Lifeboat Foundation

Just as carbon makes up both the brittle core of a No. 2 pencil and the harder-than-steel diamond in a cutting tool, boron nitride gives rise to compounds that can be soft or hard. Yet, unlike carbon, far less is known about boron nitride’s forms and their responses to changing temperatures and pressures.

Rice University scientists mixed hexagonal boron nitride —a soft variety also known as “white graphite”—with cubic boron nitride—a material second to diamond in hardness—and found that the resulting nanocomposite interacted with light and heat in unexpected ways that could be useful in next-generation microchips, quantum devices and other advanced technology applications.

“Hexagonal boron nitride is widely used in a variety of products, such as coatings, lubricants and cosmetics,” said Abhijit Biswas, a research scientist who is the lead author of a study about the research published in Nano Letters. “It’s quite soft and it is a great lubricant, and very lightweight. It’s also cheap and very stable at room temperature and under atmospheric pressure.

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The Australian military is funding a project to grow intelligent “mini-brains” in petri dishes. The goal is to use these “DishBrains” to design better AIs — and, eventually, even combine the two, creating AIs merged with processing features of human brain cells.

Continue reading “Australian military is funding a computer chip merged with human brain cells” »

The write in their paper on the invention: “The LK-99 has many possibilities for various applications such as magnet, motor, cable, levitation train, power cable, qubit for a quantum computer, THz Antennas, etc. We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind.”

It’s important to note that while room-temperature superconducting advances may clear some of the scalability hurdles, warm temperatures still impact quantum errors.

That being said, and while scientists are still trying to verify this work, how will it affect quantum computing? If at all?

Collaboration yields new solutions that tackle complex challenges in defense and aerospace sectors

Companies to showcase live demonstration of quantum-hybrid application at Space & Missile Defense Symposium

BURNABY, British Columbia, PALO ALTO, Calif. & HUNTSVILLE, Ala., August 7, 2023 —(BUSINESS WIRE)— D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS), a leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services, and Davidson Technologies, Inc., a technology services company that provides innovative engineering, technical and management solutions for the Department of Defense, aerospace and commercial customers, today announced progress in their collaboration to create solutions that advance national defense efforts. In support of the companies’ joint presence at this week’s Space and Missile Defense Symposium, D-Wave and Davidson Technologies revealed that together they have built two applications, focused on interceptor assignment and optimized radar scheduling.

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The University of Missouri scientists have developed a new form of metamaterial based on the method of a 4D synthetic dimension.

Work could benefit probabilistic optical computing.

Rice University physicists have shown that immutable topological states, which are highly sought for quantum computing, can be entangled with other manipulable quantum states in some materials.

“The surprising thing we found is that in a particular kind of crystal lattice, where electrons become stuck, the strongly coupled behavior of electrons in d atomic orbitals actually act like the f orbital systems of some heavy fermions,” said Qimiao Si, co-author of a study about the research in Science Advances.

The unexpected find provides a bridge between subfields of condensed matter physics that have focused on dissimilar emergent properties of quantum materials. In topological materials, for example, patterns of quantum entanglement produce “protected,” immutable states that could be used for quantum computing and spintronics. In strongly correlated materials, the entanglement of billions upon billions of electrons gives rise to behaviors like unconventional superconductivity and the continual magnetic fluctuations in quantum spin liquids.

A German-Chinese research team has successfully created a quantum bit in a semiconductor nanostructure. Using a special energy transition, the researchers created a superposition state in a quantum dot – a tiny area of the semiconductor – in which an electron hole simultaneously possessed two different energy levels. Such superposition states are fundamental for quantum computing.

Previously, the induction of such a state necessitated a large-scale, free-electron laser capable of emitting light in the terahertz range. Unfortunately, this wavelength was too long to accurately focus the beam on the quantum dot. This team, however, achieved the excitation with two carefully calibrated, short-wavelength optical laser pulses.

The team headed by Feng Liu from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, together with a group led by Dr. Arne Ludwig from Ruhr University Bochum and other researchers from China and the UK, report their findings in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, published online on July 24, 2023.

Following the path of electronic integrated circuits (EICs), silicon (Si) photonics holds promises to enable photonic integrated circuits (PICs) with high densities, advanced functionality and portability. Although various Si photonics foundries are rapidly developing PIC capabilities—enabling volume production of modulators, photodetectors and most recently lasers—Si PICs have yet to achieve the stringent requirements on laser noise and overall system stability imposed by many applications such as microwave oscillators, atomic physics and precision metrology^9,10,11. Semiconductor lasers must strongly suppress amplified-spontaneous-emission noise to achieve narrow linewidth for these applications¹². They will also require isolation from the rest of the optical system, otherwise the laser source will be sensitive to back-reflections from downstream optical components that are beyond the control of the PIC designer¹³. In many integrated photonic solutions, a bulk optical isolator must be inserted between the laser chip and the rest of the system, significantly increasing the complexity, as well as the cost of assembly and packaging¹⁴.

To enrich the capabilities of Si PICs and avoid multi-chip optical packaging, non-group-IV materials need to be heterogeneously integrated to enable crucial devices, including high-performance lasers, amplifiers and isolators^15,16,17. It has now been widely acknowledged that group III–V materials are required to provide efficient optical gain for semiconductor lasers and amplifiers in Si photonics regardless of the integration architecture, but concerns still remain for a complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) fab to incorporate magnetic materials, which are currently used in industry-standard optical isolators¹⁸.

Fortunately, a synergistic path towards ultralow laser noise and low feedback sensitivity exists—using ultrahigh-quality-factor (Q) cavities for lasers that not only reduce the phase noise but also enhance the feedback tolerance to downstream links. These effects scale with the cavity Q and ultrahigh–Q cavities would thus endow integrated lasers with unprecedented coherence and stability^19,20. The significance is twofold. First, the direct integration of ultralow-noise lasers on Si PICs without the need for optical isolators simplifies PIC fabrication and packaging. Furthermore, this approach does not introduce magnetic materials to a CMOS fab as isolators are not obligatory for such complete PICs.