Category Archives: Quantum Physics
New History of the Physics Department by Raj Gupta and Paul Sharrah Published – University of Arkansas Newswire
Cover design by UA Printing Services
A Centennial History of the Physics Department, University of Arkansas.
A new history of the Department of Physics, titledAcoustics to Quantum Materials: A Centennial History of the Department of Physics, University of Arkansas andauthored by Rajendra Gupta and Paul C. Sharrah, has been published.
The Department of Physics was born during the 1907-08 academic year when the first full-time physics teacher was appointed and a syllabus for a physics major was defined for the first time. The department celebrated its centennial in April 2008. For 35 years, from 1872 to 1907, physics was taught by teachers whose primary discipline was not physics, for example, chemistry, applied mathematics, mechanic arts and engineering, and even biology and geology. While primary emphasis of this book is on the one hundred years, 1907-2007; for completeness, the previous 35 years are covered in two prologues. The period, 2008 t0 2018 is summarized in an epilogue. The history includes the perspective of the authors, both emeritus professors of physics, who were eye-witnessto the events unfolding in the department over a combined period of 76 years.
The book traces the evolution of the department from a one-person department with no physics majors in 1907, to 1920s when it expanded to three faculty and graduated its first major; to the 1930s when professor Llyod Ham established the first research laboratory in physics; to the 1940s when the department's ambitious vision of starting a credible research program was interrupted by the World War I and it had to teach an estimated 3,500 army trainees, but that was followed by a blossoming of its physics majors program; to the 1950s when a credible research program did start and the department's Ph.D. program was approved; to the 1960s when post-Sputnik government support for research helped the department expand its research efforts; to the evolution of the department's research in many diverse areas, including atomic and molecular physics, quantum optics, biophysics and condensed matter physics.
The first research laboratory in physics established by professor Ham was in acoustics. Today, the largest research effort is in the area of quantum materials, which explains the title of the book.
While the department had a modest beginning, starting with just one teacher and no majors, today it can claim its rightful place among the noteworthy physics departments at the U.S. public institutions.
An electronic copy of the book can be downloaded from the university repository: scholarworks.uark.edu/physpub/23.
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Quantum Tunneling in Graphene Advances the Age of High Speed Terahertz Wireless Communications – SciTechDaily
Quantum tunneling. Credit: Daria Sokol/MIPT Press Office
Scientists from MIPT, Moscow Pedagogical State University and the University of Manchester have created a highly sensitive terahertz detector based on the effect of quantum-mechanical tunneling in graphene. The sensitivity of the device is already superior to commercially available analogs based on semiconductors and superconductors, which opens up prospects for applications of the graphene detector in wireless communications, security systems, radio astronomy, and medical diagnostics. The research results are published in a high-rank journal Nature Communications.
Information transfer in wireless networks is based on the transformation of a high-frequency continuous electromagnetic wave into a discrete sequence of bits. This technique is known as signal modulation. To transfer the bits faster, one has to increase the modulation frequency. However, this requires a synchronous increase in carrier frequency. A common FM-radio transmits at frequencies of hundred megahertz, a Wi-Fi receiver uses signals of roughly five gigahertz in frequency, while the 5G mobile networks can transmit up to 20 gigahertz signals.
This is far from the limit, and a further increase in carrier frequency admits a proportional increase in data transfer rates. Unfortunately, picking up signals with hundred gigahertz frequencies and higher is an increasingly challenging problem.
A typical receiver used in wireless communications consists of a transistor-based amplifier of weak signals and a demodulator that rectifies the sequence of bits from the modulated signal. This scheme originated in the age of radio and television, and becomes inefficient at frequencies of hundreds of gigahertz desirable for mobile systems. The fact is that most of the existing transistors arent fast enough to recharge at such a high frequency.
An evolutionary way to solve this problem is just to increase the maximum operation frequency of a transistor. Most specialists in the area of nanoelectronics work hard in this direction. A revolutionary way to solve the problem was theoretically proposed in the beginning of 1990s by physicists Michael Dyakonov and Michael Shur, and realized, among others, by the group of authors in 2018. It implies abandoning active amplification by transistor, and abandoning a separate demodulator. Whats left in the circuit is a single transistor, but its role is now different. It transforms a modulated signal into bit sequence or voice signal by itself, due to non-linear relation between its current and voltage drop.
In the present work, the authors have proved that the detection of a terahertz signal is very efficient in the so-called tunneling field-effect transistor. To understand its work, one can just recall the principle of an electromechanical relay, where the passage of current through control contacts leads to a mechanical connection between two conductors and, hence, to the emergence of current. In a tunneling transistor, applying voltage to the control contact (termed as gate) leads to alignment of the energy levels of the source and channel. This also leads to the flow of current. A distinctive feature of a tunneling transistor is its very strong sensitivity to control voltage. Even a small detuning of energy levels is enough to interrupt the subtle process of quantum mechanical tunneling. Similarly, a small voltage at the control gate is able to connect the levels and initiate the tunneling current.
