Category Archives: Quantum Physics

June 17, 2022• Physics 15, 87

At very low volume, a quantum optical microphone performs better than a classical device, and humans can hear the difference.

Romolo Tavani/stock.adobe.com

Romolo Tavani/stock.adobe.com

Quantum devices are often touted as performing better than classical ones, but the impact can seem far from our everyday lives. Researchers have now demonstrated a quantum optical microphone that listeners say produces a clearer sound than a classical counterpart [1]. The microphone was tested under specific conditions (low volume and high noise), outside of which the quantum advantage would not be noticeable. Despite this limitation, the new quantum techniques could prove useful elsewhere: they could eventually be used to improve imaging of biological samples.

Many high-precision measurements, such as gravitational-wave detection, rely on interferometers that measure interference effects, such as fringes, that arise when photons are sent through two possible paths. Using pairs of quantum-mechanically entangled photons reduces the random fluctuations (shot noise) in such measurements, which increases the measurements sensitivity. However, some common techniques involve measuring both photons in an entangled paira slow selection process that limits the measurement rate to 1 Hz. If you want to use entangled photons to follow fast action, like single molecules moving inside a biological cell, that rate is far too slow.

Florian Kaiser from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and his colleagues have come up with a way to boost the measurement rate for such quantum-optics experiments by 10,000 times. In their setup, the input laser light first goes through a nonlinear crystal that creates a stream of pairs of entangled photons that are then fed into the two paths (or arms) of their interferometer.

To avoid having to measure both photons at the outputs of the interferometer, the team added an optical component called a wavelength-selective wave plate, which rotates the polarization of the light passing through one of the interferometers arms. It turns out that this simple manipulation encodes the two-photon information (the quantum phase of the pair) in just one of the photons.

Once the information is transferred to single photons, measuring the interference signal becomes easy: just take the difference of the light intensity at the two outputsthe same method as in classical interferometry. The team showed that they could obtain quantum-enhanced signal-to-noise measurements with sampling rates as high as 100 kHz. This frequency is high enough to generate high-quality audio, which allowed the researchers to demonstrate their technique in a sound recording experiment. We wanted to check if humans can actually hear the quantum improvement, Kaiser says.

J. C. M. Gebhardt/University of Ulm

J. C. M. Gebhardt/University of Ulm

The researchers transformed their interferometer into an optical microphone by attaching one of the mirrors to a membrane that vibrates in response to sound waves. As the mirror moves back and forth, it changes the length of one of the interferometer arms, producing an observable variation in the light reaching the detectors. The team used the microphone in a standardized hearing test. Selected words were recorded with the microphone and played back to a set of human listeners, who were asked to identify the words. A similar test was done with a classical optical microphone, in which the same interferometer was used but without any entanglement of photons. The subjects had slightly better success recognizing the quantum-recorded words.

Kaiser is quick to admit that the test was rigged. Our microphone has a quantum advantage in an artificial situation that we created here, he says. That situation involved turning down the volume during the recording sessions so that the measurement shot noise would be high relative to other noise contributions. Kaiser compares the noise level to the garbled transmissions between a race car driver and the pit crew, where only about half of the words are understood correctly.

But even if the new quantum technique wont revolutionize audio recording, it may benefit other types of measurements, such as biological imaging. Kaiser explains that most cells behave abnormally or can be damaged under intense illumination. A quantum microscope using the researchers entanglement scheme could improve high-resolution imaging techniques by allowing them to perform well using fewer photons.

Within the context of developing practical sensors, this new work stands as an elegant demonstration of the quantum advantage by using quantum states of light that exhibit entanglement, says quantum-optics expert Laurent Labont from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis in France.

Its a very novel and ingenious synthesis of quantum metrology concepts, says Bill Plick from the University of Dayton, Ohio, who studies the foundations of quantum mechanics. Though I dont think this work could be called perception of something fundamentally quantum, it does kind of give people a way to get their hands around quantum effects and see that they can have a recognizable impactwhich is really cool.

Michael Schirber

Michael Schirber is a Corresponding Editor forPhysics Magazine based in Lyon, France.

Raphael Nold, Charles Babin, Joel Schmidt, Tobias Linkewitz, Mara T. Prez Zaballos, Rainer Sthr, Roman Kolesov, Vadim Vorobyov, Daniil M. Lukin, Rdiger Boppert, Stefanie Barz, Jelena Vukovi, J. Christof M. Gebhardt, Florian Kaiser, and Jrg Wrachtrup

PRX Quantum 3, 020358 (2022)

Published June 17, 2022

Quantum sensors can now detect signals of arbitrary frequencies thanks to a quantum version of frequency mixinga widely used technique in electronics. Read More

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Physics - Hearing the Quantum Difference - Physics

PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aqemia, the next-gen pharmatech company leveraging artificial intelligence and quantum physics announced, today that it has entered a new research collaboration with Sanofi.

This new agreement is a follow-up to a Research Collaboration initiated at the end 2020 by Sanofi to bring the unique technologies of Aqemia to the design and discovery of novel molecules in several projects in oncology, a priority therapeutic area for Sanofi.

This initial collaboration resulted in promising molecules for an oncology program, for which Sanofi and Aqemia decided to pursue joint efforts.

Aqemia will take responsibility for the AI-based design of optimized molecules that fulfill several small molecule design goals among which potency and selectivity in a priority project in oncology. Unlike most AI-based technologies that need experimental data to train their algorithms prior to starting the design, Aqemia will tackle the drug discovery project by generating its own data with quantum and statistical physics-based calculations.

This collaboration includes an undisclosed upfront payment from Sanofi.

Maximilien Levesque, CEO and co-founder of Aqemia, commented, We are really proud of the results obtained in the first Sanofi-Aqemia oncology collaboration and are very excited to continue working together to accelerate important projects in oncology. He added, This follow-up of our first collaboration project with Sanofi, a global leader in the Pharmaceutical industry, demonstrates our ability to quickly generate novel potent and selective compounds for a given target, and we cant wait to scale it up to dozens of drug discovery projects.

