Category Archives: Quantum Physics

History of science provides some interesting examples of important scientific and technological discoveries which will hibernate for some duration and suddenly resurrect in future with new nomenclature separated in space and time.

Two such examples that come to our mind are the Geometrical Phase discovered by Pancharatnam in 1931 and its rediscovery by Berry which came to be known as Berry Phase in 1982. The third example is Joshy Effect in 1941 which describes interesting observations in Optical interaction with low-density discharge plasma.

Joshy effect provided valuable data on the nature of excited states of atomic, and molecularspecies present in the plasma discharge. Prof Joshy was a chemistry professor at Banaras HinduUniversity when he discovered an interesting phenomenon in gas discharge tube under lightirradiation.

His colleagues in the Physics department did not accept the discovery and sarcastically called it the Joshy effect. Later on, the Joshy effect was rediscovered as the Optogalavanic effect and provided a new spectroscopic technique to study optical absorption spectroscopy with non-optical detection in 1982 by Green et al . Then only BHU people and physicists elsewhere in Indian laboratories found that OGS is, in fact, the rediscovery of Joshy effect.

Prof S Chandrashekar, the astrophysicist Nobel laureate, was ridiculed by Eddington for his theory of the possible existence of a Black hole. Without initiating to fight with Eddington, Chandra wrote a book describing his discoveries and published it in Chicago. USA received Chandra with admiration to become Physics Professor at Chicago University. He was an excellent teacher and boasted that even if he did not get the Nobel Prize, the whole of his call got the Nobel Prize in Physics.

It is clear that the non-recognitions of a scientist's discovery by his colleagues is based on non-academic reasons rather than academic and logical arguments.

The latest of the Indian psyche to ignore path-breaking discoveries by one of their colleagues is that of the work by Prof C S Unnikrishnan. He discovered serious faults in Einsteins Special Theory of Relativity and developed an alternate theory called Cosmic Relativity. The entire STR has to be replaced by CR because they are antipodal. All the verified results of STR are also part of CR, but they have very different predictions for the most crucial aspects. In STR, the relative velocity of light is an invariant constant; in CR it is Galilean, like sound so the velocity of light depends on the velocity v of the observer so that.

The Galilean nature of light is confirmed in direct experiments at TIFR. This is further supported amply by facilities like the GPS. Coming to more recent experimental results, even the LIGO findings are consistent only in a new General Theory of Relativity, that is modified with CR as the basis; this is because the relative velocity of gravitational waves is also Galilean, as verified in the simultaneous detection of light (gamma) rays and gravitational waves. In CR, all the relativistic effects are because of the gravitational influence of matter and energy in the universe.

Since cosmic matter and its average density are observed and measured, its enormous gravity is the natural consequence.. After formulating CR, Prof Unnikrishnan also found serious inconsistencies in STR, due to a vital error Einstein made in the discussion of simultaneity and synchronization of clocks. That theory is to be completely replaced because its basic postulate is refuted (falsified) experimentally. Predictions like mass-energy equivalence and Lorentz- Fitz Gerald transformations in STR have logically-consistent concrete proofs in CR. Without assuming the constancy of the velocity of light, as Einstein did in his STR, Prof Unnikrishnan described an alternate theory of Relativity with the Universe as an absolute frame of reference for all dynamics, with respect to which light can have non-constant speed.

In spite of several experimental proofs to support CR from experiments like GPS and LIGO, and special optical interferometry using lasers in Prof Unnikrishnans laboratory itself, the scientific community in India does not acknowledge Unnikrishnans findings. Instead, he was not given an extension of service as a Professor of Physics in TIFR so that he can complete his experimental works and was unceremoniously removed from the investigation group of LIGO India (now Unnikrishnan is a professor at the Defence Institute of Advanced Technology, of the DRDO, in Pune).

One can also remember the case of Prof E C G Sudarshan whose two seminal discoveries in weak interaction and quantum optics were ignored while considering the Nobel Prize inphysics. In the first case, one can admit that he was a research scholar at that time and his guide did not allow him to speak on the subject during an international Physics colloquium.

Sudarshan commented on the 1967 NP in Physics, "What I did for my PhD thesis in 1957 was probably one of the most important things in physics and they (the Nobel Foundation) should have nominated me at that time. If not then ten years later. No, they didnt. Instead, they gave the prize to somebody who did something on top of it. I usually say if you want to awardsomebody, you take the person who built the ground floor, not someone on the second andthird floors. That is what they did. Glashow, Salam and Weinberg did the next step to what Idid. Without the first step, they couldnt have done it."But, in the case of Quantum Optics, the situation is different. Sudarsan was a senior physicistwith the distinction of several discoveries and awards including the Dirac Medal, at the time. Usually, when one got Dirac Medal, he/she is sure to win NP. The work he developed was re-described by Glauber in detail including the fundamental physics of optics involved in the findings, so that his paper will seem to be more extensive than that of Sudarshan who wrote a short paper highlighting the gist of his discovery. In spite of the fact that Sudarshan should have given a major share in the NP, the committee recognized only Glauber for the award. Sudarshan did not hide his disagreement with the recommendation of the NP committee regarding the nonrecognition of his work.

Nothing happened anything more in this case even though the scientific community aroundthe globe stood up to talk against the decision of the NP committee. "I can assure you that it isnot impartial. For example, the prize given to Glauber, it is my prize. They gave it to him for things which I did. The prize is coveted because it is identified with excellence, and themajority of people who have got it, have gotten it for very good reasons. The very firstprize was given to Rontgen, who discovered X-rays. At that time it was because of the factthat people recognised that X-rays were very important for medicine. But afterwards, theygave it for all kinds of things. Like my friend, Glauber got the prize for... I dont knowwhat; it cannot be because of the excellence of his work."One of the latest works by Sudarshan is the resurrection of an aether and how this explains light propagation as waves. It is interesting to note that the algorithm for factual GPS corrections developed by Prof Unnikrishnan for his CR is also based on an absolute frame (matter-filled Universe) as the background, according to a recent conversation given by Prof Unnikrishnan to Asianet News Online. To watch the full interview, click the link.

One should not forget the Late Prof Thanu Padmanabhan (IUCAA, Pune, yet another scientist fromKerala) who described GTR in the light of classical thermodynamics and fused QuantumMechanics with GTR which was a task ( fusion of GTR with QM) taken up by many scientistswithout success. His untimely demise was a loss to the scientific community since he had moretheories which could have made physics more rich. In the following sections, we will describethe details of Unnikrishnans theory. Assuming that the velocity of light is an absolute fundamental constant only in the cosmic rest frame, determined physically by the gravitational interaction of light with the Universe Prof Unnikrishnan was able to show that CR implies all relativistic effects and that the velocity of light is Galilean in all other frames. It is very important to realize that the effects are gravitational in origin and that in an empty Universe, there will not be any relativistic effects, unlike in SR. It is possible to get convinced of this by considering the effect of distant galaxies on local physics.

For example, a moving clock experiences a cosmic gravitational potential that is different from what is experienced by a clock stationary in the Universe. Then it is gravitational time dilation that is responsible for the experimentally verified motional time dilation. Obviously, this solves the much-debated twin-paradox consistently and easily. The more fundamental theory -- Cosmic Relativity -- is based on the gravitational effects of the Universe and it is not limited to reference frames moving with uniform velocity.

Results for clock comparison experiments

Time dilation effects are very important for the experimental validation of cosmic relativityConsider a frame moving at velocity V with respect to the cosmic frame. We consider experiments in which there are clocks moving within this frame, which will be compared among themselves and with other clocks that are at rest within the frame. Consider a clock within this frame that is moving at velocity u relative to the coordinates inside the frame. SR asserts that no special relativistic time dilation expression should contain the velocity of the frame (with respect to some hypothetical frame in which the moving frame is embedded) in which the experiment is performed.

