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Opinion The scientific community celebrated April 14 as World Quantum Day to raise awareness of quantum science’s impact across diverse fields The world of science is on the cusp of a transformative era driven by the burgeoning field of quantum technology. Quantum science is founded on several key principles that underpin the behaviour of particles and systems at the quantum scale. The term “quantum scale” refers to the realm of physics that deals with phenomena occurring at very small scales, typically at the level of atoms, subatomic particles and fundamental particles. It encompasses the principles of quantum mechanics, which govern...

Republican presidential hopefuls don’t see eye-to-eye over how much the US should support Israel in its all-out war against Hamas — with some candidates, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and biotech mogul Vivek Ramaswamy tacking toward isolationism and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley vowing to give Israel “anything they need.” In addition to Haley, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former Vice President Mike Pence, and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie have expressed more hawkish views — including openness to US troop involvement — while former President Donald Trump has largely been ambiguous about his policies. Ramaswamy has been...

1. A cat can be dead and alive Obviously, a cat is nothing like an individual photon in a controlled lab environment, it is much bigger and more complex. Any coherence that the trillions upon trillions of atoms that make up the cat might have with each other is extremely short-lived. This does not mean that quantum coherence is impossible in biological systems, just that it generally won't apply to big creatures such as cats or a human. 2. Simple analogies can explain entanglement Quantum particles are just mysteriously correlated in ways we can't describe with everyday logic or language...

A rendering of the entangled atoms within the interferometer. Credit: Steven Burrows, Thompson Group/JILA A team of researchers at JILA has for the first time successfully combined two of the “spookiest” features of quantum mechanics to make a better quantum sensor: entanglement between atoms and delocalization of atoms. JILA is a physical science research institute operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder. For the first time, scientists have successfully combined two of the “spookiest” features of quantum mechanics to make a better quantum sensor: entanglement between atoms and delocalization of atoms....

JILA and NIST Fellow James K. Thompson's team of researchers have for the first time successfully combined two of the "spookiest" features of quantum mechanics to make a better quantum sensor: entanglement between atoms and delocalization of atoms. Einstein originally referred to entanglement as creating spooky action at a distance—the strange effect of quantum mechanics in which what happens to one atom somehow influences another atom somewhere else. Entanglement is at the heart of hoped-for quantum computers, quantum simulators and quantum sensors. A second rather spooky aspect of quantum mechanics is delocalization, the fact that a single atom can be...

Entanglement is one of the most confusing aspects of quantum mechanics — a field of physics that isn't exactly known to be clear-cut, sensible, common-sense and easy-to-understand.  Even Albert Einstein himself was flummoxed by the surprising behavior of microscopic particles, and he firmly believed that we were fundamentally misunderstanding the universe with quantum mechanics. It turns out that Einstein was wrong, but it's going to take a while to explain where he went wrong and what's really going on in the quantum realm. Head of state One of the most important lessons from quantum mechanics is that we have to...

Up until last year, mathematician Peter Bierhorst had hoped the physicists he works with would fail. It was nothing personal. He just found their worldview a little disturbing. Like most physicists, his co-workers believe that our universe’s particles can influence each other using a sort of telepathy. Called “entanglement,” this connection allows two particles separated by vast distances to behave as a single entity. Both instantly react to something that happens to one of them. If you find this very weird and counterintuitive, you’re not alone. “I find this very weird and counterintuitive,” says Bierhorst, a postdoc at the National...

“Harnessing the mysterious property that Albert Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’ is a crucial step toward exploiting quantum quirks for technology such as new kinds of sensors or computers,” the physicists said. “Entanglement is not just some academic curiosity; it’s also something you can harness as a basis for doing useful things with quantum mechanics,” Professor Clerk added. Entangled states are typically extremely fragile — especially so when they involve large objects. So Professor Clerk and his colleague, Dr. Matt Woolley from the University of New South Wales, developed a theoretical proposal for how to keep the motion...

Scientists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, recently reengineered their data processing, demonstrating that 16 million atoms were entangled in a one-centimetre crystal. ... Although the concept of entanglement can be hard to grasp, it can be illustrated using two socks! Imagine a physicist who always wears two socks of different colours. When you spot a red sock on his right ankle, you also immediately learn something about the left sock: it is not red. There is a correlation, in other words, between the two socks. This is a reasonably prosaic and quite intuitive occurrence; but when we switch...

The ytterbium crystal was first synthesized a year ago by scientists in China, where the government in Beijing has invested heavily in hopes of creating synthetic quantum materials with novel properties. It appears they may have now succeeded, said Mourigal, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech's School of Physics. "Imagine a state of matter where this entanglement doesn't involve two electrons but involves, three, five, 10 or 10 billion particles all in the same system," Mourigal said. "You can create a very, very exotic state of matter based on the fact that all these particles are entangled with each other....