We are also extremely excited by the promising results obtained by Aqemia using their proprietary and disruptive technology to design potent inhibitors on given targets. We are eager to prolong our collaboration to speed up our candidate finding process for the sake of patients suffering from cancer, said Laurent Schio, head of Integrated Drug Discovery of Sanofi France,

About Aqemia

Aqemia is a next-gen pharmatech company generating one of the world's fastest-growing drug discovery pipeline. Our mission is to design fast innovative drug candidates for dozens of critical diseases. Our differentiation lies in our unique quantum and statistical mechanics algorithms fueling a generative artificial intelligence to design novel drug candidates. The disruptive speed and accuracy of our technological platform enables us to scale drug discovery projects just like tech projects.

For more information visit us on http://www.aqemia.com or follow us on LinkedIn

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Aqemia Announces an Extension of Its First Collaboration With Sanofi About AI and Quantum Physics-driven Drug Discovery in Oncology - Business Wire

The relationship between the mind and the brain is a mystery that is central to how we understand our very existence as sentient beings. Some say the mind is strictly a function of the brain consciousness is the product of firing neurons. But some strive to scientifically understand the existence of a mind independent of, or at least to some degree separate from, the brain.

The peer-reviewed scientific journal NeuroQuantology brings together neuroscience and quantum physics a crossroads that some scientists have used to explore this fundamental relationship between mind and brain.

An article published in NeuroQuantologys September 2017 edition reviews and expands on current theories of consciousness that arise from this meeting of neuro and quantum sciences.

Dr. Dirk K.F. Meijer, a professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, hypothesizes that consciousness resides in a field surrounding the brain, a field which lies in another dimension. It shares information with the brain through a concept known as quantum entanglement, among other processes. This has certain similarities with a black hole.

This field may be able to pick up information from the Earths magnetic field, dark energy, and other sources. It then transmits wave information into the brain tissue, that is instrumental in high-speed conscious and subconscious information processing,wrote Dirk.

In other words, the mind is a field that exists around the brain; it picks up information from outside and communicates it into the brain at an extremely fast speed.

He described this field alternately as a holographic structured field, a receptive mental workspace, a meta-cognitive domain, and the global memory space of the individual.

Theres an unsolved mystery in neuroscience called the binding problem.Different parts of the brain handle different tasks: some work on processing color, some on processing sound, etc. But thisall somehow comes together as a unified perception, or consciousness.

Information merges and interacts in the brain more quickly than can be explained by current understandings of neural transmissions in the brain.It thus seems the mind is more than just neurons firing in the brain.

Neuroscientists are still searching for a mechanism behind this binding of disparate parts of the brains information processing. Meijerhas turned to quantum entanglement and tunneling for part of the answer.

Quantum entanglement is where particles appear to be connected despite vast distances between them. When actions are performed on one of the particles, corresponding changes are observed on the others simultaneously and instantaneously.

Quantum tunneling is a phenomenon where a particle tunnels through a barrier it shouldnt be able to according to classical physics.

These quantum phenomena allow for processes so rapid exceeding the speed of lightthey cant be explained with classical physics. So they could help explain ultra-fast subconscious mental processes.

If a mind or mental field could interact with the brain this way, that could be a step toward explaining the rapidity of mental processes.Meijer also used the wave-particle fluctuation of matter in quantum physics to explain the relationship between the mental field and brain. The idea is that particles, such as electrons and photons, exist as waves of probability, but also exist as particles in the event of those probabilities collapsing.

Similarly, Meijer said the mental field is both non-material and, simultaneously, part of the physical brain: The proposed mental workspace is regarded to be non-material, but in relation to the individual brain, entertains a non-dual wave/particle relation according to quantum physical principles: it is directly dependent on the brain physiology but not reducible to it.

The mind and the brain, said Meijer, are connected. They are unified, yet separate. Such an apparent paradox is a signature of quantum physics.

He hypothesizes that the mental field lies in another dimension: That we cannot directly perceive this information aspect is traditionally ascribed to a hidden fourth spatial dimension which cannot be observed in our 3-D world, but can be mathematically derived.

This fourth spatial dimension isnt time. Rather, it is a concept of space-time which includes four spatial dimensions, plus time a 4+1 space-time structure.

He cited studies that have suggested this concept of dimensions could reconcile the mismatches between traditional physics and quantum physics that plague scientists today.

Thus, the mind would exist in the fourth spatial dimension.

Meijer envisions a sort of screen or boundary between the outside world and the individual mental field. He likens this boundary to the event horizon of a black hole.

It is assumed that information entering a black hole from the outside is not lost, but rather is being projected on its outer screen, called the event horizon, Meijer wrote.

Consciousness is a boundary condition between a singularity (black hole) and space within the brain, he added, noting that the event horizon separates a mental model of reality for internal use in each individual from all that exists outside of it. Yet it is connected to a universal information matrix.

This dynamic holographic boundary collects information from inside the brain as well as from the information fields in which our brain is permanently embedded, he told The Epoch Times. In this manner, it is implicitly connected to a universal information matrix.

The geometrical shape known as a torus is well suited for the nature and functions Meijer attributes to this mental field.

A torus is described by the Merriam Webster dictionary as a doughnut-shaped surface generated by a circle rotated about an axis in its plane that does not intersect the circle.

Meijer presented various reasons related to physics theories for this shape. One is related to a theory of how electrical activity in the brain oscillates.

The torus structure is found in physics from the microscale, to the extreme macroscale of black holes, and the universe as a whole, Meijer explained. It could be instrumental in dynamically integrating information in the mind and brain.

Our paper, may directly contribute to an answer on the famous question of [cognitive scientists and philosopher David] Chalmers : how can something immaterial like subjective experience and self-consciousness arise from a material brain?Meijer wrote.