The cosmic gravitational time dilation has the characteristic imprint of the fact that there is a preferred cosmic frame with reference to which the time dilation is calculated. The clock that is stationary within the frame itself has a time dilation with respect to the clocks in the cosmic rest frame. (Such a clock is notionally provided by the temperature of the CMBR). We have to calculate the time dilation of the stationary clock and the moving clock with respect to the cosmic frame and then compare them.

The surprising new result is the dependence of the time dilation factor on the velocity of the frame. This is equivalent to considering all velocities relative to the cosmic rest frame or CMBR for calculating the time dilation effect. It is possible to have a moving clock inside a local frame age faster than a stationary clock in the same frame, in complete contrast to the special relativistic prediction. In SR, no local experiment should have a dependence on the velocity of the frame.

If a clock is taken around the earth along the equator at constant ground speed u, and brought back after a round trip, its time dilation with respect to a clock stationary on the surface is not given by the special relativistic factor predicted by Einstein in 1905. The correct result is given by Cosmic Relativity.The result that the clock in motion can age faster than a clock at remaining at rest within the laboratory frame is devastating for Einsteins SR. This can never happen in SR. For a clock moving at ground speed u along the instantaneous surface velocity (440 m/s) of the rotating earth with respect to the cosmic frame, and another one moving opposite (eastwards and westwards). If the clocks are taken around in aircraft with a velocity 220 m/s (average ground speed of about 800 km/hour), then the predicted asymmetry would be T 310 ns This is several times larger than the special relativistic time dilation, t 50 nsThe total time dilation asymmetry depends only on just the total path length covered in the experiment. It does not matter how fast the clocks are moved, provided we move them by the same distance. Slow transport will need more time, and the asymmetry depends only on the product of the velocity and duration. Thus if the clocks are taken around by walking around the earth eastwards and westwards along the equator, the clocks will show an asymmetry that is exactly equal to the one predicted for clocks taken around in fast flights! All these results have been already verified in the results of clock transport experiments, done as early as 1970 (Hafele-Keating experiment).

Experimental Evidence for Cosmic Relativity

The Sagnac effect was first discovered in optical interferometry. The phase shift in a rotating planar interferometer with area A, in which light travels in two opposite paths and returns to their starting point is given by .This expression is the same as the expression for the time asymmetry in round-trip clock comparisons. It is implied that the physical interaction responsible for the Sagnac effect is the gravity of the Universe.

Here we merely note that the total equivalence of the expression for the Sagnac effect forlight and matter waves arises from the fact that gravitational interaction is universal, and therefore the Sagnac effect does not depend on the group velocity of waves used in Sagnac interferometry (this result is not intuitively obvious, for example in a Sagnac interferometer that uses optical fibres, since the light pulse takes more time to circle around and yet the time difference between the clockwise and counterclockwise pulses is still given by the same equation.) Thus Cosmic Relativity is the generalized theory of relativity in flat spacetime since it does not distinguish between inertial and non-inertial motion.

Cosmic Relativity and physical effects in quantum systems

In cosmic relativity, the enigmatic connection between spin and statistics in quantum theory is seen to be a consequence of the gravitational interaction of the spin with the Universe. The interaction is gravitomagnetic in nature and gives us the result that identical integer spin particles obey Bose-Einstein statistics and identical half-integer spin particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. This is a deep result, and for the first time might answer the long-standing query-what are the physical reasons behind the spin-statistics connection? It also answers why the connection is valid in non-relativistic, two-particle situations despite the general impression that it is a consequence of relativistic field theory.

The fine structure in atoms, Spin in CR, and the Spin-Statistic connection

When the idea of electron spin was first proposed by Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit, they had not resolved the problem that the simple spin-orbit coupling ( L-S coupling) gives twice the experimentally observed value for the fine structure splitting. CR shows that the correct fine structure is obtained from a cosmic gravitational interaction. Spin in gravity is the equivalent of a magnetic moment in electrodynamics.

Any physical effect that exclusively depends on spin must be of gravitational origin. The spin-statistics connection is the following: a) Particles with integer spin are bosons and they obey the Bose-Einstein statistics. b) Particles with half-integer spin are fermions and they obey the Fermi-Dirac statistics. This simple division is behind most of the material variety in the physical world. A geometric understanding of these statements was published by Berry and Robbins and several authors have invoked the relation between rotation operators and exchange of particles in quantum mechanics to prove the spin-statistic theorem.

Sudarshan has been arguing for the existence of a simple proof that is free of argumentsspecific to relativistic quantum field theory. While these attempts have clarified several issues regarding the connection, none provides a physical understanding of the connection. It may be noted that physically the connection is applicable for any two identical particles, in non-relativistic quantum mechanics. Thus we should expect that the physical proof need not depend on relativistic quantum field theory.

Cosmic relativity shows that it is the gravitational interaction of the quantum particles with theentire Universe that is responsible for the spin-statistics connection. In other words, the Pauli exclusion is a consequence of the relativistic gravitational interaction with the critical Universe, which is always present.

The fundamental principle regarding the velocity of light

The fundamental principle of Cosmic Relativity is that the velocity of light is a fundamental constant only in the cosmic rest frame, determined by the local average gravitational potential due to the entire Universe in the cosmic rest frame. Relative to a moving observer, the relative velocity of light varies, just as for sound and other familiar waves. In SR, the constancy of the velocity of light in all frames is the defining assumption. So, the measurement of the one-way relative velocity can decisively settle which theory is correct. (Note that the Michelson-Morley experiment uses a two-way propagation of light and it's not suitable for deciding this fundamental issue of the nature of propagation of light, contrary to the general belief). An experiment was done in Unnikrishnans lab, progressively refining, to determine the genuineone-way relative velocity of light, and compare it to the behaviour of sound. The result decisively refutes and falsifies the defining postulate of Einsteins theory, and therefore, the theory itself.

Why is E=mc2?

We now discuss the physical relation between the velocity of light and the average gravitational potential of the Universe at any point. If the Universe started from pure nothingness, then it is expected that every constituent of this Universe has zero energy. One part of the energy is the gravitational interaction energy. Clearly, every mass at rest with respect to the cosmic frame should possess energy and can be seen as and thus E = mc2 as predicted by SR.

Conceptual and philosophical implications

There has been a significant change, in fact, the most profound and far-reaching, in the philosophical view on space and time after Einsteins relativity theory became understood. The development of Cosmic Relativity and experimental evidence favouring it will imply a large shift in our worldview. The new world-view will of course be different from the one that existed in pre-SR days, though Cosmic Relativity brings into focus a preferred frame we call the cosmic rest frame or the absolute frame. Since there is no aether, and since new circumstances arise in acknowledging the gravitational presence of the Universe, a world-view based on Cosmic Relativity will be different from the one induced by Special Relativity. It is important to note that the only aspect of the cosmos we have used in deducing a new theory of relativity is its approximate homogeneity and isotropy, and the fact that the Universe is nearly at critical density. These results imply a critical modification of General Relativity as well, in which the theory is endowed with the absolute matter frame of the Universe. This makes GTR totally Machian, which was indeed one of Einsteins passionate desires for his theory of General Relativity. There is also the question of whether there should be a change in our attitude towards quantizing gravity.

Space and time are un-observables, and really have no meaning in the absence of matter. It is a matter that defines, facilitates, and modifies measurements of spatial and temporal intervals. At present it suffices to mention that everything we know in General Relativity is consistent with Cosmic Relativity, and the harmony between the two is even better than in the case of General Relativity and Special Relativity.

We can now answer some of the doubts raised by Julian Barbour in his book, Absolute or Relative Motion?: Discovery of Dynamics .Cosmic Relativity strengthens these connections further, that relativistic modifications of spatial and temporal intervals, as well as several important effects specific to quantum systems, are the results of the gravitational interaction of the Universe with the local physical system. Thus the construction of Cosmic Relativity answers the important questions left unanswered by the pioneers like Newton, Mach and Einstein. A major monograph written by Unnikrishnan was published recently by Springer Nature (Nov. 2022) in which it is stated the theory of cosmic relativity addresses and answers all long-standing questions and puzzles in relativity and dynamics.

