By Rowan Hooper

BBC/FX Networks

TVDevsBBC iPlayer and FX on Hulu

Halfway through episode two of Devs, there is a scene that caused me first to gasp, and then to swear out loud. A genuine WTF moment. If this is what I think it is, I thought, it is breathtakingly audacious. And so it turns out. The show is intelligent, beautiful and ambitious, and to aid in your viewing pleasure, this spoiler-free review introduces some of the cool science it explores.

Alex Garlands eight-part seriesopens with protagonists Lilyand Sergei, who live in a gorgeous apartment in San Francisco. Like their real-world counterparts, people who work atFacebook orGoogle, the pair take the shuttle bus to work.

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They work at Amaya, a powerful but secretive technology company hidden among the redwoods. Looming over the trees is a massive, creepy statue of a girl: the Amaya the company is named for.

We see the company tag line asLily and Sergei get off the bus: Your quantum future. Is it just athrow-away tag, or should we think about what that line means more precisely?

Sergei, we learn, works on artificial intelligence algorithms. At the start of the show, he gets some time with the boss, Forest, todemonstrate the project he has been working on. He has managed to model the behaviour of a nematode worm. His team has simulated the worm by recreating all 302 of its neurons and digitally wiring them up. This is basically the WormBot project, an attempt to recreate a life form completely in digital code. The complete map of the connections between the 302 neurons of the nematode waspublished in 2019.

We dont yet have the processing power to recreate theseconnections dynamically in a computer, but when we do, it will be interesting to consider if the resulting digital worm, a complete replica of an organic creature, should be considered alive.

We dont know if Sergeis simulation is alive, but it is so good, he can accurately predict the behaviour of the organic original, a real worm it is apparently simulating, up to 10 seconds in thefuture. This is what I like about Garlands stuff: the show has only just started and we have already got some really deep questions about scientific research that is actually happening.

Sergei then invokes the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics conceived by Hugh Everett. Although Forest dismisses this idea, it is worth getting yourhead around it because the show comes back to it. Adherents say that the maths of quantum physics means the universe isrepeatedly splitting into different versions, creating a vast multiverse of possible outcomes.

At the core of Amaya is the ultrasecretive section where thedevelopers work. No one outside the devs team knows what it is developing, but we suspect it must be something with quantum computers. I wondered whether the devssection is trying to do with the 86 billion neurons of thehuman brain what Sergei has been doing with the 302 neurons of the nematode.

We start to find out when Sergei is selected for a role in devs. He must first pass a vetting process (he is asked if he is religious, a question that makes sense later) and then he is granted access to the devs compound sealed by alead Faraday cage, gold mesh andan unbroken vacuum.

Inside is a quantum computer more powerful than any currently in existence. How many qubits does it run, asks Sergei, looking inawe at the thing (it is beautiful, abit like the machines being developed by Google and IBM). Anumber that it is meaningless to state, says Forest. As a reference point, the best quantum computers currently manage around 50 qubits, or quantum bits. We can only assume that Forest has solved the problem ofdecoherence when external interference such as heat or electromagnetic fields cause qubits to lose their quantum properties and created a quantum computer with fantasticprocessing power.

So what are the devs using it for? Sergei is asked to guess, and then left to work it out for himself from gazing at the code. He figures it out before we do. Then comes that WTF moment. To say any more will give away the surprise. Yet as someone remarks, the world is deterministic, but with this machine we are gaining magical powers. Devs has its flaws, but it is energising and exciting to see TV this thoughtful: it cast a spell on me.

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Devs: Here's the real science behind the quantum computing TV show - New Scientist News

A discovery that long eluded physicists has been detected in a laboratory at Princeton. A team of physicists detected superconducting currents the flow of electrons without wasting energy along the exterior edge of a superconducting material. The finding was published May 1 in the journal Science.

Researchers at Princeton have discovered superconducting currents traveling along the outer edges of a superconductor with topological properties, suggesting a route to topological superconductivity that could be useful in future quantum computers. The superconductivity is represented by the black center of the diagram indicating no resistance to the current flow. The jagged pattern indicates the oscillation of the supercurrent, which varies with the strength of an applied magnetic field.