The ability of the mental field to pick up information from other fields, as conceived by Meijer, could also explain some anomalous phenomena, such as extrasensory perception, he noted.

In his view, consciousness can be regarded as the most basic building block of nature and consequently is present at all levels of the fabric of reality.

Since quantum physics emerged, scientists have been exploring its ability to explain consciousness, which Meijers work fits into.

Another theory called orchestrated objective reduction, or Orch-OR, was developed by physicist Sir Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Dr. Stuart Hameroff, which on Hameroffswebsite hedescribesthusly: It suggests consciousness arises from quantum vibrations in protein polymers called microtubules inside the brains neurons.

Like Meijer, Penrose and Hameroff believethere is a connection between the brains biomolecular processes and the basic structure of the universe. They have also called for a major change in how scientists view consciousness.

Hameroff said in an interview with the blog Singularity: Most scientists cant explain consciousness in the brain, so they cant say that consciousness out of the brain is impossible.

Update:Dr. Dirk Meijer has provided The Epoch Times with an update on his paper, clarifying that quantum tunneling and entanglement are not the most likely methods of information transfer between the mental field and the brain. These two phenomena have been shown to provide only a correlation between two particles, not necessarily information transfer (although that may prove to be the case with further research).

Rather, quantum wave resonance is a more likely mechanism of extremely rapid information processing in the brain. This means, instead of signals being sent between neurons in the brain, a wave pattern that encompasses all neurons, as well as the mental field, transmits the information instantaneously.

Picture a vibration wave going up and down in a consistent pattern and running all through your brain and even outside of it. That pattern communicates information that can be understood by vibratory receptors in your brain. All of this is happening in a dimension and at a microscopic level not directly perceptible through conventional scientific instrumentation at our disposal today, yet can be inferred through physical and mathematical modeling.

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Scientist Reveals 'Quantum Entanglement' May Explain the Mind Existing as a Field Separate From the Brain - The Epoch Times

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, theatrically released in early May, develops the concept of the multiverse in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) by establishing how different universes interact with each other. As with most good science fiction, it represents a combination of both fiction and science in this case, quantum physics.

In quantum physics, multiverse hypotheses suggest that Earths universe may be one of many. Dr. Tony Crider, an astrophysics professor from Elon University, clarifies that theres no evidence of a multiverse yet, only untested models.

Multiple hypotheses about parallel universes exist, but Dr. Crider narrows it down to the three most prevalent, distinct and different models: Bubble Universes, Extra Dimensions and Many-Worlds models. The Many-Worlds model relates to the MCU most directly.

In classical physics, existing laws allow scientists to predict the outcome of certain situations. When a ball is thrown into the air with a certain amount of force, scientists can calculate how high it will go and when it will come back down.

However, this predictability does not work for the smaller scale of quantum physics. On a quantum level, each action can have many outcomes, and each potential outcome has a certain probability of happening.

Dr. Chris Richardson, another astrophysics professor at Elon University, explains that, in the Many-Worlds model, All of these different possible outcomes do occur, but only one of them occurs in our universe. All of the other possible outcomes occur in different universes.

In the Many-Worlds model, the universe diverges every time a decision is made, so that there are an infinite number of possible universes that can differ based on the smallest detail. For example, if a car has the option to turn left or right at an intersection, the Many Worlds model holds that the car turns in both directions a divergence into two different universes.

These universes can differ in the slightest way, such as the subtle difference in the direction that the car is turning, but eventually, over time, they can grow to become more distinct from one another.

In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, theres a Doctor Strange in every universe, all variants of Stephen Strange played by Benedict Cumberbatch. The existence of the different versions of superhero Doctor Strange establishes that the car accident that caused Doctor Stranges injury and subsequent journey to study the mystic arts likely occurred in each universe.

Therefore, the divergence between those universes transpired after the accident at different points in time. Understanding the physics behind Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is not paramount, but establishing that concepts in science fiction, such as the multiverse in the MCU, are based on genuine science promotes an interest in science and makes the story more believable. By making the plot more credible, the film itself becomes more incredible.

The Martian, a film released in 2015 based on a book of the same name, follows the journey and trials of a human mission on Mars. Though the trip itself is aspirational and fictional, the film pulls from some scientific discoveries and hypotheses. Mark Watney can grow crops in the soil on Mars, which aligns with scientific evidence that the soil on Mars may even be more suitable for crops than Earths soil. Using human waste as fertilizer would make Watneys crops richer, which is also seen in the film.

Other science fiction evokes scientific discoveries as well. Prior to the Moon landing in 1969, multiple science fiction narratives and films from decades earlier imagined journeys to the Moon. The silent film Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) from 1929 presented whats considered the first relatively well-known science fiction narrative that introduced traveling to the Moon by rocket.

The film was predated by Le Voyage Dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) in 1902, which was seen by a smaller audience and was inspired by novels by both Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Science fiction often creatively imagines what could be possible with some scientific evidence.

Frau im Mond and Le Voyage Dans la Lune prove that the fantasy of going to the Moon began decades before the space race. At the time, it seemed impossible to land humans on the Moon, but in 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced the United States ambition to send an American to Earths natural satellite.

With The Martian, the writers imagined a future with the resources for space travel to Mars that is safe for humans. The imagined future is growing closer, as some scientists believe humans may land on Mars as early as the 2030s. Earlier this year, Elon Musk had considered a mission to Mars in 2029.

Yet, while based on scientific theory, science fiction remains just that: fiction. Science fiction stories are often illogical and depart from science to enhance the plot. The ability to walk between parallel universes that America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) shows off in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is improbable, if not impossible.

Dr. Crider contradicts the logic behind the Sacred Timeline from Loki, by explaining that the Copernican Theory establishes that every time that you think that youre special, you should recognize that youre not. Despite the relations between the multiverse as seen in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the Many-Worlds theory, other MCU films and television shows appear less able to follow the model.

