The seismic reflection method involves sending acoustic waves thousands of meters under the Earth’s surface. The reflected signals provide scientists with information about the characteristics of the subsurface. This is how oil and gas deposits can be discovered. While these will eventually no longer be extracted as we move away from fossil fuels, accurate knowledge of rock structures is important for better understanding known reservoirs. The Earth’s subsurface could be a key place to store greenhouse gases. With improved machine…
A new form of heterostructure of layered two-dimensional (2D) materials may enable quantum computing to overcome key barriers to its widespread application, according to an international team of researchers. The researchers were led by a team that is part of the Penn State Center for Nanoscale Science (CNS), one of 19 Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers (MRSEC) in the United States funded by the National Science Foundation. Their work was published Feb. 13 in Nature Materials. A regular computer consists of billions…
The device could help workers locate objects for fulfilling e-commerce orders or identify parts for assembling products. MIT researchers have built an augmented reality headset that gives the wearer X-ray vision. The headset combines computer vision and wireless perception to automatically locate a specific item that is hidden from view, perhaps inside a box or under a pile, and then guide the user to retrieve it. The system utilizes radio frequency (RF) signals, which can pass through common materials like…
New EU project to use supercomputers for improved Earth system simulations. The ocean has a large effect on our planet’s climate. In this regard, mesoscale – i.e., medium-sized – eddies, which constitute essentially the weather on the ocean, could be far more important than previously believed. Accordingly, a new project, led by the Alfred Wegener Institute has just been launched in order to more precisely assess this aspect: by doing so, “European Eddy Rich Earth System Models” (EERIE) could significantly…
Although the Pony Express lasted only a short time in the mid-1800s before being outperformed by the transcontinental telegraph, it inspired a concept for a string of small satellites to transport data from Mars to Earth and help alleviate the data logjam currently occurring in the Deep Space Network. “The Solar System Pony Express is a mission concept that aims to augment the data transmission capabilities of the Deep Space Network using the idea of data mules,” said Robyn Woollands,…
HZDR team creates single-photon emitters exactly where they are needed. In the very near future, quantum computers are expected to revolutionize the way we compute, with new approaches to database searches, AI systems, simulations and more. But to achieve such novel quantum technology applications, photonic integrated circuits which can effectively control photonic quantum states – the so-called qubits – are needed. Physicists from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, TU Dresden and Leibniz-Institut für Kristallzüchtung have made a breakthrough in this effort: for…
– saving costs and reducing waste. The system doesn’t require batteries, ensuring sustainable connectivity. Imagine you can open your fridge, open an app on your phone and immediately know which items are expiring within a few days. This is one of the applications that a new technology developed by engineers at the University of California San Diego would enable. The technology combines a chip integrated into product packaging and a software update on your phone. The phone becomes capable of…
Fraunhofer technology prepares quantum computing for industrial use. Quantum computers are highly energy-efficient and extremely powerful supercomputers. But for these machines to realize their full potential in new applications like artificial intelligence or machine learning, researchers are hard at work at perfecting the underlying electronics to process their calculations. A team at Fraunhofer IZM are working on superconducting connections that measure a mere ten micrometers in thickness, moving the industry a substantial step closer to a future of commercially viable…
A wireless technique enables a super-cold quantum computer to send and receive data without generating too much error-causing heat. Heat causes errors in the qubits that are the building blocks of a quantum computer, so quantum systems are typically kept inside refrigerators that keep the temperature just above absolute zero (-459 degrees Fahrenheit). But quantum computers need to communicate with electronics outside the refrigerator, in a room-temperature environment. The metal cables that connect these electronics bring heat into the refrigerator,…
Innovation combines computational and signal processing. A research team supported by the Q-NEXT quantum research center demonstrates a new way to use quantum sensors to tease out relationships between microscopic magnetic fields. Say you notice a sudden drop in temperature on both your patio and kitchen thermometers. At first, you think it’s because of a cold snap, so you crank up the heat in your home. Then you realize that while the outside has indeed become colder, inside, someone left…
“Squeezing” noise over a broad frequency bandwidth in a quantum system could lead to faster and more accurate quantum measurements. A certain amount of noise is inherent in any quantum system. For instance, when researchers want to read information from a quantum computer, which harnesses quantum mechanical phenomena to solve certain problems too complex for classical computers, the same quantum mechanics also imparts a minimum level of unavoidable error that limits the accuracy of the measurements. Scientists can effectively get around…
New research demonstrates feasibility of photon-number doubling with a lithium-niobate-on-insulator (LNOI) platform. Can quantum optics be used for practical applications? A lot depends on whether a large number of photons can be gathered in quantum state. Among all quantum systems, photons are known for their weak interaction, which allows long coherence time to be achieved even at room temperature, making them suitable for transmitting quantum bits (also known as “qubits”) between distant locations. However, the weak interaction of photons restricts…
… that can solve big challenges of our time. Universal of Sussex and Universal Quantum scientists have, for the first time, connected quantum microchips together, like a jigsaw puzzle, to make powerful quantum computers and with record breaking connection speed and accuracy. Researchers from the University of Sussex and Universal Quantum have demonstrated for the first time that quantum bits (qubits) can directly transfer between quantum computer microchips and demonstrated this with record-breaking speed and accuracy. This breakthrough resolves a…
A new study shows how large language models like GPT-3 can learn a new task from just a few examples, without the need for any new training data. Large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 are massive neural networks that can generate human-like text, from poetry to programming code. Trained using troves of internet data, these machine-learning models take a small bit of input text and then predict the text that is likely to come next. But that’s not all these…
The security of digital identities is threatened by future quantum technologies. In the hands of attackers, quantum computers will be able to break classical encryption methods. To fend off such attacks, four partners launched the Quant-ID project. In this project, they are researching the development of novel methods and systems that guarantee cryptographic security in the long term based on quantum random numbers and post-quantum cryptography. Highly critical areas, such as government institutions, banks or insurance companies, will thus receive…
Compact silicon photonic computing engine computes tiled matrix multiplication at a record-high 50 GHz clock frequency. “All things are numbers,” avowed Pythagoras. Today, 25 centuries later, algebra and mathematics are everywhere in our lives, whether we see them or not. The Cambrian-like explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) brought numbers even closer to us all, since technological evolution allows for parallel processing of a vast amounts of operations. Progressively, operations between scalars (numbers) were parallelized into operations between vectors and, subsequently,…
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