Conclusion

We discussed some of the revolutionary discoveries made by Prof C S Unnikrishnan through the proposal of Cosmic Relativity. There is no place for an axiom that the velocity of light is constant in all frames of reference as Einstein imposed to describe SR. It is high time that Prof Unnikrishnans CR should be discussed by the Physics community in India without any prejudices. One should note that when a new theory is emerged by shattering the foundations of existing theory, there is always an inertia among the specialists to accept it just as the inertial forces described by Newton in his laws of motion. Hope that we will hear positive discussions among the specialists so that a new paradigm shift will be created in unravelling the secrets of nature.

Prof V P N Nampoori is visiting scientist at the Cochin University of Science and Technology, Kerala University and M G University. Views expressed are personal

The rest is here:

India's Physics community must lend its ears to Cosmic Relativity that challenges Einstein's theory - Asianet Newsable

Software engineers get the ball rolling as they wait for quantum computers to arrive, a number of public Salesforce sites leak private data and the first wooden transistor is here.

These top tech news stories and more for Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023. Im your guest host, James Roy.

Weve heard a lot of endless superpowers of quantum computers, be it to revolutionize medical research or solve climate change. Millions are being poured into these machines, hailed as being a million times faster than todays fastest computers. But they are yet to hit the market.

However, quantum startups are getting creative despite lacking these powerful computers.

QC Ware, a software startup initially focused only on software that could run on quantum computers.

But the company now said it needed to change tack to find a solution until the future quantum machines arrive.

Investors are not shying away either, despite the dismal stock performance of publicly-listed quantum computer companies. QC Ware, in fact, raised more than $33 million.

What these startups are doing is nothing short of brilliant;

They are developing a new breed of software inspired by algorithms used in quantum physics which is a branch of science that studies the fundamental building blocks of nature.

These algorithms, once too big for conventional computers, are being put to work thanks to todays powerful artificial intelligence chips.

QC Ware CEO, Matt Johnson said it turned to Nvidias GPUs to figure out how can we get them something that is a big step change in performance and build a bridge to quantum processing in the future.

This week, QC Ware is unveiling a quantum-inspired software platform called Promethium that will simulate chemical molecules to see how they interact with things like protein on a traditional computer using GPUs.

The companys head of quantum chemistry said the software can cut simulation time from hours to minutes for molecules of 100 atoms, and months to hours for molecules of up to 2000 atoms, compared with existing software solutions.

Source: Reuters

According to a report by KrebsOnSecurity, a number of organizations, including banks, healthcare and government agencies are leaking private and sensitive information through their public Salesforce Community websites.

Reportedly, the leaking stems from a misconfiguration in Salesforce Community that allows an unauthenticated user to access records that should only be available after logging in.

Salesforce Community is a widely-used cloud-based software that makes it easy for organizations to create websites.

Customers can access a Salesforce Community website by either logging in or through guest user access, which allows unauthenticated users to view specific content and resources, without logging in.

But sometimes Salesforce administrators also mistakenly grant users access to internal resources which can cause unauthorized access and data leaks.

The state of Vermont, for instance, allowed guest access to sensitive data to at least five separate Salesforce Community websites, including one for a Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that exposed applicants full name, SIN number, phone number, bank account number and more.

Vermonts Chief Information Security Officer Scott Carbee said, During the pandemic, we were largely standing up tons of applications, and lets just say a lot of them didnt have the full benefit of our dev/ops process. In our case, we didnt have any native Salesforce developers when we had to suddenly stand up all these sites.

But, Carbee also denounced the permissive nature of the platform

On Monday, KrebsOnSecurity notified Washington D.C. city administrators that at least five different public DC Health websites were leaking sensitive information.

Interim CISO, Mike Rupert said the District had hired a third party to investigate and it revealed that the Districts IT systems were not vulnerable to data loss.

But after being presented with a document including the Social Security number of a health professional in D.C. that was downloaded in real-time from the DC Health public Salesforce website, Rupert acknowledged his team had overlooked some configuration settings.

Meanwhile, Salesforce maintains that the data exposures are not the result of a vulnerability inherent to Salesforce but occur when customers access control permissions are misconfigured.

In a written statement, Salesforce said it is actively focused on data security for organizations with guest users, and that it continues to release robust tools and guidance for our customers.

Source: KrebsOnSecurity

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a new proposed rule to fight the absolute headache that canceling subscriptions can be.

The proposed provision, Click-to-Cancel, seeks to make it as easy to cancel enrollment as it was to sign up.

FTC Chair Lina M. Khan said, Some businesses too often trick consumers into paying for subscriptions they no longer want or didnt sign up for in the first place.The proposal would save consumers time and money, and businesses that continued to use subscription tricks and traps would be subject to stiff penalties.

The new proposal will mandate a simple cancellation mechanism. For instance, if you signed up online, you must be able to cancel on the same website in the same number of steps.

Secondly, the proposal would require sellers to ask customers whether they want to be pitched other offers upon cancellation. Sellers must take no for an answer if thats the case and immediately expedite the cancellation process.

Finally, and that, no doubt would be helpful to many of us, the proposed rule would require sellers to provide an annual reminder to consumers enrolled in subscriptions, before they are automatically renewed.

Source: FTC

Akash Nigam, CEO of avatar technology company Genies revealed to Insider that he is spending $2,400 a month on ChatGPT accounts for all 120 of his employees as part of an experiment to boost productivity.

Nigam says he is already seeing stuff getting done faster.

He said that Genies R&D team, for instance, has used ChatGPT to answer math and coding questions, get advice on how to debug code, and generate scripts for presentations based on outlines. Other employees have used it to generate creative briefs, write legal documents and answer technical questions.

Not everyone is using ChatGPT but he is encouraging everyone to make learning the technology a priority.

Employees who are more productive as a result of using ChatGPT will be up for a raise or a promotion. Others, he says, will fall behind

He also believes that the use of the technology can help his company reduce costs as he will need to hire less employees.

Genies is not the only company diving head first with ChatGPT. Amazon, Microsoft and design firm Pure Fusion Media have also strongly encouraged employees to use AI.

Source: Insider

The link between increased cyberthreats and AI however, remains unclear. Some say it might be overblown.

John Dwyer, head of research at IBM Security X-Force, told Axios, Cybercriminals are often looking for the simplest, quickest schemes to make money, and bringing todays AI into play doesnt fit that bill.

If anything, its cyber defenders who will exploit AI to counter the run-of-the-mill security holes that criminals keep exploiting.

Palo Alto Networks and Mandiant are the big names already playing around ChatGPT and other AI tools to improve their security products.

Michael Sikorski, CTO of Palo Alto Networks threat intelligence team revealed that most of the malicious code spewed by AI tools are repurposed from previous attacks. He adds, maybe they are faster, but they are not new. And its definitely not trained on how to write a zero-day or find or exploit a vulnerability.

Plus, according to Chester Wisniewski, field CTO of applied research at Sophos, most hackers do not double up as data scientists or are not training the AI models themselves. Theyll need to bring make enough money from the malicious AI for it to be worth it.

But, Wisniewski says, the upside is the good guys do have data scientists, and many of us do spend millions of dollars in the cloud on GPUs

However, we still need to be wary. Many cybercriminals are using simple AI tools to get people to respond to phishing emails and scam texts.

And many companies continue to suffer from attacks with already publicly known flaws that companies failed to patch.

Rob Joyce, director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, said during the RSA Conference, Ill tell you, buckle up. Next year, if were talking a similar year in review, well have a bunch of examples of where its been used and where its succeeded.

Source: Axios

Swedish researchers have built what they claim is the worlds first wooden transistors.

Its shaped like a T and made from three pieces of balsa wood.

