A team led by Professor Andrea Morello has just demonstrated the operation of a new type of quantum bit, called ‘flip-flop’ qubit, which combines the exquisite quantum properties of single atoms, with easy controllability using electric signals, just as those used in ordinary computer chips.
“Sometimes new qubits, or new modes of operations, are discovered by lucky accident. But this one was completely by design,” says Prof. Morello. “Our group has had excellent qubits for a decade, but we wanted something that could be controlled electrically, for maximum ease of operation. So we had to invent something completely new.”
Prof. Morello’s group was the first in the world to demonstrate that using the spin of an electron as well as the nuclear spin of a single phosphorus atom in silicon could be used as ‘qubits’ – units of information that are used to make quantum computing calculations. He explains that while both qubits perform exceptionally well on their own, they require oscillating magnetic fields for their operation.
Stephen Hawking was one of the greatest scientific and analytical minds of our time, says NASA’s Michelle Thaller. She posits that Hawking might be one of the parents of an entirely new school of physics because he was working on some incredible stuff—concerning quantum entaglement— right before he died. He was even humble enough to go back to his old work about black holes and rethink his hypotheses based on new information. Not many great minds would do that, she says, relaying just one of the reasons Stephen Hawking will be so deeply missed. You can follow Michelle Thaller on Twitter at @mlthaller.
MICHELLE THALLER: Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit NASA.
TRANSCRIPT: Michelle Thaller: Yes Jeremy, a lot of us were really sad with the passing of Stephen Hawking. He was definitely an inspiration. He was one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in the world, and of course, he overcame this incredible disability, his life was very difficult and very dramatic and I for one am really going to miss having him around. And I certainly miss him as a scientist too. He made some incredible contributions. Now, Stephen Hawking was something that we call a theoretical physicist, and what that means is that people use the mathematics of physics to explore areas of the universe that we can’t get to very easily. For example, conditions right after the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe, what were things like when the universe was a fraction of a second old? That’s not something we can create very easily in a laboratory or any place we can go to, but we can use our mathematics to predict what that would have been like and then test our assumptions based on how the universe changed over time. And one of the places that is also very difficult to go to is, could we explore a black hole? And this is what Stephen Hawking was best known for. Now, black holes are massive objects they’re made from collapsed dead stars, and the nearest black hole to us is about 3,000 light years away. That one is not particularly large, it’s only a couple times the mass of the sun. The biggest black hole that’s in our galaxy is about four million times the mass of the sun and that actually sits right in the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy. And right now you and I are actually orbiting that giant black hole at half a million miles an hour. These are incredibly exotic objects. The reason we call them black holes is that the gravity is so intense it can suck in everything, including light. Not even light, going through space freely at the speed of light, can escape a black hole, so talk about dramatic exotic objects that are difficult to do experiments on. Stephen Hawking laid down some of our basic understanding of how a black hole works. And one of the things he actually did was he even predicted that black holes can die. You would think that a collapsed star that forms a bottomless pit of gravity would exist forever, but Stephen Hawking used the laws of quantum mechanics and something called thermodynamics, how heat behaves in the universe, to prove that maybe black holes can evaporate over time. And of course, that’s a hugely significant thing. One of the reasons I think it’s very unfortunate he died is we’re actually right on the cusp of being able to do actual experiments with black holes. And I know that sounds like a strange thing to say, but there are some particle accelerators, I mean specifically the Large Hadron Collider, which is in Europe, that are about to get to high enough energies they’re going to smash particles together so hard that so much energy is generated they might be able to make tiny little black holes. Read full transcript on: https://bigthink.com/videos/michelle-thaller-ask-a-nasa-astr…-the-world
Measurements of the magnetic moment of the electron have achieved unprecedented accuracy, showing great potential for the search for physics beyond the standard model.
Despite its remarkable successes, the standard model of particle physics clearly isn’t complete—dark matter, dark energy, and the matter–antimatter asymmetry of the Universe are some of its most flagrant deficiencies. Experimenters thus eagerly search for anomalies that could provide hints on a theory that could complete or replace the standard model. The electron is a key player in this quest: its magnetic moment is both the most precisely measured elementary-particle property and the most accurately verified standard model prediction to date. New measurements by Gerald Gabrielse’s group at Northwestern University in Illinois [1] have determined the value of the electron’s magnetic moment 2.2 times more accurately than the previous best estimate, which was obtained in 2008 [2].
That’s exactly what researchers in Germany set out to do, making use of “acoustic holograms” to form distinct 3D shapes out of particles suspended in water — all in “one shot,” said study lead author Kai Melde, a researcher from the Max Planck Institute, in a press release.
According to a study on the work, published last week in the journal Science Advances, the researchers were able to create a helix and a figure 8 out of silica gel beads, assembled biological cells into spherical clumps, and even provided a compelling concept for forming the shape of a dove in future experiments.
These acoustic holograms work by cleverly manipulating the pressure exerted by high frequency ultrasonic waves via the inexpensive use of a conventionally 3D-printed plate.
Quantum mechanics is simultaneously beautiful and frustrating.
Its explanatory power is unmatched. Armed with the machinery of quantum theory, we have unlocked the secrets of atomic power, divined the inner workings of chemistry, built sophisticated electronics, discovered the power of entanglement, and so much more. According to some estimates, roughly a quarter of our world’s GDP relies on quantum mechanics.
