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Quantum circuits still can’t outperform classical ones when simulating molecules.
Quantum computers promise to directly simulate systems governed by quantum principles, such as molecules or materials, since the quantum bits themselves are quantum objects. Recent experiments have demonstrated the power of these devices when performing carefully chosen tasks. But a new study shows that for problems of real-world interest, such as calculating the energy states of a cluster of atoms, quantum simulations are no more accurate than those of classical computers [1]. The results offer a benchmark for judging how close quantum computers are to becoming useful tools for chemists and materials scientists.
Richard Feynman proposed the idea of quantum computers in 1982, suggesting they might be used to calculate the properties of quantum matter. Today, quantum processors are available with several hundred quantum bits (qubits), and some can, in principle, represent quantum states that are impossible to encode in any classical device. The 53-qubit Sycamore processor developed by Google has demonstrated the potential to perform calculations in a few days that would take many millennia on current classical computers [2]. But this “quantum advantage” is achieved only for selected computational tasks that play to these devices’ strengths. How well do such quantum computers fare for the sorts of everyday challenges that researchers studying molecules and materials actually wish to solve?
Researchers at Purdue University have discovered new waves with picometer-scale spatial variations of electromagnetic fields that can propagate in semiconductors like silicon. The research team, led by Dr. Zubin Jacob, Elmore Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Department of Physics and Astronomy, published their findings in Physical Review Applied in a paper titled “Picophotonics: Anomalous Atomistic Waves in Silicon.”
“The word microscopic has its origins in the length scale of a micron, which is a million times smaller than a meter. Our work is for light matter interaction within the picoscopic regime which is far smaller, where the discrete arrangement of atomic lattices changes light’s properties in surprising ways,” says Jacob.
These intriguing findings demonstrate that natural media host a variety of rich light-matter interaction phenomena at the atomistic level. The use of picophotonic waves in semiconducting materials may lead researchers to design new, functional optical devices, allowing for applications in quantum technologies.
Femtosecond pulsed lasers—which emit light in ultrafast bursts lasting a millionth of a billionth of a second—are powerful tools used in a range of applications from medicine and manufacturing, to sensing and precision measurements of space and time. Today, these lasers are typically expensive table-top systems, which limits their use in applications that have size and power consumption restrictions.
An on-chip femtosecond pulse source would unlock new applications in quantum and optical computing, astronomy, optical communications and beyond. However, it’s been a challenge to integrate tunable and highly efficient pulsed lasers onto chips.
Now, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a high-performance, on-chip femtosecond pulse source using a tool that seems straight out of science fiction: a time lens.
Their experiment could help to create a unified theory of quantum gravity.
A team of physicists from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands simulated the event horizon of a black hole in a lab and observed the equivalent of an elusive form of radiation first theorized by Stephen Hawking, a report from Science Alert.
The new discovery could help the scientific community develop a whole new theory that marries the general theory of relativity with the principles of quantum mechanics. John/iStock.
Circa 2021 face_with_colon_three
We are finally testing the ideas that quantum collapse in the brain gives rise to consciousness and that consciousness creates the reality we see from the quantum world.
Researchers use lasers to increase or suppress an ion’s quantum characteristics and generate power at microscopic level.
A trip deep into the far future, to the End of Earth.
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For most of human history, the end of Earth, the Universe, and Time itself were all identical, now we know the world will end in 4 billion years, long before the Universe begins to wind down. Today we will ask how we can extend that, and keep Earth around for far longer.
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Continue reading “Civilizations at the End of Time: Dying Earth” »
Researchers control the speed of sound in an ultracold gas, mimicking features of a curved spacetime and reproducing quantum field behavior predicted in early Universe models.
We think of physical reality as what objectively exists, independent of any observer. But relativity and quantum physics say otherwise.