The idea of a strong reaction of a tunneling transistor to low voltages is known for about fifteen years, says Dr. Dmitry Svintsov, one of the authors of the study, head of theLaboratory of 2D Materials for Optoelectronicsat the MIPT center for Photonics and 2D materials. But its been known only in the community of low-power electronics. No one realized before us that the same property of a tunneling transistor can be applied in the technology of terahertz detectors. Georgy Alymov (co-author of the study) and I were lucky to work in both areas. We realized then: if the transistor is opened and closed at a low power of the control signal, then it should also be good in picking up weak signals from the ambient surrounding.
The created device is based on bilayer graphene, a unique material in which the position of energy levels (more strictly, the band structure) can be controlled using an electric voltage. This allowed the authors to switch between classical transport and quantum tunneling transport within a single device, with just a change in the polarities of the voltage at the control contacts. This possibility is of extreme importance for an accurate comparison of the detecting ability of a classical and quantum tunneling transistor.
The experiment showed that the sensitivity of the device in the tunneling mode is few orders of magnitude higher than that in the classical transport mode. The minimum signal distinguishable by the detector against the noisy background already competes with that of commercially available superconducting and semiconductor bolometers. However, this is not the limit the sensitivity of the detector can be further increased in cleaner devices with a low concentration of residual impurities. The developed detection theory, tested by the experiment, shows that the sensitivity of the optimal detector can be a hundred times higher.
The current characteristics give rise to great hopes for the creation of fast and sensitive detectors for wireless communications, says the author of the work, Dr. Denis Bandurin. And this area is not limited to graphene and is not limited to tunnel transistors. We expect that, with the same success, a remarkable detector can be created, for example, based on an electrically controlled phase transition. Graphene turned out to be just a good launching pad here, just a door, behind which is a whole world of exciting new research.
The results presented in this paper are an example of a successful collaboration between several research groups. The authors note that it is this format of work that allows them to obtain world-class scientific results. For example, earlier, the same team of scientists demonstrated how waves in the electron sea of graphene can contribute to the development of terahertz technology. In an era of rapidly evolving technology, it is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve competitive results. comments Dr. Georgy Fedorov, deputy head of the Laboratory of Nanocarbon Materials, MIPT, Only by combining the efforts and expertise of several groups can we successfully realize the most difficult tasks and achieve the most ambitious goals, which we will continue to do.
Reference: Tunnel field-effect transistors for sensitive terahertz detection by I. Gayduchenko, S. G. Xu, G. Alymov, M. Moskotin, I. Tretyakov, T. Taniguchi, K. Watanabe, G. Goltsman, A. K. Geim, G. Fedorov, D. Svintsov and D. A. Bandurin, 22 January 2021, Nature Communications.DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-20721-z
The work was supported by Russian Science Foundation (grant # 16-19-10557) and Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant # 18-29-20116 mk).
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International Business Machines : The Decade of Quantum Computing Is Upon Us, IBM Executive Says – Marketscreener.com
By Jared Council
As more uses for quantum computing appear, chief information officers need to help their companies see the emerging technology's potential as well as its risks, an International Business Machines Corp. executive said on Tuesday.
"This is going to be the decade in which quantum really comes of age," said Dario Gil, senior vice president and director of IBM Research, at The Wall Street Journal's virtual CIO Network summit.
Leveraging the properties of quantum physics, quantum computers have the ability to sort through a vast number of possibilities in nearly real time and come up with a probable solution. Difficulties with hardware have held back the adoption of quantum computing, but that is about to change, Dr. Gil said.
IBM is planning to release new quantum systems this year and next, but a big shift will come with the system the company plans to release in 2023, Dr. Gil said. That one for the first time will allow engineers to mitigate errors through software, as opposed to only through hardware.
"We've got to get these computers to operate without errors, and if we can do that we'll realize their full potential," he said. "So what we envision is in 2023, when we deliver that system, it will be an inflection point in that the errors of quantum computers will continue to decrease exponentially through software, as opposed to just by making the device better."
After that point, he said, quantum computers will start to be used on a broader scale.
Major corporations are already experimenting with early-stage quantum technology, among them, Visa Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Roche Holding AG and Volkswagen AG.
Quantum computers harness the properties of quantum physics, including superposition and entanglement, to radically speed up complex calculations intractable to today's computers. Conventional computers store information as either zeros or ones, but quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, which represent and store information as both zeros and ones simultaneously.
