Feature Channels: Quantum Mechanics

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Imagine a road with two lanes in each direction. One lane is for slow cars, and the other is for fast ones.

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Scientists with the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE) at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering announced today that for the first time they’ve connected the city of Chicago and suburban labs with a quantum network—nearly doubling the length of what was already one of the longest in the country.

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A profile of Bo Peng, a scientist at PNNL working on error correction for quantum computing. He is a collaborator with Q-NEXT, one of the DOE National QIS Research Centers.

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For would-be quantum programmers scratching their heads over how to jump into the game as quantum computers proliferate and become publicly accessible, a new beginner’s guide provides a thorough introduction to quantum algorithms and their implementation on existing hardware.

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The University of Illinois Chicago has been selected to join the Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage, a U.S. Department of Energy-funded center focused on building the tools necessary to create scalable, distributed and fault-tolerant quantum computer systems.

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University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) has joined the Brookhaven National Laboratory-led Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage (C2QA), making the public research university C2QA’s 24th partner institution.

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A Quantum Science Center-supported team has captured the first-ever appearance of a previously undetectable quantum excitation known as the axial Higgs mode.

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A Bristol-led team of physicists has found a way to operate mass manufacturable photonic sensors at the quantum limit. This breakthrough paves the way for practical applications such as monitoring greenhouse gases and cancer detection.

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Atoms do weird things when forced out of their comfort zones. Rice University engineers have thought up a new way to give them a nudge.

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Superconductors are materials with no electrical resistance whatsoever, commonly requiring extremely low temperatures. They are used in a wide range of domains, from medical applications to a central role in quantum computers. Superconductivity is caused by specially linked pairs of electrons known as Cooper pairs. So far, the occurrence of Cooper pairs has been measured indirectly macroscopically in bulk, but a new technique developed by researchers at Aalto University and Oak Ridge National Laboratories in the US can detect their occurrence with atomic precision.

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Scientists have created the first ”time-crystal” two-body system in an experiment that seems to bend the laws of physics.

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In conventional wisdom, producing a curved space requires distortions, such as bending or stretching a flat space.

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A theoretical breakthrough in understanding quantum chaos could open new paths into researching quantum information and quantum computing, many-body physics, black holes, and the still-elusive quantum to classical transition.

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Argonne researchers have used quantum computers to simulate spin defects, an important material property for the next generation of quantum computers.

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Researchers are developing the nation’s first drone-based, mobile quantum network for unhackable wireless communication. The network includes drones, a ground station, lasers and fiber optics. In war, these drones would provide one-time crypto-keys to exchange critical information, which spies and enemies would not be able to intercept. Quantum protects information using the laws of nature and not just by a clever manmade code.

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At the quantum mechanics level, the mystery of what happens when electrons transition between metallic and insulator states has intrigued physicists for nearly 60 years. Modern instrumentation has provided a fascinating glimpse at the answer.

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Novel simulation brings extraordinary fast radio bursts into the laboratory in a way once thought impossible.

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AWS joins Q-NEXT as an institutional partner. Q-NEXT is a DOE National QIS Research Center led by Argonne.

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A Berkeley Lab-led research team has demonstrated an ultrathin silicon nanowire that conducts heat 150% more efficiently than conventional materials used in advanced chip technologies. The device could enable smaller, faster, energy-efficient microelectronics.

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Paul Benioff, an Argonne emeritus scientist, helped pave the way for the field of quantum computing that is now being intensely pursued throughout the world. He passed away on March 29, leaving a legacy of intellectual courage and collaboration.

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Various technologies, networks and institutions benefit from or require accurate time keeping to synchronize their activities. Current ways of synchronizing time have some drawbacks that a new proposed method seeks to address.

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Quantum computers are prone to errors that limit their usefulness in scientific research. While error correction would be the ideal solution, it is not yet feasible due to the number of qubits needed. New research shows the value of an error mitigation approach called noise estimation circuits for improving the reliability of quantum computer simulations.

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A team led by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, in close collaboration with FAMU-FSU College of Engineering Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Wei Guo, has announced the creation of a new qubit platform that shows great promise to be developed into future quantum computers. Their work is published in Nature.

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Scientists have developed a qubit platform formed by freezing neon gas into a solid, spraying electrons from a light bulb’s filament onto it, and trapping a single electron there. This system shows great promise as an ideal building block for quantum computers.

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Quantum computing experiments now have a new control and readout electronics option that will significantly improve performance while replacing cumbersome and expensive systems. Developed by a team of engineers at Fermilab in collaboration with the University of Chicago, the Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit, or QICK for short, is easily scalable.