The top of the T served as the transistor channel, with a source at one end and a drain at the other, while the vertical portion of the T used two pieces of balsa with a gap between them to form the transistors gate pieces.

Before you start gathering your tools and your balsa wood, remember that in order to make the wood conductive, the researchers had to expose it to heat and use chemicals to replace the lignin with conductive polymer.

Once filled with the polymer and assembled, the Swedish team achieved conductivity up to 69 Sm-1, and were also able to prove the devices effectiveness as a double-gate organic electrochemical transistor and functional on/off switch.

Previous wooden transistors could only regulate ions transport and would stop functioning once the ion ran out. This one does not work like that and still functions without deteriorating.

But, unfortunately this breakthrough is not going to revolutionize the semiconductor industry. The balsa wood transistor is neither small nor fast. Its so slow its unable to switch off under a second and switching on takes a full five seconds. Not exactly super computing speeds.

But for the researchers, this proves that it is possible to modulate the electrical conductivity of the electroactive wood by applying an external voltage.

Source: The Register

One of our listeners sent in a note about yesterdays story where we reported that Pornhub was pulling out of Utah. Apparently searches for Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) that allow people to disguise their location went off the charts. Probably a coincidence just a lot of folks trying to watch Charles coronation on BritBox. I mean its Utah they wouldnt.

Thanks to Nemanja for that we love your comments, keep it coming.

Thats the top tech news for today. We go to air with a daily newscast five days a week, as well as a special weekend interview with an expert on topics relevant to todays tech news.

Follow Hashtag Trending on Google, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can even get us on your Alexa or Google smart speaker. You can even find us on YouTube as TechNewsDay.

You can reach our CIO, Jim Love on LinkedIn, Twitter, or on Mastodon as @therealjimlove on our Mastodon site technews.social. Or if thats too much, just leave a comment under the text version at itworldcanada.com/podcasts Click the check mark or the X youll get to send a message that comes right to me.

Im your host, James Roy. Have a Wonderful Wednesday!

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Hashtag Trending May 3- Quantum startups get creative while waiting for quantum computers to arrive; sites built on Salesforce Community leak private...

This article has been reviewed according to ScienceX's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

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by Jos Tadeu Arantes , FAPESP

Quantum theory, which was formulated in the first three decades of the twentieth century, describes a wide array of phenomena at the molecular, atomic and subatomic scales. Among its many technological applications, three have become ubiquitous in daily life: laser barcode scanners, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and the global positioning system (GPS).

Nevertheless, quantum physics is still not entirely understood, and some of the phenomena concerned appear to fly in the face of common sense or everyday empirical experience, surprising not only the average layperson but also physicists and philosophers of science. Some of the counterintuitive aspects of quantum theory are due to its probabilistic nature. It offers a set of rules for calculating the probabilities of the possible measurement outcomes of physical systems and in general cannot predict the actual result of a single measurement.

One of the challenging ideas presented by quantum physics is non-locality, an aspect of reality manifested when two or more systems are generated or interact in such a way that the quantum states of any system cannot be described independently of the quantum states of the others. Technically speaking, scientists call such systems entangled, since they are strongly correlated even at a distance and their quantum state is not defined by the quantum states of their component parts.

Another challenging idea, which seems to point in the opposite direction, is contextuality, according to which the outcome of measuring a quantum object depends on the context, meaning other compatible measurements performed at the same time.

Non-locality and contextuality were born with quantum theory but followed independent paths for several decades. In 2014, scientists conducted a study involving a particular case in which they showed that only one of them can be observed in a quantum system. This finding became known as monogamy. The authors conjectured that non-locality and contextuality were different facets of the same general behavior observed either in one way or the other.

Now, however, a study by Brazilian and Chinese researchers has shown both theoretically and experimentally that this is not so. An article on the study is published in Physical Review Letters and highlighted as an Editors' Suggestion.

The research was led by Rafael Rabelo, last author of the article and a professor at the State University of Campinas's Gleb Wataghin Institute of Physics (IFGW-UNICAMP) in Brazil.

The first authors are Peng Xue and Lei Xiao of Beijing Computational Science Research Center in China. The other co-authors, all affiliated with Brazilian institutions, are Gabriel Ruffolo and Andr Mazzari, also researchers at IFGW-UNICAMP; Marcelo Terra Cunha of the same university's Institute of Mathematics, Statistics and Scientific Computing (IMECC-UNICAMP); and Tassius Temstocles of the Federal Institute of Alagoas.

"We proved that both phenomena can indeed be observed concurrently in quantum systems. The theoretical approach was developed here in Brazil and validated in a quantum optics experiment by our Chinese collaborators," Rabelo told Agncia FAPESP.

The new study shows definitively that two of the fundamental ways in which quantum physics differs from classical physics can be observed at the same time in the same system, contrary to the usual belief. "Non-locality and contextuality, therefore, are clearly not complementary manifestations of the same phenomenon," Rabelo said.

In practical terms, non-locality is an important resource for quantum encryption, while contextuality is the basis for a specific quantum computing model, among other applications. "The possibility of having both at the same time in the same system could pave the way to the development of new quantum information processing and quantum communications protocols," he said.

The idea of non-locality was a sort of answer to the objection raised by Albert Einstein (1879-1955) to the probabilistic nature of quantum physics. In a seminal article published in 1935, Einstein, Boris Podolsky (1896-1966) and Nathan Rosen (1909-1995), or EPR, questioned the completeness of quantum theory.

They proposed a thought experiment known as the EPR paradox: to justify certain non-classical correlations deriving from entanglement, distant quantum systems would have to exchange information instantly, which is impossible according to the special theory of relativity. They concluded that this paradox was due to the incompleteness of quantum theory. The incompleteness, EPR argued, could be corrected by including local hidden variables that would make quantum physics as deterministic as classical physics.

"In 1964, British physicist J.S. Bell (1928-1990) revisited the EPR argument, introducing an elegant formalism that encompassed all theories of local hidden variables regardless of the particular properties each variable might have. Bell proved that none of these theories could reproduce the correlations between measurements performed on two systems predicted by quantum physics. In my view, this result, later known as Bell's theorem, is one of the most important pillars of quantum physics. The property of having strong correlations that can't be reproduced by any local theory is now known as Bell non-locality. Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger were awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for observing Bell non-locality experimentally, among other achievements," Rabelo said.

Another important result deriving from the discussion of hidden variables was presented in an article by Simon Kochen (1934-) and Ernst Specker (1920-2011), published in 1967. The authors demonstrated that, owing to the structure and mathematical properties of quantum measurements, any theory of hidden variables that reproduces the predictions of quantum physics must exhibit a contextuality aspect.

"Despite the common motivation, studies of Bell non-locality and Kochen-Specker contextuality followed independent paths for quite a long time. Only recently has there been growing interest in finding out whether both phenomena could be manifested concurrently in the same physical system. In an article published in 2014, Pawel Kurzynski, Adn Cabello and Dagomir Kaszlikowski said no. They showed why through a particular case but an interesting one, nonetheless. We've now refuted that 'no' in our study," Rabelo said.

More information: Peng Xue et al, Synchronous Observation of Bell Nonlocality and State-Dependent Contextuality, Physical Review Letters (2023). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.040201

Journal information: Physical Review Letters

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Study proves compatibility of two fundamental principles of quantum theory - Phys.org

Science and nature books

Quantum computers will transform our world, curing cancer and fixing the climate crisis, says the scientist and sci-fi fan but can they be made to work?

Sat 22 Apr 2023 04.00 EDT

Have you been feeling anxious about technology lately? If so, youre in good company. The United Nations has urged all governments to implement a set of rules designed to rein in artificial intelligence. An open letter, signed by such luminaries as Yuval Noah Harari and Elon Musk, called for research into the most advanced AI to be paused and measures taken to ensure it remains safe trustworthy, and loyal. These pangs followed the launch last year of ChatGPT, a chatbot that can write you an essay on Milton as easily as it can generate a recipe for everything you happen to have in your cupboard that evening.

