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Category: quantum physics

Mechanical inputs boost diamond quantum sensor states as Q factor tops one million

Most people think of diamonds as high-end adornments. Not Ania Bleszynski Jayich. The UC Santa Barbara physicist sees diamonds, which she grows in the UC Quantum Foundry, as a potentially powerful foundation for quantum sensors. Sensors are currently much farther along in their development than other potential quantum applications. Diamond sensors are particularly promising because diamonds require relatively few quantum bits (qubits) to operate, whereas a quantum computer, for instance, requires more than 100,000, perhaps as many as a million, qubits to handle error correction, one of the main hurdles for quantum computing.

A paper about the latest advance from the Bleszynski Jayich lab, “Spin-embedded diamond optomechanical resonator with a mechanical quality factor exceeding one million,” has been published in the journal Optica.

Quantum ground state of rotation achieved for the first time in two dimensions

Quantum mechanics tells us that a particle can never be perfectly still. But how precisely can it be oriented? A research team at the University of Vienna, together with colleagues at TU Wien and Ulm University, has now cooled the rotational motion of a levitated silica nanorotor all the way to its quantum ground state—in two orientational degrees of freedom.

Reporting in Nature Physics, they show how optical cooling confines the nanoparticle’s orientation to within the bounds of quantum zero-point fluctuations, the unavoidable orientational uncertainty imposed by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Such quantum-limited alignment is an important milestone towards rotational matter-wave interferometry and ultra-sensitive quantum torque sensing.

New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever

From the article:

” home new advances bring the era of quantum computers closer than ever

Quantum computing New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever By Charlie Wood April 3, 2026

Two research groups say they have significantly reduced the amount of qubits and time required to crack common online security technologies.

Kristina Armitage/Quanta Magazine Introduction Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor(opens a new tab) took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world.

Shor worked out a way for quantum computers to swiftly solve a couple of math problems that classical computers could complete only after many billions of years. Those two math problems happened to be the ones that secured the then-emerging digital world. The trustworthiness of nearly every website, inbox, and bank account rests on the assumption that these two problems are impossible to solve. Shor’s algorithm proved that assumption wrong.

For 30 years, Shor’s algorithm has been a security threat in theory only. Physicists initially estimated that they would need a colossal quantum machine with billions of qubits — the elements used in quantum calculations — to run it. That estimate has come down drastically over the years, falling recently to a million qubits. But it has still always sat comfortably beyond the modest capabilities of existing quantum computers, which typically have just hundreds of qubits.

Continue reading “New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever” | >

The Race to Harness Quantum Computing’s Mind-Bending Power | The Future With Hannah Fry

Get “The AI Career Survival Guide” here: https://technomics.gumroad.com/l/ai-survival-guide.
What happens when human labor becomes mathematically obsolete? For thousands of years, the global economy has run on the biological engine of human workers. But a new era has arrived: The Physical Singularity.
In this video, we break down the brutal thermodynamics of the labor inversion, revealing how major AI companies are mass-producing humanoid robots that operate for just 57 cents an hour. We expose the massive industry shift from digital generation to “World Models,” and how China’s manufacturing miracle is driving hardware costs to zero. With 10 billion robots projected by the 2040s, experts like Geoffrey Hinton are warning of a hive-mind “alien intelligence.” The digital era is over. The physical agent era has begun.
Welcome to Technomics. If you want to stay ahead of the curve and understand the real impact of the AI revolution, hit that subscribe button.
Sources & Research Links:
The 57¢ / Hour Labor Inversion Math: https://www.ark-invest.com/articles/valuation-models/ark-pub…oid-robots.
Unitree G1 Official $16,000 Pricing: https://www.unitree.com/g1/
China’s 2024 Robotics Dominance (IFR Report): https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/china-dominates-industrial-robot-market.
Elon Musk’s 10 Billion Robot Prediction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODsjGOGX_oM
Geoffrey Hinton on AI Hive Mind (“Immortality, but it’s not for us”): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpoRO378qRY
Geordie Rose on Alien Intelligence (“The same way you don’t care about an ant”): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pd4i2YlGmc.
DeepSeek AI Cost Efficiency Breakthroughs: https://www.deepseek.com/
Timestamps:
00;00 — The 57¢ Workforce & The Great Deception.
02;48 — The Math of the Labor Inversion.
05;01 — Why OpenAI Killed Sora (World Models)
09;16 — The Manufacturing Miracle: China’s Hardware Collapse.
12;53 — 10 Billion Robots & Alien Intelligence.
15;58 — How to Survive the Singularity.
Disclaimer:
The content in this video is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. The views and opinions expressed in this video are based on current research and industry trends, which are subject to rapid change. We do not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the projections discussed. Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research.
#PhysicalSingularity #HumanoidRobots #ArtificialIntelligence #OpenAI #FutureOfWork #TechTrends

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Electrons in moiré crystals explore higher-dimensional quantum worlds

The electrons that power our society flow left and right through the circuitry in our electronics, back and forth along the transmission lines that make up our power grid, and up and down to light up every floor of every building. But the electrons in newly discovered “moiré crystals” move in much stranger ways. They can move left and right, back and forth, or up and down in our three-dimensional world, but these electrons also act as if they can teleport in and out of a mysterious fourth dimension of space that is perpendicular to our perceivable reality. Physicists have found that this strange, newly discovered quantum behavior has nothing to do with the electrons themselves and everything to do with the strange material environment in which they live.

The electrons in moiré crystals leap into a fourth dimension through a process called “quantum tunneling.” While a soccer ball sitting at the bottom of a hill will stay put until someone retrieves it, a quantum particle in a valley can jump out all on its own. Quantum tunneling may seem magical to us, but it is quite commonplace in the microscopic quantum world, on the length scales of atoms. Quantum tunneling is also important on larger length scales, particularly in large superconducting circuits that underlie an emerging landscape of quantum technology, as recognized by the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics.

However, quantum tunneling in moiré crystals is different, in that once an electron tunnels, physicists have now measured that it acts as if it had tunneled into a completely different world and come back again, as if it had been transported through a fourth “synthetic” dimension.

A 200-year-old light trick just transformed quantum encryption

Scientists have unveiled a new approach to ultra-secure communication that could make quantum encryption simpler and more efficient than ever before. By harnessing a 19th-century optics phenomenon called the Talbot effect, researchers developed a system that sends information using multiple states of single photons instead of just two, dramatically boosting data capacity. Even more impressive, the setup works with standard components and requires only a single detector, reducing cost and complexity.

Microscopic mechanism of ‘quantum collapse’ in real-world environments uncovered for the first time

A research team has, for the first time in the world, elucidated the microscopic mechanism by which quantum order is lost and collapses in “open quantum environments” existing in nature. Since perfectly isolated quantum systems cannot exist in reality, this study is expected to provide a decisive breakthrough in bridging the gap between ideal quantum theory and quantum technologies that must operate in real-world environments.

The study is published in the journal Advanced Science. The study was led by Professor JaeDong Lee of the Department of Physics and Chemistry at DGIST.

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