What If presents the closest resemblance to the Many-Worlds model, as one slight alteration in the timeline creates an entirely different world and story, but both Loki and Spider-Man: No Way Home have the same characters from different universes looking physically different.

How does Peter Parker exist in different universes with the same relatives but look completely different and age at a different rate? How does Lokis character have a crocodile variant?

Following the Many Worlds theory, all variants of Parker and all variants of Loki should appear in the same form, but the differences in appearance establish that science fiction is first and foremost fiction. Even with a scientific basis, the writers create a narrative that is marketable to an audience over one that follows scientific theories.

The multiverse that exists in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and in the MCU relates to actual scientific models about parallel universes, but the films and television shows distance themselves from science by presenting narratives that align more with the writers visions and the audiences desires. The best science fiction is often linked to actual scientific theories because science provides ideas that writers can enhance to create stories that people want to read and see.

Where will the MCU go next? The MCUs next steps are anyones guess as audiences cannot predict the direction of the future of the MCU any more than scientists can predict the future of multiverse modeling. Fans can only be sure that the multiverse will continue to play a role in future MCU films.

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The Multiverse in 'Doctor Strange' Has a Basis in Quantum Physics - Study Breaks

Sometimes the discovery of new physics demands insane levels of energy. Big machines. Fancy equipment. Countless hours of sifting through reams of data.

And then sometimes the right combination of materials can open a doorway to invisible realms in a space little bigger than a tabletop.

Take this new kind of relative to the Higgs boson, for example. It was found lurking in a room temperature chunk of layered tellurium crystals. Unlike its famous cousin, it didn't take years of smashing up particles to spot it, either. Just a clever use of some lasers and a trick for unweaving their photon's quantum properties.

"It's not every day you find a new particle sitting on your tabletop," saysKenneth Burch, a Boston College physicist and the lead co-author of the study announcing the discovery of the particle.

Burch and his colleagues caught sight of what's known as an axial Higgs mode, a quantum wiggle that technically qualifies as a new kind of particle.

Like so many discoveries in quantum physics, observing theoretical quantum behaviors in action get us closer to uncovering potential cracks in the Standard Model and even helps us hone in on solving some of the remaining big mysteries.

"The detection of the axial Higgs was predicted in high-energy particle physics to explain dark matter," says Burch.

"However, it has never been observed. Its appearance in a condensed matter system was completely surprising and heralds the discovery of a new broken symmetry state that had not been predicted."

It's been 10 years since the Higgs boson was formally identified amid the carnage of particle collisions by CERN researchers. This not only ended the hunt for the particle but loosely closed the final box in the Standard Model the zoo of fundamental particles making up nature's complement of bricks and mortar.

With the Higgs field's discovery, we could, at last, confirm our understanding of how components of the model gained mass while at rest. It was a huge win for physics, one we're still using to understand the inner mechanics of matter.

While any single Higgs particle exists for barely a fraction of a second, it's a particle in the truest sense of the word, blinking briefly into reality as a discrete excitation in a quantum field.

There are, however, other circumstances in which particles can bestow mass. A break in the collective behavior of a surge of electrons called a charge density wave, for example, would do the trick.

This 'Frankenstein's monster' version of Higgs, called a Higgs mode, can also appear with traits that aren't seen in its less patchwork cousin, such as a finite degree of angular momentum (or spin).

A spin-1 or axial Higgs mode not only does a similar job to the Higgs boson under very specific circumstances, it (and quasiparticles like it) could provide interesting grounds for studying the shadowy mass of dark matter.

As a quasiparticle, the axial Higgs mode can only be seen emerging from the collective behaviors of a crowd. Spotting it requires knowing its signature amid a wash of quantum waves and then having a way to sift it out of the chaos.

By sending perfectly coherent beams of light from two lasers through such material and then watching for telltale patterns in their alignment, Burch and his team uncovered the echo of an axial Higgs mode in layers of rare-earth tritelluride.

"Unlike the extreme conditions typically required to observe new particles, this was done at room temperature in a table top experiment where we achieve quantum control of the mode by just changing the polarization of light," says Burch.

It's possible there could be plenty of other such particles emerging from the tangle of body parts making up exotic quantum materials. Having a means of easily catching a glimpse of their shadow in the light of a laser could reveal a whole litany of new physics.

This research was published in Nature.

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Researchers Discovered a New Kind of Higgs Relative in The Unlikeliest of Places - ScienceAlert

Steve Israel for the Times Herald-Record| Times Herald-Record

As a boy whose father died when I was a baby, the most important man in my life never threw me a baseball or football. He barely knew Willie Mays from Joe Willie Namath. Yet my grandpa Max Botwinick was my ideal of a man. He had an inner strength fueled by his compassion for his fellow men and women that inspires me to this day.

When he was just a teenager in early 20thcentury Russia, he was exiled to Siberia for life for protesting the murder and beatings of thousands of Jews like him. He escaped after 11 months and came to America where he became a housepainter and union leader who fought for the rights of all workers. As Ive written before, I never heard him say a negative word about anyone because of their religion, race or ethnicity or describe people that way. At family gatherings, when someone said something negative about someone elses race, religion or ethnicity, he called them on it.

He lived by a creed that still guides me and is exemplified by a story he often told me that his father told to him: If your mother makes you a new coat, you wouldnt want someone to throw mud on it. So you shouldnt throw mud on someone elses coat.

The most important man in my life as a grown up may at first seem so different than my grandpa. My father-in-law, Joe Curtis, was a semi pro baseball player who played a nifty first base. Yet his kindness and compassion are as much a part of him as his Brooklyn accent and also inspire me to this day.

I once wrote about how my mom, who raised me by herself, tried to do what other little boys fathers did, and buy me my first baseball glove. But because she knew as much about baseball as I did about quantum physics, she bought me a flimsy little plastic one not a real leather one like dads bought their sons.

After Joe read the story, he gave me his leather baseball glove when I was in my 50s.