But what if the computers used to develop AI were replaced by ones able to make calculations not millions, but trillions of times faster? What if tasks that might take thousands of years to perform on todays devices could be completed in a matter of seconds? Well, thats precisely the future that physicist Michio Kaku is predicting. He believes we are about to leave the digital age behind for a quantum era that will bring unimaginable scientific and societal change. Computers will no longer use transistors, but subatomic particles, to make calculations, unleashing incredible processing power. Another physicist has likened it to putting a rocket engine in your car. How are you feeling now?

Kaku seems pretty relaxed about it all some might say boosterish. He talks to me via Zoom from his apartment on Manhattans Upper West Side. Seventy-six and retired from research, he still teaches at the City University of New York where he is professor of theoretical physics and gets to do the fun stuff. A fan of Isaac Asimov, he tells me that hes currently teaching a course on the physics of science fiction. I talk about what is known and not known about time travel, space warps, the multiverse, all the things you see in Marvel Comics, I break it down. His website describes him as a futurist and populariser of science and his new book, Quantum Supremacy, sketches out all the promise of quantum computing and very little of the downside. Though he has the long white hair of the stereotypical mad scientist, it is swept back elegantly. He speaks at the pace of a practised lecturer, with the occasional outbreak of mild bemusement pitching his voice a little higher.

Kaku has a simple explanation for the doom-mongering around ChatGPT: Journalists are hyperventilating about chatbots because they see that their job is on the line. Many jobs have been on the line historically, but no one really said much about them. Now, journalists are right there in the crosshairs. This is a somewhat partial view a report by Goldman Sachs recently estimated that 300m jobs are at risk of automation as a result of AI. Kaku does admit that we might see sentient machines emerging from laboratories but reckons that could take another hundred years or so. In the meantime, he thinks theres a lot to feel good about.

The rocket engine of quantum computing will, Kaku says, completely transform research in chemistry, biology and physics, with all sorts of knock-on effects. Among other things, it will enable us to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into fuel, with the waste products captured and used again so-called carbon recycling. It will help us extract nitrogen from the air without the high temperatures and pressures that mean fertiliser production currently accounts for 2% of the energy used on Earth, leading to a new green revolution. It will allow us to create super-efficient batteries to help renewables go further (todays lithium-ion batteries only carry about 1% of the energy stored in gasoline). It will solve the design and engineering challenges currently stopping us from generating cheap, abundant power via nuclear fusion. And it will lead to radically effective treatments for cancer, Alzheimers and Parkinsons diseases, alongside a host of others.

How? The main thing to understand is that quantum computers can make calculations much, much faster than digital ones. They do this using qubits, the quantum equivalent of bits the zeros and ones that convey information in a conventional computer. Whereas bits are stored as electrical charges in transistors etched on to silicon chips, qubits are represented by properties of particles, for example, the angular momentum of an electron. Qubits superior firepower comes about because the laws of classical physics do not apply in the strange subatomic world, allowing them to take any value between zero and one, and enabling a mysterious process called quantum entanglement, which Einstein famously called spukhafte Fernwirkung or spooky action at a distance. Kaku makes valiant efforts to explain these mechanisms in his book, but its essentially impossible for a layperson to fully grasp. As the science communicator Sabine Hossenfelder puts it in one of her wildly popular YouTube videos on the subject: When we write about quantum mechanics, were faced with the task of converting mathematical expressions into language. And regardless of which language we use, English, German, Chinese or whatever, our language didnt evolve to describe quantum behaviour.

What were left with are analogies of varying helpfulness, for example the toy trains with compasses on them and mice in mazes that Kaku invokes to explain such complex ideas as superposition and path integrals. Beyond these, there is one important takeaway: reality is quantum, and so quantum computers can simulate it in a way that digital ones struggle to. Mother Nature does not compute digitally, he tells me. Quantum computers should [be able to] unravel the secrets of life, the secrets of the universe, the secrets of matter, because the language of nature is the quantum principle. If you want to know precisely how photosynthesis works (still a mystery to modern science), or how one protein interacts with another in the human body, you will be able to use the virtual lab of a quantum computer to model it precisely. Designing medicines to interrupt biological processes gone awry, like the proliferation of cancer cells or the misfolding of proteins in Alzheimers disease, could become much easier. Kaku even reckons that the riddle of ageing will be unravelled so that we can arrest it one of the chapters in his book is called simply Immortality.

At this stage, its worth introducing an important caveat. Quantum computers are very, very hard to make. Because they rely on tiny particles that are extremely sensitive to any kind of disturbance, most can only run at temperatures close to absolute zero, where everything slows down and theres minimal environmental noise. That is, as you would expect, quite difficult to arrange. So far, the most advanced quantum computer in the world, IBMs Osprey, has 433 qubits. This might not sound like much, but as the company points out the number of classical bits that would be necessary to represent a state on the Osprey processor far exceeds the total number of atoms in the known universe. What they dont say is that it only works for about 70 to 80 millionths of a second before being overwhelmed by noise. Not only that, but the calculations it can make have very limited applications. As Kaku himself notes: A workable quantum computer that can solve real-world problems is still many years in the future. Some physicists, such as Mikhail Dyakonov at the University of Montpellier, believe the technical challenges mean the chances of a quantum computer that could compete with your laptop ever being built are pretty much zero.

Kaku brushes this off. He points to the billions of dollars being poured into quantum research the Gold Rush is on he says and the way intelligence agencies have been warning about the need to get quantum-ready. Thats hardly proof positive theyll live up to expectations it could be tulip mania rather than a gold rush. He shrugs: Lifes a gamble.

In any case, hes far from the only true believer. Corporations such as IBM, Google, Microsoft and Intel are investing heavily in the technology, as is the Chinese government, which has developed a 113 qubit computer called Jiuzhang. So, assuming for a moment quantum dreams do become a reality: is it responsible to accentuate the positive, as Kaku does? What about the possibility of these immense capabilities being used for ill?

Well, thats the universal law of technology, that [it] can be used for good or evil. When humans discovered the bow and arrow, we could use that to bring down game and feed people in our tribe. But of course, the bow and arrow can also be used against our enemies.

Advances in physics, in particular, have always raised the prospect of new and more fearsome weapons. But you cant hold back research as a result: you make the discoveries, then you deal with the consequences. Thats why we regulate nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are a rather simple consequence of Einsteins E=mc2. And they have to be regulated, because the E would be enough to destroy humanity on planet Earth. At some point, were going to reach the boundaries of this technology, where it impacts negatively on society. Right now, I can see a lot of benefits.

In any case, for Kaku, knowledge is power. Its part of the reason hes moved from the lab to TV, radio and books. The whole purpose of writing books for the public is so that [they] can make educated, reasonable, wise decisions about the future of technology. Once technology becomes so complicated that the average person cannot grasp it, then theres big trouble, because then people with no moral compass will be in charge of the direction of that technology.

There are other reasons, as well. From an early age, Kaku was, unsurprisingly, a science fiction nut. But he wasnt content to simply swallow the stories, and wanted to know if they were really possible, whether the laws of physics might verify or contradict them. And in the science section, there was nothing, absolutely nothing. And I was [also] fascinated by Einsteins dream of a theory of everything, a unified field theory. Again I found nothing, not a single book, on Einsteins great dream. And I said to myself, when I grow up, and I become a theoretical physicist, I want to write papers on this subject. But I also want to write for myself as a child, going to the library and being so frustrated that there was nothing for me to read. And thats what I do.

