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Quantum entanglement on demand could lead to a super-secure internet
If you're going to create virtually unbreakable quantum networks, you need to create quantum entanglement so that particles, and thus pieces of data, are intertwined at long distances. There hasn't been a reliable way to make that happen, however, until now. Scientists at TU Delft have produced the first entanglement on demand -- that is, they can reliably trigger the quantum pairing effect and make it last long enough to be meaningful. The effect only worked across two nodes and a modest distance of about 6.6 feet, but it raises the possibility of a quantum internet that's far more secure than what you see today.
China bounced an 'unhackable' quantum signal between cities
The field of quantum cryptography, which seeks to transmit encrypted information using entangled quantum particles like photons, could help lay the groundwork for tomorrow's quantum networks but it faces a significant physical hurdle: entangled photons are crazy hard to transmit long distances. Even in fiber optic cables, they can only go about 150 miles before completely degrading. But a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences may have the solution. You just have to send the photons 745 miles into space.
600-year-old starlight addressed a loophole in quantum theory
Quantum entanglement, where two particles are separated by space and yet inextricably linked by the laws of quantum mechanics, has already been proven to be real, but something called the "freedom-of-choice loophole" has so far made it impossible to definitively prove the theory. That is, until physicists from the University of Vienna and MIT addressed that loophole with a blast of 600-year-old starlight.
The artist making physics and a conspiracy theory into music
Peaches is her aunt. Jared Leto's a fan and so is Jean-Michel Jarre, who sent her to live with an indigenous tribe in the Amazon. She's modeled for high-end fashion events and composed for German theater. She's conducted magnetic resonance imaging studies on mutated HIV cells and had paintings featured in galleries in New York. She taught herself the piano at age 10. At 15, she successfully petitioned the Los Angeles courts to be home-schooled; one year later, she enrolled at the University of Maryland. Her upcoming album incorporates the synthesized sounds of actual stars, physics themes and pitch-shifting conspiracies linked to Bob Marley and Hitler. Her list of professional accomplishments puts other so-called pop culture multihyphenates to shame. She is Simonne Jones, and you will know her name.
Newly discovered magnetism is a big boost for quantum computers
Until now, humanity has only known two forms of magnetism: ferromagnetism (the kind you see on your fridge) and antiferromagnetism (a sort of negative magnetism found in hard drives). However, MIT researchers just confirmed the existence of a third kind... and it could be the key to making quantum computing a practical reality. The team made and supercooled a crystal that exhibits a quantum spin liquid state, where the magnetic directions of each particle never line up. That odd behavior, in turn, leads to quantum entanglement (in which distant particles affect each other's magnetism) that would be ideal for computers.
Scientists create quantum entanglement at room temperature
Quantum entanglement, where two particles are inextricably linked, is a real thing. However, creating that odd behavior has been extremely difficult so far -- you have to cool things down to near absolute zero to pull it off on a significant scale. Or rather, you did. Researchers have successfully produced macro-scale quantum entanglement at room temperature through the one-two combo of an infrared laser (which aligned magnetic states) and electromagnetic pulses (for the actual entanglement). The experiment only included enough electrons and nuclei to fill the space of a blood cell, but that still amounts to linking "thousands" of particles.
Scientists have found a way to connect quantum electronics together
Scientists have found a way to connect quantum devices together, transmitting entanglement — and crucially the quantum properties that could deliver the next-generation of electronics. Sounds boring and complicated (it's not too complicated), but it's important, we promise. It all involves the interconnect, the part of electronics that links one component to another. As explained by Technology Review, this can often take up most of the space on silicon chip and the limits of the interconnect often form the limits of a computing system's performance. At least, for now.
Basics of quantum teleportation now fit on a single chip
Until now, quantum teleportation (that is, sending quantum data from one place to another) has required a room-filling machine. That's not going to usher in a brave new era of quantum computing, is it? However, a team of British and Japanese researchers has shrunk things down to a much more reasonable size. They've stuffed the core optical circuits for quantum teleportation into a single silicon chip that's just slightly longer than a penny -- in contrast, an experimental device from 2013 was nearly 14 feet long. While scientists built the chip using "state-of-the-art nano-fabrication," it should be more practical to make than its ancestors, which took months.
'Spooky' experiment proves quantum entanglement is real
Einstein was wrong -- about the quantum mechanical phenomena known as superpositioning and wave form collapse, at least. A team from Australia's Griffith University and Japan's University of Tokyo, have proven that both are tangible phenomena, not simply mathematical paradoxes. See, back when he was still reigning "smartest guy on the planet," Einstein just couldn't wrap his massive intellect around the theory of superpositioning (or as he called it, "spooky action across distance"). That is, a particle in superposition effectively exists in both places at once (not unlike Schroedinger's Cat) until you observe it at either location. At which time the particle you aren't looking at ceases to exist (a process known as wave function collapse). What's more, the disappearing particle seems to know that its twin has been discovered through some mechanism that happens instantly, literally traveling faster than the speed of light -- a clear violation of Einstein's theory of relativity.
Entangled photons on a chip could lead to super-fast computers
Photon entanglement is one of the odder properties of quantum physics, but it promises a lot for computing -- if one photon can instantly affect another no matter how far away it is, you could make super-speedy computers and communications that aren't easily limited by physical distances. It hasn't been easy to get entanglement tech down to a manageable size, however, and that's where Italy's Università degli Studi di Pavia might just come to the rescue. Its researchers have developed a tiny emitter that could pump out entangled photons as part of an otherwise ordinary silicon chip. The device, which uses a ring shape to both rope in and emit light, measures just 20 microns across. That's hundreds of times smaller than existing devices, which are comparatively gigantic at a few millimeters wide.