On this Fathers Day, when blustery tough-talking still masquerades as manliness, the two most important men in my life taught me that kindness, compassion and integrity are what really matter. My father-in-law and my late grandpa are reminders that even when we despair at the worlds often unfathomable cruelty, we can still find comfort in the goodness that exists around us.

I only heard my grandpa raise his voice once, when I was a little boy. He was talking on the phone with a doctor caring for his other daughter, my moms sister, who was hospitalized. Apparently, my grandfather was upset that the treatment he had been told would help her only made her worse. His yelling may have frightened me, but I eventually realized he was only expressing the depth of his love for his daughter.

And almost until the day he died at 93, this shortish man stood tall for the causes he believed in. In his late 80s, he joined protests against the Vietnam War. Even after he turned 90, he took the bus from Bayonne, New Jersey, to his union meetings on 14thStreet in New York City just to support his fellow workers.

Joe Curtis, now 97 and also a union man who distributed the New York Times, has his kindness as deeply engrained as the tattoo on his arm that he got serving in the Navy during World War II. A few years ago, Joe saw me walking outside without a hat on a cool, drizzly summers day. He was so worried, youd think I was walking naked in a blizzard. When I once told him I was about to drive back to Sullivan County from New York City in the rain, he was so concerned, youd think I was driving in a blizzard.

On this Fathers Day, my grandpa Max Botwinick and my father-in-law, Joe Curtis, are examples of what the world so desperately needs: hearts that beat with kindness and integrity that makes them stand tall as inspirations to us all.

steveisrael53@outlook.com

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Steve Israel: Reflections on two inspiring men whose values endure - Times Herald-Record

Global Mobility Call brought together more than 4,500 on-site attendees and 13,000 online attendees from 40 countries, with more than 1.3 million views of the live programme. In addition, 250 journalists have covered the more than 100 multi-sector dialogues, where over 300 panelists, representatives from public and private sectors, entrepreneurs, academics and experts have presented proposals, ideas, reports and reflections on the rapid processes of changes in mobility.

Among the main conclusions was the need to carry out national and international projects that promote digitalisation, decarbonisation, connectivity, intermodal and multimodal transport, industrial transformation, urban design, improvement of rural transport, funding and professional services.

The President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Snchez, closed the Global Mobility Call by stating that this forum "is the best example of the capacity for resilience, ambition to transform, the essential collaboration between the public and private sectors, the strength of companies and of Spanish society as a whole. Both private and public sectors share a special ability to face difficulties and adapt to new scenarios".

He has underlined that the uncertainties provoked by the war "should not delay" the sustainable mobility transformation.

In closing the event, the President of the Executive Committee of IFEMA MADRID, Jos Vicente de los Mozos, explained that these days at Global Mobility Call have shown "the inspiration and the keys to enter into business of enormous proportions, for which priority is to access recovery funds", while the event has generated "content and professional networking, which will translate into a real boost for sustainable mobility".

"We have to process the vast content and contacts of highest interest which have been produced during these days. It will be our job to organise and make this important legacy available to the different sectors and the thousands of professionals who have participated in Global Mobility Call", he said.

Global Mobility Call has responded to the need to bring together all mobility actors at a time of profound transformation. The need to act on both climate and energy crises, seizing the opportunity provided by the EUR 800 billion NextGenerationEU European recovery funds, has made Global Mobility Call an unprecedented opportunity to shape the future of a decarbonised, safe, digitised mobility, which respects the planet and the people's health, aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement and the European Green Pact.

Among the panellists, Jeffrey Sachs, American economist and specialist in sustainable development, called for further digital development of mobility and insisted that this be approached as an integrated ecosystem of sectors, just as Global Mobility Call does.

Clotilde Delbos, CEO of Mobilize, stressed the need to work towards providing users with mobility services tailored to their needs.

Michio Kaku, physicist and futurist, predicted how the quantum physics of the future will generate computers that will connect to the brain and the robotisation of the automotive industry.

Adina Vlean, European Commissioner for Transport, highlighted the opportunity presented by the Next GenerationEU Funds to boost projects in many of Europe's mobility sectors. It was also stressed that it is important to make this coincide with the drive for energy transition, to make Europe less dependent on fossil fuels.

Monica Araya, Climate Mobility Advisor and member of the ClimateWorks & Partners' Steering Committee suggested incorporating into the sustainable mobility agenda the questions of generating employment, fostering talent and economic value, at a time when countries are trying to remain within supply chains, and society is very anxious about the climate crisis and the retraining of labour in many sectors.

Urban planner and MIT professor Carlo Ratti called for reflection on deep structural changes in the mobility of people, jobs and products, at a time of disruption accelerated by the Covid crisis and war.

More information: https://www.ifema.es/en/global-mobility-call/

CONTACTS: Marta Cacho, Directrice de la Communication, [emailprotected]Elena Valera, Presse Internacionale, [emailprotected]

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SOURCE Global Mobility Call

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Global Mobility Call becomes the cornerstone for business and governments to build the future sustainable mobility - PR Newswire

Title image: A laser-emitting device atop a tower at an oil and gas operation scans the landscape for methane-containing natural gas leaks. Credit: Casey Cass/CU Boulder

Sean Coburn walks down a dusty dirt road in Greeley, Colorado, flanked by a scene thats becoming more common in this city at the edge of the Front Rangerows and rows of tanks, pipes, stacks and other hallmarks of the oil and gas industry.

The engineer, who earned his doctorate from CU Boulder and now splits time between the university and a company called LongPath Technologies, is wearing a flame retardant jacket, bulky boots and a hard hat. He needs them on this site. Here, operators take raw and very flammable oil and natural gas, the latter mostly composed of methane, and process it into a form that people can use to heat their homes or drive their cars.

But Coburn is heading for something else: a metal tower, about 50-feet-tall with what looks like a security camera on top.

We pipe the laser light up from there, said Coburn, pointing at a cabinet at the base of the tower. Then we shoot it at different targets around the site.