Image courtesy of Stephan Kim, Princeton University

The superconductor that the researchers studied is also a topological semi-metal, a material that comes with its own unusual electronic properties. The finding suggests ways to unlock a new era of "topological superconductivity" that could have value for quantum computing.

"To our knowledge, this is the first observation of an edge supercurrent in any superconductor," said Nai Phuan Ong, Princeton's Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and the senior author on the study.Learn more about topological materials in thisessayby Ong.

N. Phuan Ong, Princeton's Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics

Photo by

Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications

"Our motivating question was, what happens when the interior of the material is not an insulator but a superconductor?" Ong said. "What novel features arise when superconductivity occurs in a topological material?"

Although conventional superconductors already enjoy widespread usage in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and long-distance transmission lines, new types of superconductivity could unleash the ability to move beyond the limitations of our familiar technologies.

Researchers at Princeton and elsewhere have been exploring the connections between superconductivity and topological insulators materials whose non-conformist electronic behaviors were the subject of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for F. Duncan Haldane, Princeton's Sherman Fairchild University Professor of Physics.

Topological insulators are crystals that have an insulating interior and a conducting surface, like a brownie wrapped in tin foil. In conducting materials, electrons can hop from atom to atom, allowing electric current to flow. Insulators are materials in which the electrons are stuck and cannot move. Yet curiously, topological insulators allow the movement of electrons on their surface but not in their interior.

To explore superconductivity in topological materials, the researchers turned to a crystalline material called molybdenum ditelluride, which has topological properties and is also a superconductor once the temperature dips below a frigid 100 milliKelvin, which is -459 degrees Fahrenheit.

"Most of the experiments done so far have involved trying to 'inject' superconductivity into topological materials by putting the one material in close proximity to the other," said Stephan Kim, a graduate student in electrical engineering, who conducted many of the experiments. "What is different about our measurement is we did not inject superconductivity and yet we were able to show the signatures of edge states."

Stephan Kim, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering, conducted experiments demonstrating supercurrents in a topological material.

The team first grew crystals in the laboratory and then cooled them down to a temperature where superconductivity occurs. They then applied a weak magnetic field while measuring the current flow through the crystal. They observed that a quantity called the critical current displays oscillations, which appear as a saw-tooth pattern, as the magnetic field is increased.

Both the height of the oscillations and the frequency of the oscillations fit with predictions of how these fluctuations arise from the quantum behavior of electrons confined to the edges of the materials.

"When we finished the data analysis for the first sample, I looked at my computer screen and could not believe my eyes, the oscillations we observed were just so beautiful and yet so mysterious," said Wudi Wang, who as first author led the study and earned his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton in 2019. "It's like a puzzle that started to reveal itself and is waiting to be solved. Later, as we collected more data from different samples, I was surprisedat how perfectly the data fit together."

Researchers have long known that superconductivity arises when electrons, which normally move about randomly, bind into twos to form Cooper pairs, which in a sense dance to the same beat. "A rough analogy is a billion couples executing the same tightly scripted dance choreography," Ong said.

The script the electrons are following is called the superconductor's wave function, which may be regarded roughly as a ribbon stretched along the length of the superconducting wire, Ong said. A slight twist of the wave function compels all Cooper pairs in a long wire to move with the same velocity as a "superfluid" in other words acting like a single collection rather than like individual particles that flows without producing heating.

If there are no twists along the ribbon, Ong said, the Cooper pairs are stationary and no current flows. If the researchers expose the superconductor to a weak magnetic field, this adds an additional contribution to the twisting that the researchers call the magnetic flux, which, for very small particles such as electrons, follows the rules of quantum mechanics.

The researchers anticipated that these two contributors to the number of twists, the superfluid velocity and the magnetic flux, work together to maintain the number of twists as an exact integer, a whole number such as 2, 3 or 4 rather than a 3.2 or a 3.7. They predicted that as the magnetic flux increases smoothly, the superfluid velocity would increase in a saw-tooth pattern as the superfluid velocity adjusts to cancel the extra .2 or add .3 to get an exact number of twists.

