Quantum error correction research yields unexpected quantum gravity insights

21 Nov 2024 Han Le

Quantum link: New research has revealed an unexpected connection between the physics of approximate error-correcting codes and quantum gravity. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/Evgenia Fux)

In computing, quantum mechanics is a double-edged sword. While computers that use quantum bits, or qubits, can perform certain operations much faster than their classical counterparts, these qubits only maintain their quantum nature – their superpositions and entanglement – for a limited time. Beyond this so-called coherence time, interactions with the environment, or noise, lead to loss of information and errors. Worse, because quantum states cannot be copied – a consequence of quantum mechanics known as the no-cloning theorem – or directly observed without collapsing the state, correcting these errors requires more sophisticated strategies than the simple duplications used in classical computing.

FOCUS ON SYSTEMIC NEGOTIATIONS: "Mastering Systemic Negotiations: Unlocking the Secrets to Strategic Influence and Unmatched Success in Every Deal" Kindle Edition by KONSTANTINOS TSIANTIS (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

 https://www.amazon.com/FOCUS-SYSTEMIC-NEGOTIATIONS-Mastering-Negotiations-ebook/dp/B0D831PQMY/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

FOCUS ON SYSTEMIC NEGOTIATIONS: "Mastering Systemic Negotiations: Unlocking the Secrets to Strategic Influence and Unmatched Success in Every Deal" Kindle Edition

by KONSTANTINOS TSIANTIS (Author)  Format: Kindle Edition

Unlock the secrets of successful negotiations in a world where every interaction counts. "Focus on Systemic Negotiations" is a transformative guide for anyone seeking to excel in negotiations, regardless of their experience level. This compelling book equips beginners with foundational skills and empowers seasoned negotiators to refine their techniques in complex multicultural environments. Are you ready to elevate your negotiation game and confidently navigate even the trickiest personalities?

 

Thorium Fuel Cycle Introduction

 

Orbital angular momentum monopoles appear in a chiral crystal

23 Oct 2024 Isabelle Dumé

Monopoles of orbital angular momentum (OAM) are a tantalizing prospect for orbitronics because OAM is uniform in all directions. This would mean that information flows could be generated in any direction. Visualizing the orbital texture is almost like capturing an image of the OAM monopoles. (Courtesy: Paul Scherrer Institute / Monika Bletry)

Magnets generally have two poles, north and south, so observing something that behaves like it has only one is extremely unusual. Physicists in Germany and Switzerland have become the latest to claim this rare accolade by making the first direct detection of structures known as orbital angular momentum monopoles. The monopoles, which the team identified in materials known as chiral crystals, had previously only been predicted in theory. The discovery could aid the development of more energy-efficient memory devices.

Traditional electronic devices use the charge of electrons to transfer energy and information. This transfer process is energy-intensive, however, so scientists are looking for alternatives. One possibility is spintronics, which uses the electron’s spin rather than its charge, but more recently another alternative has emerged that could be even more promising. Known as orbitronics, it exploits the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of electrons as they revolve around an atomic nucleus. By manipulating this OAM, it is in principle possible to generate large magnetizations with very small electric currents – a property that could be used to make energy-efficient memory devices.

 

Negative triangularity tokamaks: a power plant plasma solution from the core to the edge?

22 Oct 2024 Sponsored by Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion

Available to watch now, IOP Publishing’s journal, Plasma Science and Technologies explores the knowns and unknowns of negative triangularity and evaluate its future as a power plant solution

The webinar is directly linked with a special issue of Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion on Advances in the Physics Basis of Negative Triangularity Tokamaks; featuring contributions from all of the speakers, and many more papers from the leading groups researching this fascinating topic.

Want to learn more on this subject?

Watch now

In recent years the fusion community has begun to focus on the practical engineering of tokamak power plants. From this, it became clear that the power exhaust problem, extracting the energy produced by fusion without melting the plasma-facing components, is just as important and challenging as plasma confinement. To these ends, negative triangularity plasma shaping holds unique promise.

Conceptually, negative triangularity is simple. Take the standard positive triangularity plasma shape, ubiquitous among tokamaks, and flip it so that the triangle points inwards. By virtue of this change in shape, negative triangularity plasmas have been experimentally observed to dramatically improve energy confinement, sometimes by more than a factor of two. Simultaneously, the plasma shape is also found to robustly prevent the transition to the improved confinement regime H-mode. While this may initially seem a drawback, the confinement improvement can enable negative triangularity to still achieve similar confinement to a positive triangularity H-mode. In this way, it robustly avoids the typical difficulties of H-mode: damaging edge localized modes (ELMs) and the narrow scrape-off layer (SOL) width. This is the promise of negative triangularity, an elegant and simple path to alleviating power exhaust while preserving plasma confinement.

 

Multi-qubit entangled states boost atomic clock and sensor performance

22 Oct 2024

Coloradans Left to right are Adam Kaufman, Nelson Darkwah Oppong, Alec Cao and Theo Lukin Yelin. They are inspecting an atomic optical clock at JILA. (Courtesy: Patrick Campbell/CU Boulder)

Frequency measurements using multi-qubit entangled states have been performed by two independent groups in the US. These entangled states have correlated errors, resulting in measurement precisions better than the standard quantum limit. One team is based in Colorado and it measured the frequency of an atomic clock with greater precision than possible using conventional methods. The other group is in California and it showed how entangled states could be used in quantum sensing.

Atomic clocks are the most accurate timekeeping devices we have. They work by locking an ultraprecise, frequency comb laser to a narrow linewidth transition in an atom. The higher the transition’s frequency, the faster the clock ticks and the more precisely it can keep time. The clock with the best precision today is operated by Jun Ye’s group at JILA in Boulder, Colorado and colleagues. After running for the age of the universe, this clock would only be wrong by 0.01 s.