While a commercial-grade quantum computer hasn't been built yet, startups and tech giants including IBM, Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Microsoft Corp. are racing to commercialize the technology.
Dr. Gil said quantum computers will be able to speed up research-and-development discoveries because the machines will excel at modeling physics, chemistry and materials science. This could lead to developing more energy-efficient batteries in the auto sector, he said, or better carbon-capture membranes to fight climate change.
"That's my vision: Bring the power of computing to compress the time to discovery of what we need," he said.
Quantum computers are also poised to benefit from artificial intelligence algorithms, partly because of their ability to solve complex mathematical problems.
CIOs looking to benefit from quantum computing can start by experimenting with community platforms such as the open-source Qiskit framework, which provides tools for developers to create and run quantum programs on real quantum hardware or simulators, he said.
Companies should form small working groups that can start to identify problems that quantum computing may be able to help solve, he said.
"Value today means, do you have a small team that knows what's going on in quantum and start mapping to problems that are relevant to your business?"
But companies should also brace themselves for quantum computing's implications for cybersecurity: The machines will be able to break encryption locks that ordinary computers have trouble cracking, Dr. Gil said. Companies should consider migrating important business systems to so-called "quantum-safe" encryption protocols, he said.
"It's very important that all of you develop crypto-agility, and you develop a migration path and a quantum-safe approach to do encryption and security," he said. "Because if you don't, you're going to leave your institutions vulnerable to these kinds of attacks in the future."
Write to Jared Council at jared.council@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
03-03-21 1524ET
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Subtle quantum phenomenon found to alter chemical reactivity for the first time – Chemistry World
A new frontier has been discovered in how quantum phenomena control chemical reactivity. By colliding beams of two different reactants, a Chinese team spanning three universities has shown that the outcome can only be explained by interactions between electron spin and orbital angular momentum. This is the first time that electronic angular momentum has been found to affect such reactions, explains Xueming Yang from South University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen. The finding is very special, adds his colleague Zhigang Sun from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics.
The crossed-beam approach the team uses is common in experiments seeking to understand the quantum states involved in reactions, explains Sun. In their reaction, one of the beams consisted of fluorine atoms. The other beam, crossing the first at a right angle, contained hydrogendeuterium molecules. When the reactants collide, the fluorine atom displaces the deuterium atom, forming a hydrogen fluoride molecule, with the products scattering in various directions.
The experimental results are simply stunning. They have achieved a resolution that 20 years ago would have been deemed as unattainable
Francisco Javier Aoiz,Complutense University of Madrid
The transition state between the starting materials and products lasts for less than 10-12 seconds, a picosecond, or quadrillionth of a second. But the crossed beam experiments provide windows on that fleeting world. Varying the collision energy between atoms creates sharp variations, or resonances, in the probability of products forming at a particular scattering angle and internal energy. By measuring that information, researchers can extract information about the quantum mechanical energy level structure of the transition state.
To get those valuable details, researchers typically shine lasers into the collision zone of their crossed-beam reactions. These both detect where the products go and gain information about their electronic structure spectroscopically. Until recently this laser ionisation approach could detect the product molecules rotational energy level, but not their electronic angular momentum. Electronic angular momentum energy is much smaller than the rotational energy of a diatomic molecule, Wang says. Its influence on a chemical reaction is therefore subtle and difficult to detect, says team member Xingan Wang from Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale.
However Wang, Yang and Suns team has developed a more sensitive technique called near-threshold ionisation. The key experimental result in the current work is [detected] with high angular resolution, comments Wang. This was not available previously. If laser energy is above the ionisation limit, momentum can transfer to the atom and adversely affect the measurements, he explains. Near-threshold ionisation avoids this. By accurately tuning the photon energy during the detection, we can be sure that the products receive just enough photon energy to be ionised, Wang says.
In one particular resonance state, the researchers found a horseshoe-shaped scattering pattern where hydrogen fluoride molecules were in high rotational energy states. The teams theoretical analysis revealed that the horseshoe pattern had largely resulted from quantum interference between electron spin and orbital angular momentum.
Francisco Javier Aoiz from Complutense University of Madrid calls the study very beautiful work that represents the state-of-the-art in molecular reaction dynamics. The experimental results are simply stunning, he adds. They have achieved a resolution that 20 years ago would have been deemed as unattainable. They have determined quantum-state-resolved angular distributions in the whole range of scattering angles with an unprecedented accuracy. He says the effect detected is subtle but reveals interplay of several coupled potential energy surfaces that manifests in different ways in other chemical reactions.