Wudi Wang, the first author on the study, led the study and conducted many of the experiments. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton in 2019.

The team measured the superfluid current as they varied the magnetic flux and found that indeed the saw-tooth pattern was visible.

In molybdenum ditelluride and other so-called Weyl semimetals, this Cooper-pairing of electrons in the bulk appears to induce a similar pairing on the edges.

The researchers noted that the reason why the edge supercurrent remains independent of the bulk supercurrent is currently not well understood. Ong compared the electrons moving collectively, also called condensates, to puddles of liquid.

"From classical expectations, one would expect two fluid puddles that are in direct contact to merge into one," Ong said. "Yet the experiment shows that the edge condensates remain distinct from that in the bulk of the crystal."

The research team speculates that the mechanism that keeps the two condensates from mixing is the topological protection inherited from the protected edge states in molybdenum ditelluride. The group hopes to apply the same experimental technique to search for edge supercurrents in other unconventional superconductors.

"There are probably scores of them out there," Ong said.

Funding: The research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office (W911NF-16-1-0116). The dilution refrigerator experiments were supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DE- SC0017863). N.P.O. and R.J.C. acknowledge support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundations Emergent Phenomena in Quantum Systems Initiative through grants GBMF4539 (N.P.O.) and GBMF-4412 (R.J.C.). The growth and characterization of crystals were performed by F.A.C. and R.J.C., with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF MRSEC grant DMR 1420541).

The study, "Evidence for an edge supercurrent in the Weyl superconductor MoTe2," by Wudi Wang, Stephan Kim, Minhao Liu, F. A. Cevallos, Robert. J. Cava and Nai Phuan Ong, was published in the journal Science on May 1, 2020. 10.1126/science.aaw9270

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New Princeton study takes superconductivity to the edge - Princeton University

Daniel W. Drezner, The Washington Post

Last year, there seemed to be a gap between the hawkish consensus on China inside the Beltway and how ordinary Americans felt about it; the polling suggested that ordinary Americans were less wary of the Middle Kingdom. The novel coronavirus, and its origins in Wuhan, have helped to erase that gap.

According to the latest Pew Research Center survey, "Roughly two-thirds now say they have an unfavorable view of China, the most negative rating for the country since the center began asking the question in 2005, and up nearly 20 percentage points since the start of the Trump administration. Positive views of China's leader, President Xi Jinping, are also at historically low levels."

This shift in public attitudes has hardened the approach of politicians as well. The Biden and Trump campaigns are outbidding each other to sound the most hawkish on China. Then, over the weekend, Sen. Tom Cotton, upped the ante saying on Fox News:

"If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that's what they need to learn from America. They don't need to learn quantum computing."

It's not just Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas. The wariness about China is decidedly bipartisan.

As it turns out, I wrote something for the May issue of Reason magazine about China titled "There is no China crisis." The essay acknowledges that the old Washington consensus about China - trade and everything will work out just fine as China slowly liberalizes and embraces the liberal international order - was badly flawed. That said, the new consensus has its own problems:

"A proper U.S. strategy toward authoritarian capitalism in general and the Middle Kingdom in particular needs to appreciate the strengths and the weaknesses of the China model. Cold War hawks exaggerated Soviet capabilities, and today's China hawks do the same with the regime in Beijing. Even if one accepts that China poses a significant threat to the American way of life, the optimal response is far removed from the actual response we are witnessing today. Indeed, it seems as though much of the policy response to China is predicated on a loss of self-confidence by the United States. Debates about China are stalking horses for debates about what is wrong with America....

"A little introspection and humility are good things for a policy making community. Unfortunately, the debate has lurched all the way into full-blown panic mode. The new Washington consensus is less about the souring of elite attitudes toward China and more about the souring of elite attitudes toward the United States. American intellectuals have gone from believing in the end of history to believing that history will bury us....