Kakus parents were among those American citizens of Japanese descent who were interned during the second world war, despite having been born in the country. Like his father, he was raised in Palo Alto, California, the ground zero of the tech revolution. The irony isnt lost on him. I saw Silicon Valley grow from nothing. When I was a child, it was all alfalfa fields, apple orchards. I used to play in the apple orchards of what is now Apple, he chuckles. If his predictions about the quantum revolution are correct, it could soon be transformed again. Silicon Valley could become a rust belt a junkyard of chips that no one uses any more because theyre too primitive. Or, more likely, a gleaming new centre of quantum computation, as todays tech giants scramble to redeploy their immense intellectual and financial capital. Whether Kakus quantum revolution lives up to the hype remains to be seen. But if he is right and all that is digital passes into dust, were in for one hell of a ride.

Quantum Supremacy by Michio Kaku will be published by Allen Lane on 2 May. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com

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Physicist Michio Kaku: We could unravel the secrets of the universe - The Guardian

Picture a cat. Im assuming youre imagining a live one. It doesnt matter. Youre wrong either waybut youre also right.

What Is Carbon Capture? With Gizmodos Molly Taft | Techmodo

This is the premise of Erwin Schrdingers 1935 thought experiment to describe quantum states, and now, researchers have managed to create a fat (which is to say, massive) Schrdinger cat, testing the limits of the quantum world and where it gives way to classical physics.

Schrdingers experiment is thus: A cat is in a box with a poison that is released from its container if an atom of a radioactive substance, also in the box, decays. Because it is impossible to know whether or not the substance will decay in a given timeframe, the cat is both alive and dead until the box is opened and some objective truth is determined. (You can read more about the thought experiment here.)

In the same way, particles in quantum states (qubits, if theyre being used as bits in a quantum computer) are in a quantum superposition (which is to say, both alive and dead) until theyre measured, at which point the superposition breaks down. Unlike ordinary computer bits that hold a value of either 0 or 1, qubits can be both 0 and 1 simultaneously.

Now, researchers made a Schrdingers cat thats much heavier than those previously created, testing the muddy waters where the world of quantum mechanics gives way to the classical physics of the familiar macroscopic world. Their research is published this week in the journal Science.

In the place of the hypothetical cat was a small crystal, put in a superposition of two oscillation states. The oscillation states (up or down) are equivalent to alive or dead in Schrdingers thought experiment. A superconducting circuit, effectively a qubit, was used to represent the atom. The team coupled electric-field creating material to the circuit, allowing its superposition to transfer over to the crystal. Capiche?

By putting the two oscillation states of the crystal in a superposition, we have effectively created a Schrdinger cat weighing 16 micrograms, said Yiwen Chu, a physicist at ETH Zurich and the studys lead author, in a university release.

16 micrograms is roughly equivalent to the mass of a grain of sand, and thats a very fat cat on a quantum level. Its several billion times heavier than an atom or molecule, making it the fattest quantum cat to date, according to the release.

Its not the first time physicists have tested whether quantum behaviors can be observed in classical objects. Last year, a different team declared they had quantum-entangled a tardigrade, though a number of physicists told Gizmodo that claim was poppycock.

This is slightly different, as the recent team was just testing the mass of an object in a quantum state, not the possibility of entangling a living thing. While thats not in the teams plans, working with even larger masses will allow us to better understand the reason behind the disappearance of quantum effects in the macroscopic world of real cats, Chu said.

As for the true boundary between the two worlds? No one knows, wrote Matteo Fadel, a physicist at ETH Zurich and a co-author of the paper, in an email to Gizmodo. Thats the interesting thing, and the reason why demonstrating quantum effects in systems of increasing mass is so groundbreaking.

The new research takes Schrdingers famous thought experiment and gives it some practical applications. Controlling quantum materials in superposition could be useful in a number of fields that require very precise measurements; for example, helping reduce noise in the interferometers that measure gravitational waves.

Fadel is currently studying whether gravity plays a role in the decoherence of quantum states, namely if it is responsible for the quantum-to-classical transition as proposed a couple of decades ago by Penrose. Gravity doesnt seem to exist on the subatomic level and is not accounted for in the Standard Model of particle physics.

The quantum world ripe for new discoveries, but alas, its crammed full of unknowables, dead ends, and vexing new problems.

More: Scientists Save Schrdingers Cat

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Physicists Create the Fattest Schrdinger's Cat Ever - Gizmodo

When new assistant professor of physics Lee McCuller was young, he liked to build things. His uncle made him a power supply, which he integrated with electronic hobby kits from RadioShack to do simple things like use analog circuits to switch lights and motors on and off. Today, McCuller tinkers with what some would call the most advanced measurement device in the world: LIGO, or the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory.

McCuller is an expert on quantum squeezing, a method used at LIGO to make incredibly precise measurements of gravitational waves that travel millions and billions of light-years across space to reach us. When black holes and collapsed stars, called neutron stars, collide, they generate ripples in space-time, or gravitational waves. LIGO's detectorslocated in Washington and Louisianaspecialize in picking up these waves but are limited by quantum noise, an inherent property of quantum mechanics that results in photons popping in and out of existence in empty space. Quantum squeezing is a complex method for reducing this unwanted noise.

Research into quantum squeezing and related measurements ramped up as far back as the 1980s, with key theorical studies by Caltech's Kip Thorne (BS '62), Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, along with physicist Carl Caves (PhD '79) and others worldwide. Those theories inspired the first experimental demonstration of squeezing in 1986 by Jeff Kimble, the William L. Valentine Professor of Physics, Emeritus. The next decades saw many other advances in squeezing research, and now McCuller is at the leading edge of this innovative field. For example, he has been busy developing "frequency-dependent" squeezing that will greatly enhance LIGO's sensitivity when it turns back on in May of this year.

After earning his bachelor's degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010, McCuller attended the University of Chicago, where he earned his PhD in physics in 2015. There he began work on an experiment called the Fermilab Holometer, which looked for a speculative type of noise that would link gravity with quantum mechanics. It was during this project that McCuller met LIGO scientists, including MIT's Rai Weisswho together with Thorne and Barry Barish, the Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Physics, Emeritus, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 for their groundbreaking work on LIGO. McCuller was inspired by Weiss and the LIGO project and decided to join MIT in 2016. He became an assistant professor at Caltech in 2022.

In the future, McCuller hopes to take the quantum measurement tools he has developed for LIGO and apply them to other problems. "If LIGO is the most precise ruler in the world, then we want to make those rulers available to everyone," he says.

We met with McCuller over Zoom to learn more about quantum squeezing and its future applications to other fields as well as what inspired McCuller to join Caltech.

After I graduated from University of Chicago in 2015, I went to work on LIGO at MIT. When I walked in the door, they were having a meeting about the first detection of gravitational waves! The public didn't know yet, but there had been rumors. It was exciting to learn the rumors were true, and it was nice to see everyone overjoyed that things were working.

There was a local experiment taking place at that time on using squeezed light in the frequency-dependent manner that will start up at LIGO later this year. My job was to help build the first full-scale demonstration of this. The group, before me, had previously demonstrated the concept but not at the full scale. I was there was to show exactly what would be needed to employ it in the LIGO observatories. This required a particularly challenging experimental setup.

At each of the observatory locations, LIGO uses laser beams to measure disturbances in space-timethe gravitational waves. The laser beams are shot out at 90-degrees from each other and travel down two 4-kilometer-long arms. They reflect off mirrors and travel back down the arms to meet back up. If a gravitational wave passes through space, it will stretch and squeeze LIGO arms such that the lasers will be pushed out of sync; when they meet back up, the combined laser will create an interference pattern.

At the quantum level, there are photons in the laser light that hit the mirrors at different times. We call this shot noise, or quantum noise. Imagine dumping out a can full of BBs. They all hit the ground and click and clack independently. The BBs are randomly hitting the ground, and that creates a noise. The photons are like the BBs and hit LIGO's mirrors at irregular times. Quantum squeezing, in essence, makes the photons arrive more regularly as if the photons are holding hands rather than traveling independently. And this means that you can more precisely measure the phase or frequency of the light inside LIGOand ultimately detect even fainter gravitational waves.

