Feature Channels: Quantum Mechanics

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In standard communication the pigeon always carries the message; the information is linked to a physical entity/particle. Counter to intuition, in a new counterfactual communication protocol published in NPJ Quantum Information, scientists from the University of Vienna, the University of Cambridge and the MIT have experimentally demonstrated that in quantum mechanics this is not always true, thereby contradicting a crucial premise of communication theory.

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Researchers at Berkeley Lab have developed a graphene device that switches from a superconducting material that conducts electricity without losing any energy, to an insulator that resists the flow of electric current – all with a simple flip of a switch.

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Physicists have theorized that a new type of material, called a three-dimensional (3-D) topological insulator (TI), could be a candidate to create qubits for quantum computing due to its special properties. A study found that when the TI’s insulating layers are as thin as 16 quintuple atomic layers across, the top and bottom metallic surfaces begin to destroy their metallic properties.

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Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, along with researchers at Clemson University and Fujitsu Laboratories of America, have developed hybrid algorithms to run on size-limited quantum machines and have demonstrated them for practical applications.

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In a global first, NUS scientists have demonstrated that heat energy can be manipulated by utilising the quantum mechanical principle of anti-parity-time symmetry. Using this method, they were able to control the flow of heat in a material.

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VIDEO: Even in the strange world of open quantum systems, the arrow of time points steadily forward -- most of the time. New experiments conducted at Washington University in St. Louis compare the forward and reverse trajectories of superconducting circuits called qubits, and find that they follow the second law of thermodynamics.

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The Chicago Quantum Exchange, a growing intellectual hub for the research and development of quantum technology, has expanded its community to include new industry partners working at the forefront of quantum technology and research. These corporate partners are Boeing, Applied Materials, Inc., ColdQuanta, Inc., HRL Laboratories LLC and Quantum Opus LLC.

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Newly published research from a team of scientists led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory sheds more light on the nature of high-temperature iron-based superconductivity.

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Researchers have discovered that terahertz light --light at trillions of cycles per second -- can act as a control knob to accelerate supercurrents. That can help open up the quantum world of matter and energy at atomic and subatomic scales to practical applications such as ultrafast computing.

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Study finds waste soft drinks for carbon capture could help cut carbon dioxide emissions; sharing secret messages using quantum communications just got more practical for better cybersecurity; designed synthetic polymers for better binding in next-generation li-ion batteries; predictive modeling could point to nuclear reactors running longer; scientists to create computers that mimic human brain.

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To better store data, scientists need ways to change a material’s properties suddenly. For example, they want a material that can go from insulator to conductor and back again. Now, they devised a surprisingly simple way of flipping a material from one state into another, and back again, with flashes of light. A single light pulse turns thin sheets of tantalum disulfide from its original (alpha) state into a mixture of alpha and beta states. Domain walls separate the two states. A second pulse of light dissolves the walls, and the material returns to its original state.

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The Department of Energy has announced that, over the next four years, it will invest $32 million to accelerate the design of new materials through use of high-performance computing. One of the seven funded projects is the Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials (MICCoM), founded in 2015 and led by the Materials Science Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory. This center draws co-investigators from the University of Chicago, University of Notre Dame, and University of California, Davis.

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Researchers from Brown and Columbia Universities have demonstrated previously unknown states of matter that arise in double-layer stacks of graphene, a two-dimensional nanomaterial. These new states, known as the fractional quantum Hall effect, arise from the complex interactions of electrons both within and across graphene layers. “The findings show that stacking 2D materials together in close proximity generates entirely new physics,” says Brown Professor Jia Li.

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In free space, the light wave of a laser beam propagates on a perfectly straight line. Under certain circumstances, however, the behavior of a wave can be much more complicated.

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A team at the University of Tsukuba studied a novel process for creating coherent lattice waves inside silicon crystals using ultrashort laser pulses.

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It sounds like an old-school vinyl record, but the distinctive crackle in the music streamed into Chris Holloway’s laboratory is atomic in origin. The group spent years finding a way to directly measure electric fields using atoms, so who can blame them for then having a little fun with their new technology? They don’t expect the atomic-recording’s lower sound quality to replace digital music recordings, but the team is considering how this “entertaining” example of atomic sensing could be applied in communication devices of the future.

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ORNL story tips: New builders’ tool by ORNL assesses design performance before construction begins; new pressure technique to manipulate magnetism in thin films could enhance electronic devices; ORNL outlines quantum sensing advances for better airport scanning, other applications.

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Energy is transferred through the structure in a way that boosts its response to light, showing promise for solar cell applications.

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Theorized dark matter particles haven’t yet shown up where scientists had expected them. So Berkeley Lab researchers are now designing new and nimble experiments that can look for dark matter in previously unexplored ranges of particle mass and energy, and using previously untested methods.

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Irvine, Calif., June 6, 2019 – In a paper published this week in Nature, materials science researchers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions unveil a new process for producing oxide perovskite crystals in exquisitely flexible, free-standing layers. A two-dimensional rendition of this substance is intriguing to scientists and engineers, because 2D materials have been shown to possess remarkable electronic properties, including high-temperature superconductivity.

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Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have come up with a way to manipulate tungsten diselenide (WSe2) —a promising two-dimensional material—to further unlock its potential to enable faster, more efficient computing, and even quantum information processing and storage.

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Proof that a new ability to grow thin films of an important class of materials called complex oxides will, for the first time, make these materials commercially feasible, according to Penn State materials scientists.