"The thought that dare not speak its name, the one underlying all of this anxiety, is that China's model of political economy might be superior to America's."

The coronavirus has exacerbated this problem in all kinds of ways. The lackluster U.S. response has triggered a paroxysm of laments about America as a failed state. According to Politico's Ben White, "so far, the federal response has been too small in scope and short on creative solutions to meet the greatest challenge since World War II." George Packer opened his recent Atlantic essay with "when the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills - a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public - had gone untreated for years." In War on the Rocks, Frank Gavin concludes: "The pandemic afflicting the world has exposed many weaknesses and flaws. One of these is surely America's ability to design, coordinate, and implement effective public policy in the face of a crisis." My Washington Post colleague Ishaan Tharoor concludes, "few governments elsewhere are even looking to Washington for leadership."

At the same time concerns are raised about China's new tools of global influence and fears are expressed about China's quest for global leadership. Some of these concerns are justified.

Still, the past week also highlights the fact that even if one believes that China's moves must be countered, the way the United States has gone about it has been counterproductive at best and disastrous at worst. As numerous observers noted, Cotton's approach to Chinese students would accomplish little beyond turbocharging China's indigenous capabilities in quantum computing.

The New York Times' Ben Smith noted last week that the State Department's tit-for-tat with China over expelling press people has hurt the United States far more than it has hurt China. As Smith wrote, "The United States made its point - but paid a big price for it. China lost reporters for low-impact state media outlets, while American citizens and leaders lost access to rare up-close reporting in an increasingly closed state." The damage has been so obvious that even Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has acknowledged the screw-up, something he does not generally do even in private.

Then there is the administration's plan to starve the World Health Organization of aid. My Washington Post colleagues John Hudson, Josh Dawsey and Souad Mekhennet wrote about what the administration is thinking on this question: "President Trump and his top aides are working behind the scenes to sideline the World Health Organization on several fronts as they seek to shift blame for the novel coronavirus pandemic to the world body, according to U.S. and foreign officials involved in the discussions."

To be blunt, what they are thinking is nonsense. So far the only effect of the U.S. effort has been to stymie action at the U.N. Security Council and G-20. The fact that the United States cannot even get buy-in from its G-7 partners speaks to the absurdity of this idea. Traditionally, townsfolk do not look too kindly on the mayor who suggests disbanding the fire department in the middle of a raging fire.

As the foreign policy community thinks about what to do with China, it would be great if it recognized two important facts. The first is that it is likely overestimating China's current power and prestige. Beijing has fared almost as badly as Washington in its response, and is lashing out as well. Even a modest return by the United States to its traditional leadership role would probably buy it goodwill from the rest of the world.

The second realization is that even if the United States has a lot of problems, so does China. Fixing America's ills means acknowledging mistakes. It does not mean ramping up a new cold war with China or copying the Chinese Communist Party's model for, well, anything.

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Meet the new bipartisan consensus on China, just as wrong as the old bipartisan consensus on China - Greenwich Time

The basic units of a quantum computer can be rearranged in 2D to solve typical design and operation challenges. Efficient quantum computing is expected to enable advancements that are impossible with classical computers. A group of scientists from Tokyo University of Science, Japan, RIKEN Centre for Emergent Matter Science, Japan, and the University of Technology, Sydney have collaborated and proposed a novel two-dimensional design that can be constructed using existing integrated circuit technology. This design solves typical problems facing the current three-dimensional packaging for scaled-up quantum computers, bringing the future one step closer.

Quantum computing is increasingly becoming the focus of scientists in fields such as physics and chemistry, and industrialists in the pharmaceutical, airplane, and automobile industries. Globally, research labs at companies like Google and IBM are spending extensive resources on improving quantum computers, and with good reason. Quantum computers use the fundamentals of quantum mechanics to process significantly greater amounts of information much faster than classical computers. It is expected that when the error-corrected and fault-tolerant quantum computation is achieved, scientific and technological advancement will occur at an unprecedented scale.

