How to Make Quantum Computers Way More Stable

Calendar August 2, 2022 | Posted by admin

In new research, scientists have trained atoms to exhibit two forms of time at the same, well, time. While the phenomenon is not bending time away from what you’d expect looking at the clock, the matter shows behaviors from two different time modes, giving it special properties. Scientists believe this odd, double-time phenomenon could represent a new phase of matter.

Researchers from a few American universities, as well as Honeywell quantum-computing spinoff Quantinuum, collaborated on the new paper, which appeared late last month in the journal Nature. The experimental setup is made up of lasers and ytterbium atoms. Ytterbium is a metallic element whose arrangement of electrons makes it unusually suited to respond to laser treatments in a particular area of the wave spectrum. To trigger the new “dynamical topological phase,” scientists first hold ytterbium atoms in place using an electric ion field—like a tiny magnet—then bombard them with the right wavelength of laser to supercool the ytterbium. Broomfield, Colorado-based Quantinuum studies a particular quantum computer that’s made of ten ytterbium atoms in a shared system. It’s these ten atoms, held by the electric fields mentioned above, that do the computing. A group of atoms can be entangled— meaning they’re intrinsically linked into a group that acts as one piece, despite being ten separate pieces. And within that, individual atoms can be tuned to reflect different information.

  • A different pattern of laser pulses could make quantum computers way more stable.New research uses a Fibonacci-inspired, non-repeating sequence to keep qubits spinning.This creates a quasicrystal effect, with support in two dimensions instead of just one.

Think of how we write numbers. In binary, the largest ten-digit number is 1111111111, and that’s just 1,023 total. But you can write ten digits in base 10, our usual counting numbers, and get 9,999,999,999. That’s accomplished by simply increasing the number of possibilities that each digit can dial to from (0, 1) all the way up to  (0, 1, . . . . 8, 9). So what about a system where, theoretically, each of ten atoms could be positioned anywhere on the dial?

If that sounds amazing, you’re not wrong! There are multiple reasons why scientists and industry speculators around the world are watching the field of quantum computers with bated breath. But there’s still a very big catch, and that’s where this research comes in. The atoms in the quantum computer, known as quantum bits, or qubits, are really vulnerable, because we don’t yet have a great way to keep them in the quantum state for long. That’s because of the observer principle in quantum physics: measuring a particle in a quantum state changes, and can even destroy, the quantum state. In this case, that means unhooking all the atoms from the shared yoke of entanglement. And even worse, the “observer” can be anything happening in the complex soup of air and forces and particles all around the quantum computer.

Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/

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Swarms Of NanoRobots Quickly Clean-up Radioactive Waste

Calendar October 31, 2019 | Posted by admin

According to some experts, nuclear power holds great promise for meeting the world’s growing energy demands without generating greenhouse gases. But scientists need to find a way to remove radioactive isotopes, both from wastewater generated by nuclear power plants and from the environment in case of a spill. Now, a team of researchers from  the University of Chemistry and Technology and the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry in Prague, Czech Republic,  reporting in ACS Nano have developed tiny, self-propelled robots that remove radioactive uranium from simulated wastewater.

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The accidental release of radioactive waste, such as what occurred in the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear plant disasters, poses large threats to the environment, humans, and wildlife. Scientists have developed materials to capture, separate, remove and recover radioactive uranium from water, but the materials have limitations. One of the most promising recent approaches is the use of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — compounds that can trap specific substances, including radioactive uranium, within their porous structures. Martin Pumera and colleagues wanted to add a micromotor to a rod-shaped MOF called ZIF-8 to see if it could quickly clean up radioactive waste.

To make their self-propelled microrobots, the researchers designed ZIF-8 rods with diameters about 1/15 that of a human hair. The researchers added iron atoms and iron oxide nanoparticles to stabilize the structures and make them magnetic, respectively. Catalytic platinum nanoparticles placed at one end of each rod converted hydrogen peroxide “fuel” in the water into oxygen bubbles, which propelled the microrobots at a speed of about 60 times their own length per second. In simulated radioactive wastewater, the microrobots removed 96% of the uranium in an hour. The team collected the uranium-loaded rods with a magnet and stripped off the uranium, allowing the tiny robots to be recycled. The self-propelled microrobots could someday help in the management and remediation of radioactive waste, the researchers say.

Source: https://pubs.acs.org/
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