To squeeze light, we are basically pushing the uncertainty inherent in light waves from one feature to another. We are making the light more certain in its phase, or frequency, and less certain in its amplitude, or power [the uncertainty principle says that both the exact frequency and amplitude of a light wave cannot be known at the same time]. To really explain the details of how squeezing actually works is very hard! I primarily know how to use math to describe it.

An interesting thing about squeezed light is that we aren't doing anything to the actual laser. We don't even touch it. When we operate LIGO, we offset the arms so that its wave interference is not perfectly darka small amount of light gets through. The little bit of light that remains has an electrical field that interferes with quantum fluctuations in the vacuum, or empty space, and this leads to the shot noise or the photons acting like BBs as we talked about earlier. When we squeeze light, we are actually squeezing the vacuum so that the photons have lower uncertainty in their frequency.

Up until now, we have been squeezing light in LIGO to reduce uncertainty in the frequency. This allows us to be more sensitive to the high-frequency gravitational waves within LIGO's range. But if we want to detect lower frequencieswhich occur earlier in, say, a black hole merger, before the bodies collidewe need to do the opposite: we want to make the light's amplitude, or power, more certain and the frequency less certain. At the lower frequencies, the shot noise, our BB-like photons, push the mirrors around in different ways. We want to reduce that. Our new frequency-dependent cavity at the LIGO detectors is designed to reduce the frequency uncertainty in the high frequencies and the amplitude uncertainties in the low frequencies. The goal is to win everywhere and reduce the unwanted mirror motions.

Part of the reason this technology is more important in the next run is because we are turning up the power on our lasers. With more power, you get more pressure on the mirrors. Our new squeezing technology will allow us to turn the power up without creating the unwanted mirror motions.

What this means is that we will be even more sensitive to the early phases of black hole and neutron star mergers, and that we can see even fainter mergers.

One project I'm working on involves Kathryn Zurek and Rana Adhikari. We are building a tabletop-size detector that will attempt to pick up signatures of quantum gravity, or pixels in space and time as some people say. The idea there is to make interferometers more like high-energy-physics detectors. The detectors would click when something passes through it, largely circumventing the impacts of shot noise. I love the motivation of the projectquantum gravity, which is the quest to merge theories of gravity with quantum physics. It is a very lofty goal.

In general, what I hope to do is grow from the LIGO work and apply quantum measurement techniques to not only enhance the gravitational wave detectors but also to see where other fundamental physics experiments or technologies can be improved. I want to use quantum optics not necessarily for computation or for information but for measurement. Squeezing light is one of the first demonstrations of these concepts in a real experiment. The hope is that we can keep using these quantum techniques in more and more experiments. We want to take the advantages of LIGO and find all the places where we can apply them.

Caltech has a lot of mission-oriented scientists. It's not just about learning or demonstrating or exploringit's the mix of all these things. I like a place where the goal is to integrate technologies and do new experiments. Take LIGO for instance. Few people know how the whole thing works and many of them are here. Caltech is a place where people understand that what we are doing is hard. Good projects require both narrow and broad expertise, and a combination of the right people. The students are similarly motivated by both the science goals and the process. We are not just trying to build something that reliably works, we are also trying to build something that's at the edge of what is possible.

Excerpt from:

At the Edge of Physics - Caltech

Ideas53:59Perimeter Institute Conversations About Science and Identity

You may wonder what the bizarre subatomic world of quantum physics or the fates of distant stars have to do with our everyday lives.

But even the strangest aspects of the universe make us who and what we are. And who we are, and where we come, from shape what we know and how we know it.

Quantum physicistShohini Ghose at Wilfrid Laurier University, andMi'kmaqastrophysicist Hilding Neilson at Memorial University were interviewed for the Conversations at the Perimeter podcast, produced by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. They discussed the connections between identity and science.

Perimeter Institute's Lauren Hayward and Colin Hunter interviewed both scientists.

You wrote a really nice article for Morals and Machines, andthe theme was how quantum can help us go beyond the binary. So what are some of the the ways that we can learn about non-binary thinking inspired by quantum mechanics?

Well, everything in quantum mechanics is about letting go of specifics and precision. The idea that science and the way we think about science can impact society is not new. As our science evolves, our social thinking also evolves.

For example, the Industrial Revolution and thinking around possessions and mass marketing and scales of how we think about things, as well as knowing exactly one thing or another that has all absolutely shaped the way we behave socially. So to me, it feels like whether we like it or not, this whole new revolution with new quantum technologies that actually harnesses these stranger properties of quantum...all of that is based on quantum ideas. But now we're getting to the parts that we were kind of ignoring, like the uncertainty and entanglement.

Perhaps in society too, we will naturally start expanding our choices from right and wrong to a more broader spectrum and not just right or wrong, or any time we try to have polar opposite kind of thinking I think perhaps that we will start evolving and we will get to newer ways and new approaches which can influence so many aspects of our behaviour, whether we're choosing what we want to eat at a restaurant versus our politics and our policies, and so many, many aspects of our identities.

Ghose'sforthcoming book,Her Time, Her Space: How Trailblazing Women Scientists Decoded theUniverse,will be published this fall.

Can you talk about whatastro-colonialismis?

When we talk about astronomy and science and space, wetalk about them in terms of a certain perspective, and that perspective tends to be Eurocentric.

So for instance,the constellations in the northern hemisphere, we have the Big Dipper or Ursa major. We have Cassiopeia, Cepheus, we have Draco, and they all come from this one historical context, largely Greek and Roman astronomy.

And the Greeks and Romans told great stories about these things. And as you travel through time, those constellations sort of get maintained through star maps and European courts. It became part of the navigation in the oceans when we had first colonization of the Americas and then the slave trade. And they kept existing until the 20th century when the International Astronomical Union formed, which was great. It was supporting astronomy worldwide, but at the time it was essentially a bunch of white dudes from Europe, and they formed a committee to simplify the night sky and have 88 constellations.

There are people around the world, whether it's in Asian countries, in Asian regions, in the North, Northern Europe, Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Indigenous peoples who have their own stories [their] own constellations. We don't see them anymore. I open a textbook. I see Ursa major I don't see my constellations from Mi'kmaq or Haudenosaunee constellations or Salish or Inuit constellations. That's erasing our stories, and that's colonialism.

Then we have the future of colonialism, which is going to space. The way we do space exploration and space settlement is the exact same narrative that we did when Canada, the U.S., was being settled the pioneer, the frontiersmanship, man versus nature element.

Tell us just a little bit about your own personal relationship with the night sky.

I'm Mi'kmaq from Newfoundland. And we didn't grow up in an Indigenous community because lost settlements were more spread out across the island. So I grew up basically in suburbia watching Mr. Dressup and MuchMusic. So I didn't really have a strong connection with my heritage and where I come from.

One of the best parts of the Western coastline other than Gros Morne and the skiing is the clear night skies, seeing the Milky Way and all the stars, meteor showers and you feel you see this blanket of stars, it feels like home.

Listen to both of these interviewswherever you get your favourite podcasts or click onthe play button above

*This episode was produced by Chris Wodskou.

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Scientists explore why identity and history matter in science - CBC.ca

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Moderna and IBM are teaming up to use generative artificial intelligence and quantum computing to advance mRNA technology, the development at the core of the company's blockbuster Covid vaccine, the companies announced Thursday.

"We are excited to partner with IBM to develop novel AI models to advance mRNA science, prepare ourselves for the era of quantum computing, and ready our business for these game-changing technologies," Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement.

Moderna shares dipped slightly Thursday, while IBM's stock was about flat.

The companies said they signed an agreement for Moderna to access IBM's quantum computing systems. Those systems could help accelerate Moderna's discovery and creation of new messenger RNA vaccines and therapies, according to Dr. Dario Gil, director of IBM research.

