Lifeboat Foundation

How the mind can make sense of quantum physics in more ways than one.

A Dutch company called QuTech, working with Intel, just pulled off a silicon chip-based quantum computer. The future’s looking good for spooky action.

Try a quick experiment: Take two flashlights into a dark room and shine them so that their light beams cross. Notice anything peculiar? The rather anticlimactic answer is, probably not. That’s because the individual photons that make up light do not interact. Instead, they simply pass each other by, like indifferent spirits in the night.

But what if light particles could be made to interact, attracting and repelling each other like atoms in ordinary matter? One tantalizing, albeit sci-fi possibility: light sabers — beams of light that can pull and push on each other, making for dazzling, epic confrontations. Or, in a more likely scenario, two beams of light could meet and merge into one single, luminous stream.

It may seem like such optical behavior would require bending the rules of physics, but in fact, scientists at MIT, Harvard University, and elsewhere have now demonstrated that photons can indeed be made to interact — an accomplishment that could open a path toward using photons in quantum computing, if not in lightsabers.

De Beers diamond company has a whole division to synthesize quantum-grade diamonds.

Quantum computing has taken a step forward with the development of a programmable quantum processor made with silicon.

The team used microwave energy to align two electron particles suspended in silicon, then used them to perform a set of test calculations.

By using silicon, the scientists hope that quantum computers will be more easy to control and manufacture.

Scientists have demonstrated mathematical operations with a quantum gate between two trapped atoms that is mediated by photons.

The effort to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics always hits one snag: gravity. An experiment could finally tell us if it is a quantum force.

Can spot quantum errors IBM research By Mark Kim What good is a fast computer if you can’t trust it? Thanks to half a century of research on getting computers to do their job correctly even in the presence of mechanical errors, our modern machines tend to be pretty reliable. Unfortunately, the laws of sheer complexity of which leaves them prone to errors. Now, we finally have the first demonstration of a quantum program that can detect data corruption.

In quantum communication, the participating parties can detect eavesdropping by resorting to the fundamental principle of quantum mechanics — a measurement affects the measured quantity. Thus, an eavesdropper can be detected by identifying traces his measurements of the communication channel leave behind. The major drawback of quantum communication is the slow speed of data transfer, limited by the speed at which the parties can perform quantum measurements. Researchers at Bar-Ilan University have devised a method that overcomes this, and enables an increase in the rate of data transfer by…