Lifeboat Foundation

Quantum technologies, a wide range of devices that operate by leveraging the principles of quantum mechanics, could significantly outperform classical devices on some tasks. Physicists and engineers worldwide have thus been working hard to achieve this long-sought “quantum advantage” over classical computing approaches.

A research team at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, CNRS recently developed a quantum radar that could significantly outperform all existing radars based on classical approaches. This new radar, introduced in a paper published in Nature Physics, concurrently measures an entangled probe and the idler microwave photon states occurring once this probe reflects from target objects, merging with thermal noise.

“We invented a superconducting circuit in 2020 that was able, among other things, to generate entanglement, store and manipulate microwave quantum states and count the number of photons in a microwave field,” Benjamin Huard, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “We then realized that it had all the features we needed to tackle one of the biggest challenges in microwave quantum metrology: demonstrating a quantum advantage in radar sensing.”

Remember what it’s like to twirl a sparkler on a summer night? Hold it still and the fire crackles and sparks but twirl it around and the light blurs into a line tracing each whirl and jag you make.

A new patented software system developed at Sandia National Laboratories can find the curves of motion in streaming video and images from satellites, drones and far-range security cameras and turn them into signals to find and track moving objects as small as one pixel. The developers say this system can enhance the performance of any remote sensing application.

“Being able to track each pixel from a distance matters, and it is an ongoing and challenging problem,” said Tian Ma, a computer scientist and co-developer of the system. “For physical security surveillance systems, for example, the farther out you can detect a possible threat, the more time you have to prepare and respond. Often the biggest challenge is the simple fact that when objects are located far away from the sensors, their size naturally appears to be much smaller. Sensor sensitivity diminishes as the distance from the target increases.”

A newly described type of chemistry in fungi is both surprisingly common and likely to involve highly reactive enzymes, two traits that make the genes involved useful signposts pointing to a potential treasure trove of biological compounds with medical and chemical applications.

It was also nearly invisible to scientists until now.

In the last 15 years, the hunt for molecules from living organisms—many with promise as drugs, antimicrobial agents, chemical catalysts and even food additives—has relied on computer algorithms trained to search the DNA of bacteria, fungi and plants for genes that produce enzymes known to drive biological processes that result in interesting compounds.

I gotta admit although effective and innovative, it’s also kinda creepy.

Last year, Monash University scientists created the “DishBrain” – a semi-biological computer chip with some 800,000 human and mouse brain cells lab-grown into its electrodes. Demonstrating something like sentience, it learned to play Pong within five minutes.

The micro-electrode array at the heart of the DishBrain was capable both of reading activity in the brain cells, and stimulating them with electrical signals, so the research team set up a version of Pong where the brain cells were fed a moving electrical stimulus to represent which side of the “screen” the ball was on, and how far away from the paddle it was. They allowed the brain cells to act on the paddle, moving it left and right.

Continue reading “Computer chip with built-in human brain tissue gets military funding” »

York University and an international team of astrophysicists have made an ambitious attempt to simulate the formation of galaxies and cosmic large-scale structure throughout staggeringly large swaths of space.

First results of their MillenniumTNG project are published in a series of 10 articles in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The new calculations help to subject the standard cosmological model to precision tests and to unravel the full power of upcoming new cosmological observations, say the researchers including York Assistant Professor Rahul Kannan.

In recent decades, cosmologists have gotten used to the perplexing conjecture that the universe’s matter content is dominated by enigmatic dark matter and that an even stranger dark energy field that acts as some kind of anti-gravity to accelerate the expansion of today’s cosmos. Ordinary baryonic matter makes up less than five percent of the cosmic mix, but this source material forms the basis for the stars and planets of galaxies like our own Milky Way.

Various reports say the claim is far from true.

Russian scientists are claiming that they have created the most powerful quantum computer in the history of their nation. They even presented the computer to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who visited the exhibition of quantum technology achievements by Rosatom, the State Nuclear Energy Corporation.

But as per a report, the claim is far from true and the computer won’t be breaking modern encryption codes anytime soon.

Continue reading “Russian scientists present to Putin the nation’s ‘most powerful’ quantum computer” »

We have implemented a nonlinear quadrature measurement of \(\hat{p}+\gamma {\hat{x}}^{2}\) using the nonlinear electro-optical feedforward and non-Gaussian ancillary states. The nonlinear feedforward makes the tailored measurement classically nonlinear, while the ancillary state pushes the measurement into highly non-classical regime and determines the excess noise of the measurement. By using a non-Gaussian ancilla we have observed 10% reduction of the added noise relative to the use of vacuum ancillary state, which is consistent with the amount of nonlinear squeezing in the ancilla. Higher reduction of the noise can be realized in the near future by a better approximation of the CPS using a superposition of higher photon number states^38,42. We can now create broadband squeezed state of light beyond 1 THz^8,9 and can make a broadband amplitude measurement on it with 5G technology beyond 40 GHz¹⁰, as well as a broadband photon-number measurement beyond 10 GHz¹¹. Furthermore, the nonlinear feedforward presented here can be compatible with these technologies if an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is developed based on the FPGA board presented here. By using such technologies we can efficiently create non-Gaussian ancillary states with large nonlinear squeezing by heralding schemes^36,43 even when the success rate is very low. It is because we can repeat heralding beyond 10 GHz and can compensate for the very low success rate.

When supplied with such high-quality ancillary state, this nonlinear measurement can be directly used in the implementation of the deterministic non-Gaussian operations required in the universal quantum computation. Our experiment is a key milestone for this development as it versatilely encompasses all the necessary elements for universal manipulation of the cluster states. Furthermore, this method is extendable to multiple ancillary states case in implementation of the higher-order quantum non-Gaussianity⁴⁴ and multi-mode quantum non-Gaussianity⁴⁵.

Our experiment demonstrates an active, flexible, and fast nonlinear feedforward technique applicable to traveling quantum states localized in time. If the nonlinear feedforward system is combined with the cluster states^13,14 and GKP states¹⁹, all operations required for large-scale fault-tolerant universal quantum computation can be implemented in the same manner. As such, we have demonstrated a key technology needed for optical quantum computing, bringing it closer to reality.

Here, the authors report the realization of WSe2 Schottky junction field-effect transistors with asymmetric multi-layer graphene and WTe2 van der Waals contacts, enabling reconfigurable polarity, low off-state currents, near-ideal rectifying behaviour and bipolar photovoltaic response.

The digital devices that we rely on so heavily in our day-to-day and professional lives today—smartphones, tablets, laptops, fitness trackers, etc.—use traditional computational technology. Traditional computers rely on a series of mathematical equations that use electrical impulses to encode information in a binary system of 1s and 0s. This information is transmitted through quantitative measurements called “bits.”

Unlike traditional computing, quantum computing relies on the principles of quantum theory, which address principles of matter and energy on an atomic and subatomic scale. With quantum computing, equations are no longer limited to 1s and 0s, but instead can transmit information in which particles exist in both states, the 1 and the 0, at the same time.

Quantum computing measures electrons or photons. These subatomic particles are known as quantum bits, or ” qubits.” The more qubits are used in a computational exercise, the more exponentially powerful the scope of the computation can be. Quantum computing has the potential to solve equations in a matter of minutes that would take traditional computers tens of thousands of years to work out.