Yet despite its overwhelming success as a framework for understanding what nature does, quantum mechanics tells us very little about how nature works. Quantum mechanics provides a powerful set of tools for successfully making predictions about what subatomic particles will do, but the theory itself is relatively silent about how those subatomic particles actually go about their lives.
QuEra Computing, maker of the world’s first and only publicly accessible neutral-atom quantum computer—Aquila—today announces its research team has uncovered a method to perform a wider set of optimization calculations than previously known to be possible using neutral-atom machines.
The findings are the work of QuEra researchers and collaborators from Harvard and Innsbruck Universities: Minh-Thi Nguyen, Jin-Guo Liu, Jonathan Wurtz, Mikhail D. Lukin, Sheng-Tao Wang, and Hannes Pichler.
“There is no question that today’s news helps QuEra deliver value to more partners, sooner. It helps bring us closer to our objectives, and marks an important milestone for the industry as well,” said Alex Keesling, CEO at QuEra Computing. “This opens the door to working with more corporate partners who may have needs in logistics, from transport and retail to robotics and other high-tech sectors, and we are very excited about cultivating those opportunities.”
In this video students of the Maastricht Science Program NanoBiology Course 2020, show their explanation of the SARS-CoV-2 viral budding. Using CellPAINT, UCFS Chimera and their creativity they explain the nanobiology of how the SARS-CoV-2 virion can bud and leave the cell.
Viruses are not living things. They are just complicated assemblies of molecules, in particular macromolecules such as proteins, oligonucleotides, combined with lipids and carbohydrates. A virus cannot function or reproduce by itself. It needs a host cell.
When a virus enters the host cell, a series of chemical reactions occur that lead to the production of new viruses. A virus needs to find a host cell, attach to it, enter it, and reprogram it such that it will replicate its genome and produce new proteins that allow the assembly of a new virus. Once new viruses have been assembled, they need to get out of the original host cell, on their way to the next host cell they can exhaust. Some viruses have an easy way out: they use up all the resource of the host cells until it dies and lyse. This would only work for naked viruses such as polyomavirus and adenovirus, which lacks a lipid membrane.
Washing hands has been a standard measure since the start of this COVID-19 pandemic. The soap will disintegrate the lipid envelop of the SARS-CoV2 viral particles, as this is an enveloped virus. Enveloped viruses need envelopment, a process in which the capsids become surrounded by a lipid bilayer. This process takes place prior to release. Two mechanisms for envelopment exist. First, envelopment can proceed sequentially after the completion of capsid assembly. The fully assembled capsids are recruited to the membrane by interaction of the viral capsids with viral envelope glycoprotein. Examples of this include herpesvirus and hepatitis B virus. Secondly, the envelopment can occur simultaneously with the capsid assembly. Retrovirus is the representative of this coupled mechanism.
Where does the membrane for the envelopment come from? Some viruses, such as retrovirus and influenza virus, using the plasma membrane as the site of envelopment, whereas others, such as herpesvirus and hepatitis B, use the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and Golgi bodies as the site of envelopment.
Enveloped viruses are released from the infected cell via exocytosis, a process which is often also called budding. Viruses exploit cellular mechanisms to produce their own progeny extracellularly. For example, the budding of retroviral Gag is facilitated by ESCRT complexes, which are normally involved in the multi-vesicular bodies (MVB) pathway. How does SARS-CoV2 release its offspring from the infected cell? Can we interfere with these steps such that we attack the virus at each step of its life cycle?
Research in fundamental science has revealed the existence of quark-gluon plasma (QGP)—a newly identified state of matter—as the constituent of the early universe. Known to have existed a microsecond after the Big Bang, the QGP, essentially a soup of quarks and gluons, cooled down with time to form hadrons like protons and neutrons—the building blocks of all matter.
One way to reproduce the extreme conditions prevailing when QGP existed is through relativistic heavy-ion collisions. In this regard, particle accelerator facilities like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have furthered our understanding of QGP with experimental data pertaining to such collisions.
Meanwhile, theoretical physicists have employed multistage relativistic hydrodynamic models to explain the data, since the QGP behaves very much like a perfect fluid. However, there has been a serious lingering disagreement between these models and data in the region of low transverse momentum, where both the conventional and hybrid models have failed to explain the particle yields observed in the experiments.
Quantum Mechanics is the science behind nuclear energy, smart phones, and particle collisions. Yet, almost a century after its discovery, there is still controversy over what the theory actually means. The problem is that its key element, the quantum-mechanical wave function describing atoms and subatomic particles, isn’t observable. As physics is an experimental science, physicists continue to argue over whether the wave function can be taken as real, or whether it is just a tool to make predictions about what can be measured—typically large, “classical” everyday objects.
The view of the antirealists, advocated by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and an overwhelming majority of physicists, has become the orthodox mainstream interpretation. For Bohr especially, reality was like a movie shown without a film or projector creating it: “There is no quantum world,” Bohr reportedly affirmed, suggesting an imaginary border between the realms of microscopic, “unreal” quantum physics and “real,” macroscopic objects—a boundary that has received serious blows by experiments ever since. Albert Einstein was a fierce critic of this airy philosophy, although he didn’t come up with an alternative theory himself.
For many years only a small number of outcasts, including Erwin Schrödinger and Hugh Everett populated the camp of the realists. This renegade view, however, is getting increasingly popular—and of course triggers the question of what this quantum reality really is. This is a question that has occupied me for many years, until I arrived at the conclusion that quantum reality, deep down at the most fundamental level, is an all-encompassing, unified whole: “The One.”
