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Calcium oxide is a cheap, chalky chemical compound commonly used in the manufacturing of cement, plaster, paper, and steel. But the material may soon have a more high-tech application.

UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering researchers and their collaborator in Sweden have used theoretical and computational approaches to discover how tiny, lone atoms of bismuth embedded within solid calcium oxide can act as qubits — the building blocks of quantum computers and quantum communication devices.

These qubits are described in Nature Communications (“Discovery of atomic clock-like spin defects in simple oxides from first principles”).

“… living systems evolve to exploit any aspect of physics that enables exploration of all possible ‘fitness landscapes’.”

Indeed!

In 1990, within the intellectual haven of Haverford College, I embarked on a transformative academic journey into biophysics – the captivating intersection of physics and biology.

Continue reading “This bold new theory of ‘quantum weirdness’ could rewrite the story of evolution” »

Researchers at Harvard University, Sabanci University, and Peking University recently gathered findings that could shed light on the origin of the high-temperature absorption peaks observed in strange metals, a class of materials exhibiting unusual electronic properties that do not conform to the conventional theory of metals.

In a development at the intersection of quantum mechanics and general relativity, researchers have made significant strides toward unraveling the mysteries of quantum gravity. This work sheds new light on future experiments that hold promise for resolving one of the most fundamental enigmas in modern physics: the reconciliation of Einstein’s theory of gravity with the principles of quantum mechanics.

Researchers in China have demonstrated how entanglement might potentially power future generations of computers, according to a story in the South China Morning Post. This advance, achieved by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Innovation Academy of Precision Measurement Science and Technology, points toward how quantum engines can use their own entangled states as a form of fuel.

Entanglement is a quantum phenomenon where a pair of separated photons seem to be intimately linked, regardless of the distance between them. Scientists have long theorized that this characteristic, once robustly managed, could hold vast potential for quantum computing, and this study adds further evidence to its viability in practical applications, the researchers suggest.

“Our study’s highlight is the first experimental realization of a quantum engine with entangled characteristics. [It] quantitatively verified that entanglement can serve as a type of ‘fuel’,” said Zhou Fei, one of the corresponding authors, as reported in the SCMP.

There’s a hot new BEC in town that has nothing to do with bacon, egg, and cheese. You won’t find it at your local bodega, but in the coldest place in New York: the lab of Columbia physicist Sebastian Will, whose experimental group specializes in pushing atoms and molecules to temperatures just fractions of a degree above absolute zero.

Writing in Nature (“Observation of Bose-Einstein Condensation of Dipolar Molecules”), the Will lab, supported by theoretical collaborator Tijs Karman at Radboud University in the Netherlands, has successfully created a unique quantum state of matter called a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) out of molecules.

Their BEC, cooled to just five nanoKelvin, or about-459.66 F, and stable for a strikingly long two seconds, is made from sodium-cesium molecules. Like water molecules, these molecules are polar, meaning they carry both a positive and a negative charge. The imbalanced distribution of electric charge facilitates the long-range interactions that make for the most interesting physics, noted Will.

Physicists at Columbia University have taken molecules to a new ultracold limit and created a state of matter where quantum mechanics reigns.

There’s a hot new BEC in town that has nothing to do with bacon, egg, and cheese. You won’t find it at your local bodega, but in the coldest place in New York: the lab of Columbia physicist Sebastian Will, whose experimental group specializes in pushing atoms and molecules to temperatures just fractions of a degree above absolute zero.

Writing in Nature, the Will lab, supported by theoretical collaborator Tijs Karman at Radboud University in the Netherlands, has successfully created a unique quantum state of matter called a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) out of molecules.

There is quanta of space time just as there is for particles and fields created by entanglement or liebnitz was right and spacetime are relational entities.

Scientists believe that spacetime may have emerged, in part, from a quantum property called “magic.”

Using an atomic array originally designed for quantum memory, researchers have demonstrated a magnetometer with unprecedented spatial resolution.