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A team led by scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory explored how atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) crystals can grow over 3D objects and how the curvature of those objects can stretch and strain the crystals.

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Efforts to create reliable light-based quantum computing, quantum key distribution for cybersecurity, and other technologies got a boost from a new study demonstrating an innovative method for creating thin films to control the emission of single photons.

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The global science and technology organization Battelle recognized materials scientist Mircea Cotlet of Brookhaven Lab's Center for Functional Nanomaterials for his research in applying self-assembly methods to control the interfaces between nanomaterials and other light-interacting components.

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Tweaking the design of microring sensors enhances their sensitivity without adding more implementation complexity.

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The tech world is abuzz about quantum information science (QIS). This emerging technology explores bizarre quantum effects that occur on the smallest scales of matter and could potentially revolutionize the way we live.

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A novel material that consists of a single sheet of carbon atoms could lead to new designs for optical quantum computers. Physicists from the University of Vienna and the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona have shown that tailored graphene structures enable single photons to interact with each other. The proposed new architecture for quantum computer is published in the recent issue of npj Quantum Information.

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Researchers at the University of Washington, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory discovered that they can use extremely high pressure and temperature to introduce other elements into nanodiamonds for applications in bioimaging and quantum computing.

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Physicist Tracy Northup is currently researching the development of quantum internet at the University of Innsbruck.

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Argonne scientists have further explored a new effect that enhances their ability to control the direction of electron spin in certain materials. Their discovery may lead to more powerful and energy-efficient materials for information storage.

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In a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports, APL researchers describe a way to manipulate the critical elements of a quantum computer and their control components that will be an important piece of scaling quantum computer systems to the larger sizes needed for more complex applications.

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Scientists at Brookhaven's Center for Functional Nanomaterials are building a robotic system to accelerate quantum materials discovery.

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A team of researchers led by Berkeley Lab has observed chirality for the first time in polar skyrmions in a material with reversible electrical properties – a combination that could lead to more powerful data storage devices that continue to hold information, even after they’ve been turned off.

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Quantum computers promise to solve certain computational problems exponentially faster than any classical machine. "A particularly promising application is the solution of quantum many-body problems utilizing the concept of digital quantum simulation", says Markus Heyl from Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex in Dresden, Germany.

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By drilling holes into a thin two-dimensional sheet of hexagonal boron nitride with a gallium-focused ion beam, University of Oregon scientists have created artificial atoms that generate single photons.

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Gold atoms ski along boron nitride nanotubes and stabilize in metallic monolayers. The resulting gold quantum dots could be a promising material for future electronics and quantum computing.

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Material scientists formulated and tested a new cobalt-based Heusler alloy that can host massless particles, known as Weyl fermions, that can carry charge more efficiently.

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In a collaboration between the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory and Northeastern University, scientists have developed a model for predicting the shape of metal nanocrystals or “islands” sandwiched between or below two-dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene. The advance moves 2D quantum materials a step closer to applications in electronics.

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Irvine, Calif., April 3, 2019 – By focusing light down to the size of an atom, scientists at the University of California, Irvine have produced the first images of a molecule’s normal modes of vibration – the internal motions that drive the chemistry of all things, including the function of living cells. In a study in Nature, researchers at UCI’s Center for Chemistry at the Space-Time Limit describe how they positioned the atomically terminated silver tip of a scanning tunneling microscope mere ängstroms from its target: a cobalt-based porphyrin molecule affixed to a copper platform.

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Scientists have proposed a new method for producing more robust Majorana fermions, a kind of quasiparticle that could act as stable bits of information in next-generation quantum computers.

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Physicists develop new methodWhen a particle is completely isolated from its environment, the laws of quantum physics start to play a crucial role. One important requirement to see quantum effects is to remove all thermal energy from the particle motion, i.e. to cool it as close as possible to absolute zero temperature. Researchers at the University of Vienna, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are now one step closer to reaching this goal by demonstrating a new method for cooling levitated nanoparticles.

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An international team of scientists led by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory explored the concept of reversing time in a first-of-its-kind experiment, managing to return a computer briefly to the past. The results, published March 13 in the journal Scientific Reports, suggest new paths for exploring the backward flow of time in quantum systems and present new possibilities for quantum computer program testing and error correction.

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Researchers from Russia teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland and returned the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past. They also calculated the probability that an electron in empty interstellar space will spontaneously travel back into its recent past.

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redirect to mitre article 709077

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Review highlights insights into coherence, which could help overcome roadblocks in next-generation energy systems.

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Exploiting a strain-engineering approach could provide nanoscale light sources with a nonfluctuating emission wavelength for use in sensors, quantum communication, and imaging.

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MITRE creates new technology to improve outcomes for our sponsors and deter our adversaries. From financial models to antennae to social media analytics, we drive innovation by delivering 500+ technology licenses and managing 200+ corporate R&D programs and partnerships.

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A new frontier in the study of magnetic materials, femtomagnetism, could lead to ultrafast magnetic storage devices that would transform information processing technologies. Now, researchers report a tabletop method to characterize such a faster magnetic storage using high-harmonic generation of laser light in iron thin films. Their work, which Guoping Zhang will present at the 2019 APS March Meeting, has the same vision as quantum technology.

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Robert Myers, a theoretical physicist consistently ranked among the world’s most influential scientists, has been appointed the new Director of Perimeter Institute. The appointment follows an exhaustive global search and was made with the unanimous approval of a search committee of top international scientists and Perimeter’s Board of Directors.