Lifeboat Foundation

Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist focusing on cognitive architectures, consciousness, models of mental representation, emotion, motivation and sociality.

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Continue reading “Joscha Bach: Time, Simulation Hypothesis, & Existence” »

Vice President of AI & Quantum Computing, Paul Smith-Goodson gives his analysis of quantum machine learning models and IonQ’s strategy to make it a reality.

Ever feel like you need more time? That it’s just flying by you?

And, then, do you ever wish you could reverse it?

A study published in Scientific Reports by an international team of researchers has demonstrated that a time-reversal program on a quantum computer is possible.

The quantum fluctuations that pervade empty space spontaneously give birth to pairs of particles and antiparticles. Ordinarily, these pairs annihilate so promptly that their existence is virtual. But a powerful field can pull a pair’s members apart for long enough that their existence becomes real. In 1951 Julian Schwinger calculated how strong an electric field needs to be to beget electron–positron pairs. Now Michael Wondrak and his colleagues of Radboud University in the Netherlands have proposed that particle pairs can be brought into existence by the immense gravitational tidal forces around a black hole [1].

Wondrak and his colleagues considered all the paths a pair of virtual particles could take during their brief existence. If the vacuum is stable, all pairs that are created are also destroyed. But a strong field destabilizes the vacuum, makes some paths more likely than others, and leads to a deficit of pairs that recombine. The deficit is balanced by a net outflow of real particles, which, in the case of a black hole’s gravitational field, leads to the black hole’s eventual evaporation.

The theorists’ approach is sufficiently general that it could reproduce not only Schwinger’s effect but also Stephen Hawking’s 1974 proposal that if a particle–antiparticle pair springs into virtual existence near a black hole’s event horizon, one member could fall in while the other escapes. What’s more, the researchers found that Hawking’s effect is a special case of a more general phenomenon. Pulling virtual particles into existence depends only on the stretching of spacetime wrought by a curved gravitational field and does not require an event horizon as Hawking originally suggested. One intriguing implication is that a neutron star, whose Schwarzschild radius lies beneath the stellar surface, can also beget particle pairs and decay.

Atom for the first time. Using a pioneering technique known as synchrotron X-ray scanning tunneling microscopy (SX-STM), the team was able to identify and characterize individual atoms, opening new possibilities in environmental, medical, and quantum research.

A team of scientists from Ohio University, Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and others, led by Ohio University Professor of Physics, and Argonne National Laboratory scientist, Saw Wai Hla, has taken the world’s first X-ray SIGNAL (or SIGNATURE) of just one atom. This groundbreaking achievement was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, and could revolutionize the way scientists detect materials.

Finding practical applications for quantum entanglement is a formidable endeavor to say the least, but a group of Chinese researchers overcame some of the fundamental challenges of open-air quantum teleportation by developing a highly accurate laser pointing and tracking system, as reported by Ars Technica. The team was able to teleport a qubit (a standard unit of data in quantum computing) 97 kilometers across a lake using a small set of photons without fiberoptic cables or other intermediaries.

The laser targeting device developed by Juan Yin and his team was necessary to counteract the minute seismic and atmosphere shifts that would otherwise break the link between the two remote locations. While the use of fiberoptic cables solves the point-to-point accuracy problems faced by open-air systems, using the cables to carry entangled photons — which in turn carry the data needed for quantum teleportation — can cause what’s known as “quantum decoherence,” or rather a corruption in the photon’s entanglement data.

In the grand spectrum of scientific achievement, Yin’s research is a small but crucial stepping stone on the path to a global quantum network, allowing for super-fast data transmission with high levels of encryption to take place. Yin and his team think that quantum repeater satellites could be used to build this network, but until scientists figure out a way to give qubits a few more microseconds of staying power, such a network is probably many years off.

A 176-qubit quantum computing platform named Zuchongzhi went online for global users Wednesday night, which is expected to push forward the development of quantum computing hardware and its ecosystem, according to the Center for Excellence in Quantum Information and Quantum Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Zhu Xiaobo, chief engineer of the project and professor at the University of Science and Technology of China, said that the research team improved the 66-qubit chip of Zuchonghi-2 by adding control interfaces of 110 coupled qubits, allowing users to manipulate 176 quantum bits.

Zuchongzhi 2 is a 66-qubit programmable quantum computing system made in 2021, which can perform large-scale random quantum circuits sampling about 10 million times faster than the fastest supercomputer at that time.

A new demonstration involving hundreds of entangled atoms tests Schrödinger’s interpretation of Einstein, Rosen, and Podolsky’s classic thought experiment.

In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) presented an argument that they claimed implies that quantum mechanics provides an incomplete description of reality [1]. The argument rests on two assumptions. First, if the value of a physical property of a system can be predicted with certainty, without disturbance to the system, then there is an “element of reality” to that property, meaning it has a value even if it isn’t measured. Second, physical processes have effects that act locally rather than instantaneously over a distance. John Bell subsequently proposed a way to experimentally test these “local realism” assumptions [2], and so-called Bell tests have since invalidated them for systems of a few small particles, such as electrons or photons [3].

An unusual kind of superconductor harbors magnetic vortices that researchers predict should be readily observable thanks to the striped configurations they adopt.

In a nematic superconductor, electron pairs are bound more strongly in one, spontaneously chosen, lattice direction than in the others. This rotational symmetry breaking of the pairs’ wave function is just one of this type of superconductor’s unusual properties. A leading candidate to exhibit nematic superconductivity, copper-doped bismuth selenide, is also predicted to sustain surface charge-carrying quasiparticles known as Majorana fermions, which researchers think could be used for superconducting quantum technologies. What’s more, nematic superconductors harbor topological solitons known as skyrmions, whose complexity gives them many ways to arrange themselves and whose small size and low energy have attracted interest for data storage technologies. Now Thomas Winyard of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and colleagues have calculated the various skyrmion configurations that could arise in a nematic superconductor [1, 2].

The physicist Tony Skyrme came up with the concept of a skyrmion in 1961 when working on a particle physics problem. In the 2000s, the quasiparticle was then linked to condensed-matter systems when it was discovered that quasiparticles could also be used to explain magnetic vortices in certain thin films.