 

Living bioelectronics capture physiological signals and deliver targeted therapy

11 Jun 2024 Tami Freeman

The ABLE platform First author Jiuyun Shi holds a living bioelectronics device that integrates flexible electronic sensors, hydrogel and living cells to monitor and heal skin conditions. (Courtesy: Jiuyun Shi and Bozhi Tian/University of Chicago)

Electronic devices that seamlessly interface with living tissues hold potential to revolutionize disease diagnosis and treatment. But integrating electronics with the human body is a tricky task, due to mechanical incompatibilities between rigid metallic materials and soft biological tissues.

To address this challenge, Bozhi Tian and colleagues at the University of Chicago have created “living bioelectronics” designed to capture physiological signals and deliver targeted treatments. The team’s ABLE (active biointegrated living electronics) platform combines thin, flexible sensor circuitry with an ultrasoft, tissue-mimicking hydrogel made from tapioca starch and gelatin. The final ingredient is the addition of living cells into the gel, in this case Staphylococcus epidermidis, a bacterium that naturally lives on human skin and secretes compounds that regulate inflammation.

 

Four-wave mixing could boost optical communications in space

09 Nov 2024

Four-wave mixing A weak optical signal (red) from a spacecraft transmitter can be amplified noise-free when it encounters two pump waves (blue and green) in a receiver on Earth. (Courtesy: Chalmers University of Technology/Rasmus Larsson)

A new and practical approach to the low-noise amplification of weakened optical signals has been unveiled by researchers in Sweden. Drawing from the principles of four-wave mixing, Rasmus Larsson and colleagues at Chalmers University of Technology believe their approach could have promising implications for laser-based communication systems in space.

 

Optical technique measures intramolecular distances with angstrom precision

28 Oct 2024 Isabelle Dumé

Distance markers: Polyprolines are relatively stiff polypeptides that can be used as intramolecular “rulers” to demonstrate MINFLUX optical resolutions. This image shows optically measured distances in nanometres using chains of polyprolines 5 to 30 repeats long. The white ellipses at right show the measurement uncertainty in each position determination (2 sigma). (Courtesy: Steffen J. Sahl / Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen, Germany)

Physicists in Germany have used visible light to measure intramolecular distances smaller than 10 nm thanks to an advanced version of an optical fluorescence microscopy technique called MINFLUX. The technique, which has a precision of just 1 angstrom (0.1 nm), could be used to study biological processes such as interactions between proteins and other biomolecules inside cells.

 

Mysterious brown dwarf is two objects, not one

01 Nov 2024

Twirling pair Artist’s impression of Gliese 229Ba and Gliese 229Bb orbiting each other to create Gliese 229B. The brown dwarf pair orbit a cool M-dwarf star (shown in the distance) every 250 years. (Courtesy: K Miller/R Hurt/Caltech/IPAC)

Two independent studies suggest that the brown dwarf Gliese 229 B is not a single object, but rather a pair of brown dwarfs. The two teams reached this conclusion in different ways, with one using a combination of instruments at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, and the other taking advantage of the extreme resolution of the infrared spectra measured by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

 

Cosmic antimatter could be created by annihilating WIMPs

23 Oct 2024

Hints of dark matter Antinuclei detected by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer could help physicists improve models of dark matter. (Courtesy: NASA)

Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) are prime candidates for dark matter – but the hypothetical particles have never been observed directly. Now, an international group of physicists has proposed a connection between WIMPs and the higher-than-expected flux of antimatter cosmic rays detected by NASA’s Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) on the International Space Station.

 

Axion clouds around neutron stars could reveal dark matter origins

04 Nov 2024

Cloudy with a chance of axions: An axion cloud around a neutron star. While some axions escape the star’s gravitational pull, many remain bound to the star. Over a long period of time, a cloud of axions forms and interacts with the neutron star's strong magnetic field. This causes some axions to convert into radiofrequency photons that telescopes on Earth could detect. (Courtesy: University of Amsterdam)

Hypothetical particles called axions could form dense clouds around neutron stars – and if they do, they will give off signals that radio telescopes can detect, say researchers in the Netherlands, the UK and the US. Since axions are a possible candidate for the mysterious substance known as dark matter, this finding could bring us closer to understanding it.

 

‘Buddy star’ could explain Betelgeuse’s varying brightness

06 Nov 2024 Isabelle Dumé

Any buddy out there? Betelgeuse's position in the constellation Orion. (Courtesy: Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Simons Foundation)

An unseen low-mass companion star may be responsible for the recently observed “Great Dimming” of the red supergiant star Betelgeuse. According to this hypothesis, which was put forward by researchers in the US and Hungary, the star’s apparent brightness varies when an orbiting companion – dubbed α Ori B or, less formally, “Betelbuddy” – displaces light-blocking dust, thereby changing how much of Betelgeuse’s light reaches the Earth.

Shielding Your Family: Essential Precautions Against Nuclear Threats

Shielding Your Family: Essential Precautions Against Nuclear Threats 

ΟΔΗΓΟΣ ΘΩΡΑΚΙΣΗΣ ΤΗΣ ΑΣΦΑΛΕΙΑΣ ΤΗΣ ΟΙΚΟΓΕΝΕΙΑΣ ΣΑΣ ΕΝΑΝΤΙ ΠΥΡΗΝΙΚΩΝ ΑΠΕΙΛΩΝ

ΟΔΗΓΟΣ ΘΩΡΑΚΙΣΗΣ ΤΗΣ ΑΣΦΑΛΕΙΑΣ ΤΗΣ ΟΙΚΟΓΕΝΕΙΑΣ ΣΑΣ ΕΝΑΝΤΙ ΠΥΡΗΝΙΚΩΝ ΑΠΕΙΛΩΝ