As he talks, the cabinet beeps, and the laser emitter at its end begins to turn, sweeping over the landscape.

The tower is part of an ambitious undertaking from scientists at LongPath and CU Boulder. Theyre using new laser technology to do what other technologies have struggled to do for years: detect natural gas, which is invisible to the eye, leaking from pipes at sites like this, in real time.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, said Greg Rieker, an associate professor of mechanical engineering who testified before the House Science, Space and Technology Committee June 8 about the problem of methane emissions. It can trap nearly 80 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, and research suggests that escaped methane from oil and gas operations may play a much bigger role in climate change than previously thought.

LongPath is trying to plug that source. The companys towers shoot lasers over miles of terrain to sniff out even the faintest whiffs of methane in the air. So far, the company has installed 23 of them covering almost 300,000 acres in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahomaand Colorado. Rieker believesthe technology could be a win-win for the West: Slowing down emissions of this dangerous gas, while also reducing costs for an industry that employs tens of thousands.

The story of this technology, called a dual frequency comb laser spectrometer, dates back to the 1990s when a CU/JILA physicist named Jan Hall first developed frequency comb lasers to explore the working of tiny atomsand earned a Nobel Prize in the process.

Now, were able to use those same ideas and, with just one of these systems, mitigate about 80 million cubic feet of methane emissions per year, said Rieker who co-founded LongPath in 2017.

Scott Diddams was part of those early days of frequency comb lasers. He was a postdoctoral researcher working with Hall at JILA, a joint research institute between CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to probe quantum physicsor the mysterious workings of very, very small things.

Greg Rieker (left) works with a colleague in the lab at CU Boulder.

The researchers werent thinking about methane hovering over oil fields at the time. Instead, they used their lasers to measure how fast atoms tick. To make an atomic clock, Diddams explained, physicists first shine laser light at a cloud of atoms, giving them a kick so that they flip between different energy levels at a staccato pace. Halls group invented frequency combs to help count out that rhythm.

Atoms tick nearly a quadrillion times per second, said Diddams, now a professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering. You need a really special tool to count those cycles.

Frequency combs were special. Normal lasers, like the pointers in any lecture hall, can only generate one type of light: say, red light or green light. But these new lasers could produce thousands or even millions of colors of infrared light at the same timean entire rainbow inside a single beam.

Hall and German scientist Theodor Hnsch took home a Nobel in 2005 for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique."

By the time Rieker joined CU Boulder in 2013, he and Diddams were already wondering what else frequency combs could do.

At LongPaths offices in Boulder, Coburn and his colleagues open a computer window showing the data coming in from the system in Greeley. The graph shows a squiggly readout with sharp spikes like the teeth in a comb.

Each tooth corresponds to a color in the teams frequency comb laser (hence, the name). Rieker explained that if you shine one of these devices into a cloud of gas, the molecules inside will absorb some of those colors but not all of them. In other words, molecules will leave an imprint on the laser light, almost like pressing your thumb to a glass.

Comb-like spikes on a computerscreen illustrate measurements of methane, water and carbon dioxide.

Each of these different molecules absorbs a different pattern of light, Rieker said. Methane has one pattern. Water and carbon dioxide have another.

Frequency comb technology can read those molecular fingerprints to tell you exactly what kinds of molecules are present in a patch of air.

Or that was the theory in the mid-2000s. Rieker and scientists from NIST took roughly a decade to make it reality. First the team had to shrink these lasers, which could fill entire rooms, down to the size of a suitcasethen design them to survive the extremes of Colorado winters.

We tested what happened when our laser froze, Rieker said. We broke it every way we could think of breaking it.

Traditionally, he said, oil and gas operators look for leaks by using special video cameras or by hiring airplanes to fly overhead. Frequency comb lasers, in contrast, can operate 24/7 without a single human involved.

For 11 months in 2017 and 2018, the team put its technology to the test with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. Rieker and his colleagues deployed one of their lasers at a natural gas storage facility in California. The laser, then mounted to the roof of a trailer, was able to detect methane leaks over several miles of terrain and at an incredible precision of just a few parts per billion. Because the system ran all the time, they were able to detect 12 times more methane per month on average than traditional tools spotted.

After that, it spread by word of mouth, Rieker said. Because these things work.

A technician monitors methane at an oil and gas site in Colorado.

Around the same time, Rieker co-founded LongPath Technologies with his then research scientists Coburn and Robbie Wright, and Caroline Alden, a research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at CU Boulder.

In the beginning, it was slow-going. To launch LongPath and secure initial funding, Rieker and his colleagues worked with Venture Partners, the universitys commercialization arm for campus researchers. The companys first employees worked out of rented space in Riekers basement lab on campus.

Instead of the startup-in-a-garage, we were the startup-in-a basement. Then when COVID hit we all were working out of our own basements, said Wright, now vice president of engineering at LongPath. But in the past year we finally got our first dedicated office, and weve scaled from having three deployments out with one customer to 23 deployments with 17 customers."

Oil and gas executives have come around to these lasers, in part because they can save companies money, Rieker addedeven a routine leak, he said, could cost operators thousands of dollars if they dont catch it right away.

Hes now trying to replicate the success of LongPath.

In 2021, Rieker signed on to lead a new effort on campus called the Quantum Engineering Initiative, which seeks to transform other, fundamental scientific discoveries into real tools that you can hold in your hand. Graduate students in the engineers lab arent done with frequency comb lasers, either. This year, researchers will install one over a patch of frozen soil near Fairbanks, Alaska. Theyre hoping to measure how much methane gas leaks out from that soil as it warms because of climate change.

Graduate student David Yun, meanwhile, uses frequency comb lasers for a completely different purpose: To study how hypersonic jet engines suck up and burn oxygen as they roar to life. Diddams employs a similar set of tools to search for planets circling stars tens of light-years from Earth.

We really want to push the limits of where we can take this technology, Yun said. We keep pushing to see what is the craziest thing we can do with frequency combs?