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Double success for KIT: In its 2021 awarding round, the European Research Council (ERC) has decided to award an Advanced Grant each to computer scientist Mehdi Tahoori and physicist Alexey Ustinov. For their research projects in the areas of technical informatics and quantum physics, the renowned scientists will receive funding in the amount of about 2.5 million and 2.7 million euros, respectively, over the next five years.

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Quantum computing holds the potential to be a game-changing future technology in fields ranging from chemistry to cryptography to finance to pharmaceuticals.

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Since the first successful fabrication of a two-dimensional structure of carbon atoms about 20 years ago, graphene has fascinated scientists.

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Two new advances from the lab of University of Oregon physicist Ben McMorran are refining the microscopes. Both come from taking advantage of a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics: that an electron can behave simultaneously like a wave and a particle. It’s one of many examples of weird, quantum-level quirks in which subatomic particles often behave in ways that seem to violate the laws of classical physics.

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A research team led by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) was recently selected for second-phase funding of a $9.2 million project aimed at demonstrating a hybrid computing system that will combine the advantages of classical computing with those of quantum computing to tackle some of the world’s most difficult optimization problems.

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In a test of the photon entanglement that makes quantum communication possible, researchers built a quantum local area network (QLAN) that shared information among three systems in separate buildings. The team used a protocol called remote state preparation, where a successful measurement of one half of an entangled photon pair converts the other photon to the preferred state. The researchers performed this conversion across all the paired links in the QLAN—a feat not previously accomplished on a quantum network.

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Professor Din-Ping Tsai, the Chair Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the City University of Hong Kong (CityU), gave an online talk as part of the Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Study (HKIAS) Distinguished Lecture Series on Electronics and Photonics on 30 March 2022, titled "Meta-Devices: From Sensing and Imaging to Quantum Optical Chip". Professor Hon Yan, Wong Chun Hong Professor of Data Engineering was the moderator.

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Researchers discovered that light can trigger a form of magnetism in a normally nonmagnetic material. This magnetism centers on the behavior of electron “spin.” By controlling & aligning electron spin at this level of detail & accuracy, this platform could have applications in quantum computing & simulation.

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• A university-industry collaboration has successfully run a quantum algorithm on a type of quantum computer known as a cold atom quantum computer for the first time. The achievement by the team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin¬–Madison, ColdQuanta and Riverlane brings quantum computing one step closer to being used in real-world applications.

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Intel's quantum test bed will be installed at Argonne in partnership with the Q-NEXT quantum research center. Intel's Jeanette Roberts is leading the installation.

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In a paper in Nature Physics, researchers at Stony Brook University report the formation of matter-wave polaritons in an optical lattice, an experimental discovery that enables studies of a central quantum science and technology paradigm through direct quantum simulation using ultracold atoms.

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In a result published in PNAS, scientists derive an elegant equation that provides allows scientists to instantly calculate the quantum information lifetime for 12,000 different potential qubit materials.

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PPPL becomes first institutional affiliate of new center for quantum-based applications in computing, communication, and sensing to benefit national security, economic competitiveness, and leadership in scientific discovery.

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Science, education and economic development leaders across New Mexico have formed a coalition to bring future quantum computing jobs to the state. Sandia National Laboratories, The University of New Mexico and Los Alamos National Laboratory announced the new coalition today.

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Quantum computing can change almost everything about the world we live in, but despite the billions of dollars spent studying it, it’s still too unwieldy for regular use. NAU assistant professor Ryan Behunin is working to change that. He received an NSF CAREER grant to study how to reduce the noise produced in the process of quantum computing, which will make it better and more practical.

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Tiny silicon quantum processors have finally surpassed 99 percent fidelity, an important milestone toward future quantum computers. Three research groups demonstrated 99 percent fidelity for “if-then” logic gates between two silicon qubits. The researchers used a technique called gate set tomography to achieve this in two of the three experiments, an important methodological step.

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In recent years, artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous, with applications such as speech interpretation, image recognition, medical diagnosis, and many more. At the same time, quantum technology has been proven capable of computational power well beyond the reach of even the world’s largest supercomputer. Physicists at the University of Vienna have now demonstrated a new device, called quantum memristor, which may allow to combine these two worlds, thus unlocking unprecedented capabilities. The experiment, carried out in collaboration with the National Research Council (CNR) and the Politecnico di Milano in Italy, has been realized on an integrated quantum processor operating on single photons. The work is published in the current issue of the journal “Nature Photonics”.

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Unconventional superconductors carry electrical current with zero resistance in ways that defy our previous understanding of physics. A recent study led by Berkeley Lab could help researchers advance future applications in next-gen energy storage, supercomputing, and magnetic levitating trains.

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Shantanu Chakrabartty at the McKelvey School of Engineering proposes a new kind of encryption to protect data in the age of quantum computers.

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Argonne scientists have discovered a type of magnetic behavior that could help enable magnetically based quantum devices.