Scientists catch Schrödinger's cat with quantum physics
Schrodinger's cat, the good ole thought experiment that's been twisting (non-Quantum physicist) brains for decades. Scientists might have just caught it. Or not. Typical. What you see above is a combined image where a stencil was bombarded with cosmic rays photons, but the photons that generated the image actually never interacted with the stencil -- stay with us. It was separate photons (which shared the same quantum state as the ones that hit the camera) which arrived at the stencil. The science goes that when two separate particles are entangled, their physical properties appear to correlate and they share a single quantum state.
MIT demos new form of magnetism that could lead to quantum communication, storage
It's not often that researchers can verify a discovery that could change how we approach basic principles of technology, not just build on what we know. Nonetheless, MIT might have accomplished just such a feat in demonstrating a new state of magnetism. They've shown that a synthetically grown sample of herbertsmithite crystal (what you see above) behaves as a quantum spin liquid: a material where fractional quantum states produce a liquid-like flux in magnetic orientations, even if the material is solid. The behavior could let communications and storage take advantage of quantum entanglement, where particles can affect each other despite relatively long distances. MIT warns us that there's a wide gap between showing quantum spin liquids in action and developing a complete theory that makes them useful; we're not about to see Mass Effect's quantum entanglement communicator, if it's even possible. To us, realizing that there may be a wholly untapped resource is enough reward for now.
D-Wave One claims mantle of first commercial quantum computer
Whether or not D-Wave has actually built a quantum computer is still a matter of debate (though, a study authored by the company and published in Nature claims to prove its success) but, whatever it is these crafty Canadians have created, you can order one now and start crunching qubits with abandon. The D-Wave One is the first commercially available quantum computer and, while its 128-qubit processor can only handle very specific tasks and is easily outperformed by traditional CPUs, it could represent a revolution in the field of supercomputing. As D-Wave scales up to thousands or tens-of-thousands of qubits, complex number theory problems and advanced cryptographic systems could crumble before the mighty power of quantum annealing... or at least give us faster Google searches. Just out of curiosity, we contacted D-Wave to see how much we'd have to cough up for a quantum desktop of our own, but we've yet to hear back. Update: Joseph passed along an e-mail from the company with a little more information, including a price: $10,000,000. Yep, ten large, and we're not sure that includes the liquid helium required to keep it cooled.
Researchers show off scalable architecture for quantum computing, expand our minds
Okay, so we might be chasing the flying unicorn of modern technology here -- and, no, we're not talking about the white iPhone 4 -- but as you've probably noticed, our hunger for a quantum computer is basically insatiable. Lucky for us, some folks who actually know something about producing qubits are similarly persistent -- a team of researchers recently presented a scalable quantum chip at a meeting of the American Physical Society in good old Texas. The 6 x 6-cm processor sports four qubits, the basic units of quantum computing, and its creators say it has the potential to be scaled up to support 10 of the things within the year. So what does that mean for our quest for the ultimate super computer? Well, it means we're closer than we used to be... and the dream lives on.
Scientists create 10 billion qubits in silicon, get us closer than ever to quantum computing
We are totally ready for a quantum computer. Browse the dusty Engadget archives and you'll find many posts about the things, each charting another step along the way to our supposed quantum future. Here's another step, one that we think is a pretty big one. An international team of scientists has managed to generate 10 billion quantum entangled bits, the basic building block of a quantum computer, and embed them all in silicon which is, of course, the basic building block of a boring computer. It sounds like there's still some work to be done to enable the team to actually modify and read the states of those qubits, and probably a decade's worth of thumb-twiddling before they let any of us try to run Crysis on it, but yet another step has been made. [Image credit: Smite-Meister]
Danish scientists achieve advanced quantum teleportation
As you can imagine, here at Engadget, we love it when science fiction becomes more science and less fiction. With that in mind, we're pleased to pass along the news that Danish scientists at Copenhagen University have made a breakthrough in the wacky world of quantum teleportation by transporting quantum information over a distance of half a meter (1.6 feet). In order to achieve this, Dr. Eugene Polzik and his team shined a strong laser beam into a cloud of room-temperature cesium atoms that shared the same directional spin. As Scientific American reports: "The laser became entangled with the collective spin of the cloud, meaning that the quantum states of laser and gas shared the same amplitude but had opposite phases. The goal was to transfer, or teleport, the quantum state of a second light beam onto the cloud." (It should be noted that this process is more akin to duplication than actual teleportation, i.e. using this method on a human being would result in the formation of a doppelganger and not a magical Star Trek-like movement of matter). To achieve this goal, Polzik and other scientists added a second weaker laser pulse and split the two beams into separate branches in order to measure the difference between the quantum phases; through that measurement the scientists were then able to transfer the information of the spin state of the weak laser to the combination of the cesium atoms and the strong laser, without disturbing the quantum entanglement between the laser and the cesium. Umm, so the short of it is: one small step for a cesium atom, but one giant leap for quantum computing research and the advancement of teleportation theory.[Thanks, Josh H. and Eric M.]Read - ReutersRead - Scientific American