In a breakthrough in quantum physics, scientists were able to create the phenomenon of quantum entanglement macroscopically using large magnets at room temperature. ... scientists working at the University of Chicago and the Argonne National Laboratory revealed that they were able to create quantum entanglement at a macroscopic level at room temperature on a semiconductor chip, using atomic nuclei and the application of relatively small magnetic fields. Their breakthrough, which is published in Science Advances, is not only significant in what they accomplished but also how they accomplished it. In quantum physics, the creation of entanglement in particles larger and...

Researchers have written quantum code on a silicon chip for the first time And so it begins... FIONA MACDONALD 17 NOV 2015           For the first time, Australian engineers have demonstrated that they can write and manipulate the quantum version of computer code on a silicon microchip. This was done by entangling two quantum bits with the highest accuracy ever recorded, and it means that we can now start to program for the super-powerful quantum computers of the future.Engineers code regular computers using traditional bits, which can be in one of two states: 1 or 0. Together, two bits...

Schrödinger’s bacterium: physicists plan to put a microbe in two places at the same time Okay, this is WAY above my pay grade, but I’ve been sent articles on this by several authors, including an explanation at the Guardian. It’s a description by two theoretical physicists of an experiment that uses quantum superposition to put a bacterium in two places at the same time. They plan to collaborate with experimentalists to actually carry it out. Here’s what the Guardian says about it: The researchers plan to build on the work of others at the University of Colorado who showed in 2013 that a tiny, vibrating...

Interactive: What Is Space? Imagine the fabric of space-time peeled back layer by layer. By: Thomas Lin April 30, 2015 In 1915, Albert Einstein’s field equations of gravitation revolutionized our understanding of space, time and gravity. Better known as general relativity, Einstein’s theory defined gravity as curves in the geometry of space-time, overturning Isaac Newton’s classic theory and correctly predicting the existence of black holes and gravity’s ability to bend light. But a century later, the fundamental nature of space-time remains shrouded in mystery: Where does its structure come from? What do space-time and gravity look like in the subatomic...

Wormholes Untangle a Black Hole Paradox A bold new idea aims to link two famously discordant descriptions of nature. In doing so, it may also reveal how space-time owes its existence to the spooky connections of quantum information. By: K.C. ColeApril 24, 2015 Comments (19) One hundred years after Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity, physicists are still stuck with perhaps the biggest incompatibility problem in the universe. The smoothly warped space-time landscape that Einstein described is like a painting by Salvador Dalí — seamless, unbroken, geometric. But the quantum particles that occupy this space are more like...

The discovery is a long sought-after link between the theories of quantum mechanics and general relativityThe two towering achievements of 20th century physics are Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Both have fundamentally changed the way we view the universe and our place within it. And yet they are utterly incompatible: quantum mechanics operates on the tiniest scales while relativity operates on the grandest of scales. Never the twain shall meet; although not for lack of trying on the part of several generations of theorists including Einstein himself. Now one theorist has shown that an exotic quantum effect...

FIFTY years ago this month, the Irish physicist John Stewart Bell submitted a short, quirky article to a fly-by-night journal titled Physics, Physique, Fizika. He had been too shy to ask his American hosts, whom he was visiting during a sabbatical, to cover the steep page charges at a mainstream journal, the Physical Review. Though the journal he selected folded a few years later, his paper became a blockbuster. Today it is among the most frequently cited physics articles of all time. Bell’s paper made important claims about quantum entanglement, one of those captivating features of quantum theory that depart...

Sonner then set about to create quarks to see if he could watch what happens when two are entangled with each other. Using an electric field, he was able to catch pairs of particles coming out of a vacuum environment with a few “transient” particles in it. - Once he caught the particles, he mapped them in terms of space-time (four-dimensional space). Note: gravity is believed to be the fifth dimension because it can bend space-time [5th Dimension?], as you can see in these images of galaxies below. - Sonner then tried to figure out what would happen in the...

Top IRS officials, whose agency was under investigation for targeting conservative groups, visited the Obama White House more than 100 times over two years while the probe was going on, far more often than in previous administrations ... reports Susan Ferrechio of the Washington Examiner. Granted, some of the meetings were about the IRS' role in implementing ObamaCare. But take note of this: Former Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Doug Shulman visited the White House 118 times between 2010 and 2011. Acting Director Steven Miller, who took over at the IRS in November, also made numerous visits to the White House,...

For the last ten years, theoretical physicists have shown that the intense connections generated between particles as established in the quantum law of 'entanglement' may hold the key to eventual teleportation of quantum information. Now, for the first time, researchers have worked out how entanglement could be 'recycled' to increase the efficiency of these connections. Published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the result could conceivably take us a step closer to sci-fi style teleportation in the future, although this research is purely theoretical in nature. The team have also devised a generalised form of teleportation, which allows for a...