Lifeboat Foundation

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This bizarre yet fascinating laser can write in the air has been created by researchers at the Hongtuo Joint Laboratory in Wuhan, China. This pen might possibly be a gateway to a cutting-edge hologram technology.

Movie plots often use holograms to give the scene a scientific or cooler essence. However, researchers have made these futuristic scenes a reality. According to reports, Scientists in China showcased a laser that can create Chinese characters out of thin air.

Although lasers often have a long-range, you can only see them when the light lands on a surface. However, dust particles made an exception. But this is entirely different and looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.

Scientists have already used lasers to create a range of optical illusions. However, it required mediums like dust and clouds to do so. But according to reports, with the new device, researchers are able to draw patterns using ultra-short laser pulses.

Year 2017 face_with_colon_three

While theories of holographic universes have been around since the 1990s, the latest study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, contains the first proof, the researchers say.

To find the ‘evidence’, the researchers developed models of the holographic Universe that can be tested by peering back in time as far as 13 billion years, at the furthest reaches of the observable Universe. These models depend on the theory of quantum gravity, a theory that challenges the accepted version of classical gravity. The holographic principle says gravity comes from thin, vibrating strings which are all holograms of a flat, 2D Universe.

Continue reading “Theory claims to offer the first ‘evidence’ our Universe is a hologram” »

Year 2021 face_with_colon_three

Remember back in the mid-80s, when mass-produced holograms were such a big deal? Since then, they’ve become common on credit cards, currency and other items. Now, thanks to new research, you can actually eat the things.

First of all, why would anyone want an edible hologram? Well, along with simply being used for decorative purposes, they could conceivably also serve to show that a food item hasn’t been tampered with, or to display its name and/or ingredients in a way that proves it isn’t a counterfeit product.

Continue reading “Edible holograms could decorate or even authenticate food” »

Physicists have purportedly created the first-ever wormhole, a kind of tunnel theorized in 1935 by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen that leads from one place to another by passing into an extra dimension of space.

The wormhole emerged like a hologram out of quantum bits of information, or “qubits,” stored in tiny superconducting circuits. By manipulating the qubits, the physicists then sent information through the wormhole, they reported today in the journal Nature.

The team, led by Maria Spiropulu of the California Institute of Technology, implemented the novel “wormhole teleportation protocol” using Google’s quantum computer, a device called Sycamore housed at Google Quantum AI in Santa Barbara, California. With this first-of-its-kind “quantum gravity experiment on a chip,” as Spiropulu described it, she and her team beat a competing group of physicists who aim to do wormhole teleportation with IBM and Quantinuum’s quantum computers.”

Continue reading “Physicists Create a Holographic Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer” »

Quantum experiment conducted on Google’s Sycamore 2 computer transferred data across two simulated black holes, adding weight to the holographic principle of the universe.

In a scene from “Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope,” R2D2 projects a three-dimensional hologram of Princess Leia making a desperate plea for help. That scene, filmed more than 45 years ago, involved a bit of movie magic—even today, we don’t have the technology to create such realistic and dynamic holograms.

Generating a freestanding 3D hologram would require extremely precise and fast control of light beyond the capabilities of existing technologies, which are based on liquid crystals or micromirrors.

An international group of researchers, led by a team at MIT, has spent more than four years tackling this problem of high-speed optical beam forming. They have now demonstrated a programmable, wireless device that can control light, such as by focusing a beam in a specific direction or manipulating the light’s intensity, and do it orders of magnitude more quickly than commercial devices.

Confusing? It may sound so, but it isn’t actually. What Benini and Milan have done is apply the theory of the holographic principle to black holes. In this way, their mysterious thermodynamic properties have become more understandable: by focusing on predicting that these bodies have high entropy and looking at them in terms of quantum mechanics, which allows us to describe them as a hologram: they have two dimensions, in which gravity disappears, but they reproduce an object in three dimensions.

But there’s more. Much more.

According to the authors of the new studies, this is only the first step towards a deeper understanding of these cosmic bodies and the properties that characterize them when quantum mechanics intersects with general relativity.

Learning-based computer-generated holography (CGH) has shown remarkable promise to enable real-time holographic displays. Supervised CGH requires creating a large-scale dataset with target images and corresponding holograms. We propose a diffraction model-informed neural network framework (self-holo) for 3D phase-only hologram generation. Due to the angular spectrum propagation being incorporated into the neural network, the self-holo can be trained in an unsupervised manner without the need of a labeled dataset. Utilizing the various representations of a 3D object and randomly reconstructing the hologram to one layer of a 3D object keeps the complexity of the self-holo independent of the number of depth layers. The self-holo takes amplitude and depth map images as input and synthesizes a 3D hologram or a 2D hologram. We demonstrate 3D reconstructions with a good 3D effect and the generalizability of self-holo in numerical and optical experiments.