For Rieker, its a testament to science coming full circlefrom explorations of atomic jitters to a Nobel Prize and even technology that may soon improve the lives of everyday Coloradans.

This is a technology that was developed for something completely differentfor creating better atomic clocks and other tools for quantum research, he said. Now, were making an impact on climate change.

Read more:

Methane: As concerns rise about this greenhouse gas, CU startup works to plug leaks - CU Boulder Today

How can we better hold environmental polluters accountable? How can we enhance the efficiency of qubits? These questions, which loom large for the researchers who study them, are the type of big-issue topics that UC Santa Barbara graduate students are encouraged to tackle. And theyre the central themes of the dissertations that won the 2021-2022 Winifred and Louis Lancaster Dissertation Awards.

This years recipients are Emily Williams and Mark Turiansky, selected by the awards committee for dissertations with significant impact on the field in terms of methodological and substantive contributions.

Climate DetectiveAs global temperatures rise and communities feel the effects of climate change, how do we as a global society address the uneven distribution of harms and gains? The tropics, for instance, are already bearing the brunt of sea level rise and ocean acidification, yet they are not the places that have generated the magnitude of carbon emissions that cause these events, nor do they benefit in a proportionate way from the activities that cause these emissions. Elsewhere around the world, weather events of disastrous proportions are increasing in severity and frequency, clearly caused by anthropogenic activity yet who exactly do we hold accountable?

Inequalities and blind spots such as these are the type of thing that spark Emily Williams curiosity and activist drive. A lifelong environmentalist, she got her first taste of the discipline of environmental studies as an undergraduate at UCSB under the tutelage of the late Professor William Freudenburg.

He opened my eyes to thinking about the causes of climate change, Williams said. She became conscious of the strategies corporations use to justify their actions and their methods of deflection from their outsized contribution to the problem.

Around that time Typhoon Haiyan, then the most powerful typhoon on record, struck the central Philippines, becoming a strong and real reminder of global warmings effects. But even more compelling for Williams who had become part of a civil delegation to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (the international climate negotiations space) was the maddening slowness to address these impacts.

Fast-forward several years, and Williams desire to illuminate the gaps in climate accountability resulted in her dissertation, Interrogating the science of climate accountability: Allocating responsibility for climate impacts within a frame of climate justice. In it, she builds a best practices conceptual framework to identify responsibility for climate impacts. She then tests it using an empirical case study involving the drought in the greater Four Corners region and the Zuni people who live there.

I had the opportunity to work with very diverse mentors, meaning I got to do the attribution science, engage ethnographic methods, organizational sociology and some science and technology studies-related work, she said. Its certainly hard to do interdisciplinary work, but if you find a group of mentors that will support you in this effort, its fascinating.

Among the things she uncovered in her research is the meteorological concept of vapor pressure deficit and its role on droughts, as a result of increased temperatures. By linking this fundamental principle to vegetation, Williams and her co-authors were able to estimate what the Four Corners region would look like without climate change, and identify the human fingerprint in this whodunit of global warming. This ability to definitively attribute effects to human activity can help build a case toward holding polluters accountable, advancing the field of climate justice. Its also what earned Williams the Lancaster Award.

Emilys outstanding integration of theory with qualitative and quantitative methods and her passionate commitment to climate justice truly set her apart, said her adviser, geography professor David Lpez-Carr. Her dissertation makes a significant contribution to the nascent climate accountability literature by being the first to identify the human contribution to regional climate change and to follow those climate change impacts on vulnerable populations at the local level.

Her work provides a framework for future researchers and practitioners to advance the important area of climate accountability, he continued, with real-world implications for holding those responsible for climate change emissions and for mitigating impacts on vulnerable populations.

I feel so honored and so humbled to have received this award, said Williams, who plans to complete a short post-doc before moving into the nonprofit world for more advocacy work. I know for certain that anyone who gets through a Ph.D. program, with all the challenges and opportunities the program presents, deserves such an award. I chose my dissertation topic because I believe so deeply in the importance of ensuring climate accountability work is done within principles of justice. I am just so happy that the selection committee thinks this topic is important too.

Quantum MechanicThe quantum world holds much potential for those who learn to wield it. This space of subatomic particles and their behaviors, interactions and emergent properties can open the door to new materials and technologies with capabilities we have yet to even dream of.

Mark Turiansky is among those at the forefront of this discipline at UCSB, joining some of the finest minds in the quantum sciences as a fellow at the NSF-supported UCSB Quantum Foundry.

The field of quantum information science is rapidly developing and has garnered a ton of interest, said Turiansky, who developed an abiding interest in physics as a child. In the past few years, billions of dollars of funding have been allocated to quantum information science.

Enabled by relatively recent technologies that allow for the study of the universeat its smallest scales, quantum researchers like Turiansky are still just scratching the surface as they work to nail down the fundamentals of the strange yet powerful reality that is quantum physics.

At the heart of some of these investigations is the quantum defect imperfections in a semiconductor crystal that can be harnessed for quantum information science. One common example is the nitrogen-vacancy center in a diamond: In an otherwise uniform crystalline carbon lattice, an NV center is a defect wherein one carbon atom is replaced with a nitrogen atom, and an adjacent spot in the lattice is vacant. These defects can be used for sensing, quantum networking and long-range entanglement.

The NV center is only one such type of quantum defect, and though well-studied, has its limitations. For Turiansky, this underlined the need to gain a better understanding of quantum defects and to find ways to predict and possibly generate more ideal defects.

These needs became the basis of his dissertation, Quantum Defects from First Principles, an investigation into the fundamental concepts of quantum defects, which could lead to the design of a more robust qubit the basic unit of a quantum computer.

To explore his subject, Turiansky turned his attentions to hexagonal boron nitride.

Hexagonal boron nitride is an interesting material because it is two-dimensional, he explained, which means that you can isolate a plane of the material that is just one atom thick. By shining light on this material, it is possible to detect quantum defects called single-photon emitters by the bright spots that shine back. These single photons, he added, are inherently quantum objects that can be used for quantum information science.