IBM will also provide experts who can help Moderna scientists explore the use of quantum technologies, the companies added. Unlike traditional computers, which store information as either zeroes or ones, quantum computing hinges on quantum physics. That allows those systems to solve problems too complex for today's computers.

Under the deal, Moderna's scientists will also have access to IBM's generative AI model known as MoLFormer. Generative AI describes algorithms that can be used to create new content based on the data they have been trained on.

The companies said Moderna will use IBM's model to understand "the characteristics of potential mRNA medicines" and design a new class of vaccines and therapies.

The agreement comes as Moderna navigates its post-pandemic boom driven by its mRNA Covid vaccine.

The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company became a household name for its messenger RNA technology, which teaches human cells to produce a protein that initiates an immune response against a certain disease.

Moderna is trying to harness that technology to target other diseases as the world emerges from the pandemic and demand for blockbuster Covid vaccines and treatments slows.

The company is already working to develop a vaccine targeting respiratory syncytial virus and a shot that can target different types of cancer when combined with Merck's immunotherapy Keytruda.

The new agreement also comes as IBM ramps up its investment in AI with new partnerships. Earlier this year, the Armonk, New York-based company announced a deal with NASA to help build AI foundation models to advance climate science.

Those efforts fall in line with a recent boom in AI, largely driven by the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT. The AI-powered chatbot answers questions in clear, concise prose, and immediately caused a sensation after its launch.

ChatGPT kicked off an AI arms race and prompted questions about the full extent of artificial intelligence's capabilities and risks.

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Moderna teams up with IBM to put A.I., quantum computing to work on mRNA technology used in vaccines - CNBC

By India Today Science Desk: The Centre on Wednesday approved the National Quantum Mission with an estimate of Rs 6,003 crore for eight years.

Announcing the decision, Science & Technology Minister Dr. Jitendra Singh said, "the decision is going to give India a quantum jump in the field."

India is going to be at par with six global countries researching quantum technology. Most countries are in the research and development phase. The US, China, France, Austria, and Finland are in the R&D stage and are yet to venture into the application stage of the technology, and India will be the latest entrant in the elite club.

Read More

Quantum technology is a field of physics and engineering that studies and applies the principles of quantum mechanics to the development of new technologies. Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that describes the behavior of matter and energy at a microscopic scale, where the classical laws of physics do not apply.

Quantum technology includes various types of technologies, such as quantum computing, quantum cryptography, and quantum sensing.

While the classical computer is transistor-based, quantum computers are going to work on atoms. Quantum computers use quantum bits (qubits) instead of classical bits to perform calculations. The advantage of quantum computing is that it can solve problems much faster with more authenticity.

Quantum technology offers unique security when it comes to encryption, making quantum communication hack-proof. Quantum communication is one of the safest ways of connecting two places with high levels of code and quantum cryptography that cannot be decrypted or broken by an external entity. If a hacker tries to crack the message in quantum communication, it changes its form in such a manner that would alert the sender and would cause the message to be altered or deleted.

Meanwhile, quantum sensing uses the principles of quantum mechanics to develop new types of sensors with unprecedented sensitivity and accuracy. These sensors can measure physical quantities, such as temperature, magnetic fields, and gravitational waves, with higher precision than classical sensors. This technology has vast utilisation in astronomy and astrophysics and in solving the riddles of the universe.

Also Read | Solar eclipse 2023: These cities will witness the rare hybrid celestial event

As part of the National Quantum Mission, the center said that four thematic hubs will be established in different institutions across the country to boost research and development in the field. The mission will be led by the Department of Science & Technology under a mission director.

The Centre will form a mission secretariat which will have a governing body to steer the work under the leadership of scientists from the quantum field. The Mission Technology Research Council will work as a scientific advisory body for the governing body.

The center outlining the eight-year-long framework for the mission said that it will work at developing 20-50 qubit quantum computers and quantum communication over a distance of 2000 kilometers in the next three years.

Also Read | Starship Super Heavy launch tomorrow: How to watch Musk's Mars Vehicle lift-off?

"As technology is evolving, understanding is evolving and so are the applications. In the area of therapeutics, healthcare, and security the use is being realized," the minister added.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had in 2022 demonstrated satellite-based quantum communication when scientists from the Ahmedabad-based Space Applications Centre and Physical Research Laboratory successfully conducted quantum entanglement, using real-time Quantum Key Distribution (QKD).

"This is going to place India as a frontline nation when information & technology are concerned. This will have use beyond physical and engineering field and into healthcare and other fields as well," Dr. Singha added.

Also Read | Scientists are closer to finding solar systems that could have life

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Centre approves Rs 6,003 crore National Quantum Mission: What is it? - India Today

BUFFALO, N.Y. Moir patterns occur everywhere. They are created by layering two similar but not identical geometric designs. A common example is the pattern that sometimes emerges when viewing a chain-link fence through a second chain-link fence.

For more than 10 years, scientists have been experimenting with the moir pattern that emerges when a sheet of graphene is placed between two sheets of boron nitride. The resulting moir pattern has shown tantalizing effects that could vastly improve semiconductor chips that are used to power everything from computers to cars.

A new study led by University at Buffalo researchers, and published in Nature Communications, demonstrated that graphene can live up to its promise in this context.

Our recent work shows that this particular sandwich of graphene and boron nitride elicits properties that are suitable for use in new technological applications, said Jonathan Bird, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at UB. The research was funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy and a MURI grant from Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Graphene is made of carbon, just like charcoal and diamonds. What distinguishes graphene is the way the carbon atoms are put together: they are linked in a hexagonal or honeycomb pattern. The resulting material is the thinnest material known to exist, so thin that scientists call it two-dimensional.

Left alone, graphene conducts electricity well too well, in fact, to be useful in microelectronic technology. But by sandwiching graphene between two layers of boron nitride, which also has a hexagonal pattern, a moir pattern results. The presence of this pattern is accompanied by dramatic changes in the properties of the graphene, essentially turning what would normally be a conducting material into one with (semiconductor-like) properties that are more amenable to use in advanced microelectronics.

This research establishes how the moir pattern in graphene can be adapted to use in technological applications such as new types of communication devices, lasers and light-emitting diodes. Our work demonstrated the viability of this approach, showing that the graphene/boron nitride sandwich that we are studying does indeed have the favorable properties needed for microelectronics, said Bird.

The semiconductor chips in question are essential not just in smartphones and medical devices but also in smart-home gadgets such as dishwashers, vacuums, and home-security systems. Modern technology relies on the semiconductor chips that form the heart of their systems and control their operation, said Bird. When you talk into your cell phone, its the chip that converts your voice to an electronic signal and transmits it to a tower.

The graphene/boron-nitride heterostructure appears to have properties that are amenable to engineering. Developing future technology based on these materials may depend on discovering and harnessing properties that allow for greater speed and functionality. Bird noted that there is typically a lag between a discovery, the excitement about a discovery, and realizing the promise of the discovery. Graphene so common that its in any note scribbled with pencil wasnt discovered until 2004.

Bird earned a PhD in physics, but he was drawn to electrical engineering because it allowed him to explore quantum physics through research on semiconductors. Quantum physics the kind of magical physics that occurs at the atomic scale, he explained can be observed through experiments using technology that explores material and processes at the atomic level.

We can get a system to respond to actions we take, and that response reflects details of the atomic and quantum nature of the system, he said. Graphene attracted his attention because it appeared to be a way to study quantum effects through work on semiconductors. At UB, he established a lab called NoMaD, where he, his colleagues, and their students study quantum phenomena occurring at the nanoscale. Graduates have gone on to careers at Intel and IBM as well as other universities.

In this research, Bird and his team have explored the properties of graphene within a certain limit that must be achieved to create new technologies. The semiconductor chip industry is a massive industry that continues to grow, demanding new materials, new ways to use existing materials, and a new workforce capable of developing both.

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A particular 'sandwich' of graphene and boron nitride may lead to ... - University at Buffalo