’s bizarre predictions about the nature of reality, by proving that reality doesn’t actually exist until we measure it — at least, not on the very small scale.

That all sounds a little mind-meltingly complex, but the experiment poses a pretty simple question: if you have an object that can either act like a particle or a wave, at what point does that object ‘decide’?

Our general logic would assume that the object is either wave-like or particle-like by its very nature, and our measurements will have nothing to do with the answer. But quantum theory predicts that the result all depends on how the object is measured at the end of its journey. And that’s exactly what a team from the Australian National University has now found.

Since the recent announcements of OpenView’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Baidu’s ChatBot, the industry has been in a frenzy advancing Generative AI products and solutions. Brainy Insights estimates that the generative AI market will grow from USD $8.65 billion in 2022 and reach USD 4188.62 billion by 2032. This translates to over 36% CAGR making generative AI one of the next hottest areas to elevate AI innovations. The software segment will account for the highest revenue share of 65.0% in 2021 and is expected to retain its position over the forecast period.

What is Generative AI?

Generative AI is a form of AI that produce various types of content including text, imagery, audio and synthetic data. The recent buzz around generative AI has been driven by the simplicity of new user interfaces for creating high-quality text, graphics and videos in a matter of seconds. Although not a new technology, the introduction of generative adversarial networks, or GANs which is a type of machine learning algorithm has advanced the innovations in using this form of AI.

Continue reading “COQUI : A Generative AI Speech Innovation Will Revolutionize This Market” »

The very word ‘quantum’ makes people’s imaginations run wild. But chances are you’ve fallen for at least one of these myths.

Researchers have demonstrated quantum gate operations in a system where voltage pulses cause neighboring electron spins to swap with one another.