The main feat was identifying the defect that was responsible for single-photon emission, Turiansky said. He accomplished it with computational methodologies that he worked to develop in his research.

One methodology that Ive worked on a lot is for nonradiative recombination, he said, describing it in his paper as fundamental to the understanding of quantum defects, dictating the efficiency and operation of a given qubit. By applying his methodology, Turiansky was able to determine the origin of these single photon emitters a topic of much debate in the community. Its a feat that could be applied to examine other quantum defects, and one that was deemed worthy of the Lancaster Award.

Marks work has moved the field forward by systematically identifying promising quantum defects, and providing an unambiguous identification of the microscopic nature of the most promising quantum emitter in hexagonal boron nitride, remarked Turianskys adviser, materials professor Chris Van de Walle. He accomplished this by creatively applying the computational approaches he developed and fruitfully collaborating with experimentalists.

Its really an exceptional honor to receive such a prestigious award for my research efforts over the last five years, Turiansky said. Its even more meaningful knowing the high quality of research turned out at UCSB and the fierce competition of my peers. Im incredibly grateful to my adviser, group members, collaborators, friends and family who helped make this achievement possible.

The two Lancaster dissertations are enteres into a national competition sponsored by the Council of Graduate Schools. A check for $1,000 and a plaque will be awarded upon completion of entry for the national competition.

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Big Issues, Big Answers | The UCSB Current - The UCSB Current

Imagining our everyday life without lasers is difficult. We use lasers in printers, CD players, pointers, measuring devices, and so on. What makes lasers so special is that they use coherent waves of light: all the light inside a laser vibrates completely in sync. Meanwhile, quantum mechanics tells us that particles like atoms should also be thought of as waves. As a result, we can build atom lasers containing coherent waves of matter. But can we make these matter waves last, so that they may be used in applications? In research that was published in Nature this week, a team of Amsterdam physicists shows that the answer to this question is affirmative.

The concept that underlies the atom laser is the so-calledBose-Einstein Condensate, or BEC for short. Elementary particles in nature occur in two types: fermions and bosons. Fermions are particles like electrons and quarks the building blocks of the matter that we are made of. Bosons are very different in nature: they are not hard like fermions, but soft: for example, they can move through one another without a problem. The best-known example of a boson is the photon, the smallest possible quantity of light. But matter particles can also combine to form bosons in fact, entire atoms can behave just like particles of light. What makes bosons so special is that they can all be in the exact same state at the exact same time, or phrased in more technical terms: they can condense into a coherent wave. When this type of condensation happens for matter particles, physicists call the resulting substance a Bose-Einstein Condensate.

In everyday life, we are not at all familiar with these condensates. The reason: it is very difficult to get atoms to all behave as one. The culprit destroying the synchronicity is temperature: when a substance heats up, the constituent particles start to jiggle around, and it becomes virtually impossible to get them to behave as one. Only at extremely low temperatures, about a millionth of a degree above absolute zero (about 273 degreesbelowzero on the Celsius scale), is there a chance of forming the coherent matter waves of a BEC.

A quarter of a century ago, the first Bose-Einstein Condensates were created in physics labs. This opened up the possibility to build atom lasers devices that literally output beams of matter but these devices were only able to function for a very short time. The lasers could produce pulses of matter waves, but after sending out such a pulse, a new BEC had to be created before the next pulse could be sent out. For a first step towards an atom laser, this was still not bad. In fact, ordinary, optical lasers were also made in a pulsed variant before physicists were able to createcontinuouslasers. But while the developments for optical lasers had gone very fast, the first continuous laser being produced within six months after its pulsed counterpart, for atom lasers the continuous version remained elusive for more than 25 years.

It was clear what the problem was: BECs are very fragile, and are rapidly destroyed when light falls on them. Yet the presence of light is crucial in forming the condensate: to cool a substance down to a millionth of a degree, one needs to cool down its atoms using laser light. As a result, BECs were restricted to fleeting bursts, with no way to coherently sustain them.

A team of physicists from the University of Amsterdam has now managed to solve the difficult problem of creating a continuous Bose-Einstein Condensate. Florian Schreck, the team leader, explains what the trick was. In previous experiments, the gradual cooling of atoms was all done in one place. In our setup, we decided to spread the cooling steps not over time, but in space: we make the atoms move while they progress through consecutive cooling steps. In the end, ultracold atoms arrive at the heart of the experiment, where they can be used to form coherent matter waves in a BEC. But while these atoms are being used, new atoms are already on their way to replenish the BEC. In this way we can keep the process going essentially forever.

While the underlying idea was relatively simple, carrying it out was certainly not. Chun-Chia Chen, first author of the publication in Nature, recalls: Already in 2012, the team then still in Innsbruck realized a technique that allowed a BEC to be protected from laser cooling light, enabling for the first time laser cooling all the way down to the degenerate state needed for coherent waves. While this was a critical first step towards the long-held challenge of constructing a continuous atom laser, it was also clear that a dedicated machine would be needed to take it further. On moving to Amsterdam in 2013, we began with a leap of faith, borrowed funds, an empty room and a team entirely funded by personal grants. Six years later, in the early hours of Christmas morning 2019, the experiment was finally on the verge of working. We had the idea of adding an extra laser beam to solve a last technical difficulty, and instantly every image we took showed a BEC, the first continuous-wave BEC.

Having tackled the long-standing open problem of creating a continuous Bose-Einstein Condensate, the researchers have now set their minds on the next goal: using the laser to create a stable output beam of matter. Once their lasers can not only operate forever but can also produce stable beams, nothing stands in the way of technical applications anymore, and matter lasers may start to play an equally important role in technology as ordinary lasers currently do.

Read more from the original source:

Amsterdam Physicists Build An Atom Laser That Can Stay On Forever - Eurasia Review