But, building quantum computers for large-scale computation is proving to be a challenge in terms of their architecture. The basic units of a quantum computer are the quantum bits or qubits. These are typically atoms, ions, photons, subatomic particles such as electrons, or even larger elements that simultaneously exist in multiple states, making it possible to obtain several potential outcomes rapidly for large volumes of data. The theoretical requirement for quantum computers is that these are arranged in two-dimensional (2D) arrays, where each qubit is both coupled with its nearest neighbor and connected to the necessary external control lines and devices. When the number of qubits in an array is increased, it becomes difficult to reach qubits in the interior of the array from the edge. The need to solve this problem has so far resulted in complex three-dimensional (3D) wiring systems across multiple planes in which many wires intersect, making their construction a significant engineering challenge. https://youtu.be/14a__swsYSU

The team of scientists led by Prof Jaw-Shen Tsai has proposed a unique solution to this qubit accessibility problem by modifying the architecture of the qubit array. Here, we solve this problem and present a modified superconducting micro-architecture that does not require any 3D external line technology and reverts to a completely planar design, they say. This study has been published in the New Journal of Physics.

The scientists began with a qubit square lattice array and stretched out each column in the 2D plane. They then folded each successive column on top of each other, forming a dual one-dimensional array called a bi-linear array. This put all qubits on the edge and simplified the arrangement of the required wiring system. The system is also completely in 2D. In this new architecture, some of the inter-qubit wiringeach qubit is also connected to all adjacent qubits in an arraydoes overlap, but because these are the only overlaps in the wiring, simple local 3D systems such as airbridges at the point of overlap are enough and the system overall remains in 2D. As you can imagine, this simplifies its construction considerably.

The scientists evaluated the feasibility of this new arrangement through numerical and experimental evaluation in which they tested how much of a signal was retained before and after it passed through an airbridge. The results of both evaluations showed that it is possible to build and run this system using existing technology and without any 3D arrangement.

The scientists experiments also showed them that their architecture solves several problems that plague the 3D structures: they are difficult to construct, there is crosstalk or signal interference between waves transmitted across two wires, and the fragile quantum states of the qubits can degrade. The novel pseudo-2D design reduces the number of times wires cross each other, thereby reducing the crosstalk and consequently increasing the efficiency of the system.

At a time when large labs worldwide are attempting to find ways to build large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers, the findings of this exciting new study indicate that such computers can be built using existing 2D integrated circuit technology. The quantum computer is an information device expected to far exceed the capabilities of modern computers, Prof Tsai states. The research journey in this direction has only begun with this study, and Prof Tsai concludes by saying, We are planning to construct a small-scale circuit to further examine and explore the possibility.

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Wiring the Quantum Computer of the Future: Researchers from Japan and Australia propose a novel 2D design - QS WOW News

This partnership is an opportunity to leverage a unique industrial and technological expertise for the design, integration and validation of advanced quantum solutions that has been applied for more than a decade to quantum gravimeters and atomic clocks. It will speed up the development of Pasqals processors and will bring them to an unprecedented maturity level.

Muquans will supply several key technological building blocks and a technical assistance to Pasqal, that will offer an advanced computing and simulation capability towards quantum advantage for real life applications.

We have the strong belief that the neutral atoms technology developed by Pasqal has a unique potential and this agreement is a wonderful opportunity for Muquans to participate on the great adventure of quantum computing. It will also help us find new opportunities for our technologies. We expect this activity to significantly grow in the coming years and this partnership will allow us to become a key stakeholder in the supply chain of quantum computers., Bruno Desruelle, CEO Muquans

Muquans laser solutions combine extreme performance, advanced functionalities and industrial reliability. When you develop the next generation of quantum computers, you need to rely on strong bases and build trust with your partners. Being able to embed this technology in our processors will be a key factor for our company to consolidate our competitive advantage and bring quantum processors to the market., Georges-Olivier Reymond, CEO Pasqal

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Muquans and Pasqal partner to advance quantum computing - Quantaneo, the Quantum Computing Source