Toggle light / dark theme

A new form of light which makes fiber optics more secure. Los Alamos has been key player in this space due to their work on the Quantum Internet.


In a breakthrough that has the potential to alter our understanding of the fundamental nature of light, scientists from the Trinity College Dublin School of Physics and the CRANN Institute in Ireland have discovered a never before seen new form of luminescence.

Lead author Paul Eastham attests to how exciting this finding is, saying in a statement that this very fundamental property of light that has always been thought to be constant can, in fact, change.

One of the measurable characteristics of a beam of light is known as angular momentum.

A new form of light has been discovered by physicists from Trinity College Dublin’s School of Physics and the CRANN Institute, Trinity College, which will impact our understanding of the fundamental nature of light.

One of the measurable characteristics of a beam of light is known as angular momentum, The Spectrum reports. Until now, it was thought that in all forms of light the angular momentum would be a multiple of Planck’s constant (the physical constant that sets the scale of quantum effects).

Now, recent PhD graduate Kyle Ballantine and Professor Paul Eastham, both from Trinity College Dublin’s School of Physics, along with Professor John Donegan from CRANN, have demonstrated a new form of light where the angular momentum of each photon (a particle of visible light) takes only half of this value. This difference, though small, is profound. These results were recently published in the online journal Science Advances.

Read more

EU betting big on Quantum Technology.


The European Union (EU) aims to embark on an ambitious common strategy on quantum technologies, European Commissioner for digital economy and society Gunther Oettinger said here Tuesday.

At a conference which brought together some of the world’s leading experts in the field of quantum technology, European scientists and entrepreneurs launched a “Quantum Manifesto” laying out future priorities and activities to create a new “knowledge-based industrial ecosystem” in Europe.

“We aim to launch an ambitious large-scale flagship initiative to unlock the full potential of quantum technologies, accelerate their development, and bring commercial products to public and private users,” Oettinger told the conference.

Read more

For the first time, scientists at IBM Research have demonstrated reliably storing 3 bits of data per cell using a relatively new memory technology known as phase-change memory (PCM).

The current landscape spans from venerable DRAM to hard disk drives to ubiquitous flash. But in the last several years PCM has attracted the industry’s attention as a potential universal memory technology based on its combination of read/write speed, endurance, non-volatility and density. For example, PCM doesn’t lose data when powered off, unlike DRAM, and the technology can endure at least 10 million write cycles, compared to an average flash USB stick, which tops out at 3,000 write cycles.

This research breakthrough provides fast and easy storage to capture the exponential growth of data from mobile devices and the Internet of Things.

Read more

Whether these Universes are similar or different to our own, whether they have the same physical laws and properties, whether they have the same fundamental constants, particles and interactions, we do not know.

And at the same time, our very best laws of nature tell us that this is reality: we are a tiny fraction of our observable Universe, which is a tiny bit of the unobservable Universe, which is just one of a tremendous number of Universes in a multiverse that’s constantly generating new ones, and has been for billions of years. And that’s the Multiverse we live in, to the best of our knowledge!

Read more

ACTON, Australia, May 16 (UPI) — A pair of physicists in Australia have trained an artificial intelligence system to replicate the experiment that won the 2001 Nobel Prize.

The experiment involves what is known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, the trapping of an ultra-cool gas in a series of lasers.

At just a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, Bose-Einstein condensates constitute some of the coldest temperatures in the universe — colder than interstellar space.

Read more

DUBLIN, Ireland, May 17 (UPI) — Researchers in Ireland have discovered a new form of light. Their discovery is expected to reshape scientists’ understanding of light’s basic nature.

Angular momentum describes the rotation of a light beam around its axis. Until now, researchers believed the angular momentum was always a multiple of Planck’s constant — a constant ratio that describes the relationship between photon energy and frequency, and also sets the scale for quantum mechanics.

The newly discovered form of light, however, features photons with an angular momentum of just half the value of Planck’s constant. The difference sounds small, but researchers say the significance of the discovery is great.

Read more