While the work provides a fundamental revelation about the influences on chemical transition states, the team now needs to evaluate its full significance, notes Wang. We are planning to further investigate the role of the electronic angular momentum in a more general chemical reaction, he says.
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Subtle quantum phenomenon found to alter chemical reactivity for the first time - Chemistry World
Physicists believe faster-than-light travel is indeed possible with new warp drive – ZME Science
Scientists have often turned to fiction for inspiration about what secrets of nature they could unlock. Some of the most outlandish science fiction concepts include teleportation and warp drive, both of which have been traditionally frowned upon because they would break the laws of physics or so we thought. A new study found that, at least in the case of warp drives, faster-than-light-travel may be possible by taking advantage of a loop hole in general relativity.
The concept for the Star Trek-inspired warp-drive is simple to grasp. Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light, butthe really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light. As the name suggests, a warp drive involves warping spacetime itself around an object.
The most widely used theoretical framework for a warp drive was proposed by Mexican physicistMiguel Alcubierre in 1994. In order to allow faster-than-light-travel, Alcubierre envisioned catapulting a spaceship in a bubble of negative energy that would expand space and time behind the ship, while at the same time compressing space-time in front of it.
In the theory of generalrelativity, we usually assume that the energy is greater than zero, at all times and everywhere in the universe. This has a very important consequence for gravity: energy (e) is linked to mass via the formula e=mc (with m being the mass and c the speed of light). So negative energy would consequently also imply negative mass. Positive masses attract each other, but with a negative mass, gravity could suddenly become a repulsive force.
This is where things get interesting. Quantum theory does allow negative energy. According to quantum physics, it is possible to borrow energy from a vacuum at a certain location, like money from a bank. This would theoretically open the door for negative mass and negative gravity.
But thats easier said than done. Due to its requirements for negative energy, many believe that warp drives are not physically possible.
This, however, is no longer correct, said Alexey Bobrick, scientist and astrophysicist at Lund University.
Bobrick and colleagues went for a different route with their research, describing a new class of warp drives that respects general relativity and doesnt require negative energy.
The researchers in Sweden, part of an independent group of scientists known as Applied Physics, worked closely with distinguished researchers in warp field mechanics and even received the blessings of Alcubierre, the godfather of warp drive.
Writing in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, the authors said that any warp drive, including the Alcubierre drive, is a shell of regular or exotic material moving inertially with a certain velocity. Mathematically, they then go on to show that a class of subluminal, spherically symmetric warp drive spacetimes, at least in principle, can be constructed based on the physical principles known to humanity today.
If that sounds hard to understand, well, it kind of is. But fear not! Sabine Hossenfelder, Professor and Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, break down this study in a recent YouTube video, which you can watch below.
One problem though: even if the theory is reliable, no one really knows how to actually do this yet. For the time being, warp drives remain in the realm of theory, but this research provides new perspectives on how to achieve faster-than-light travel. At least, the concept doesnt sound like such a crazy idea anymore.
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Physicists believe faster-than-light travel is indeed possible with new warp drive - ZME Science
Can god be disproved using the laws of physics? An expert explains how it depends on perspective – Scroll.in
I still believed in god (I am now an atheist) when I heard the following question at a seminar, first posed by Einstein, and was stunned by its elegance and depth: If there is a god who created the entire universe and all of its laws of physics, does god follow gods own laws? Or can god supersede his own laws, such as travelling faster than the speed of light and thus being able to be in two different places at the same time? Could the answer help us prove whether or not god exists or is this where scientific empiricism and religious faith intersect, with no true answer?
I was in lockdown when I received this question and was instantly intrigued. It is no wonder about the timing tragic events, such as pandemics, often cause us to question the existence of god: if there is a merciful god, why is a catastrophe like this happening?
So the idea that god might be bound by the laws of physics which also govern chemistry and biology and thus the limits of medical science was an interesting one to explore.
If god was not able to break the laws of physics, she arguably would not be as powerful as you had expected a supreme being to be. But if she could, why have not we seen any evidence of the laws of physics ever being broken in the universe?
To tackle the question, let us break it down a bit. First, can god travel faster than light? Let us just take the question at face value. Light travels at an approximate speed of 300,000 kilometres every second. We learn at school that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light not even the USS Enterprise in Star Trek when its dilithium crystals are set to max.
But is it true? A few years ago, a group of physicists posited that particles called tachyons travelled above light speed. Fortunately, their existence as real particles is deemed highly unlikely. If they did exist, they would have an imaginary mass and the fabric of space and time would become distorted leading to violations of causality (and possibly a headache for god).
It seems, so far, that no object has been observed that can travel faster than the speed of light. This in itself does not say anything at all about god. It merely reinforces the knowledge that light travels very fast indeed.
Things get a bit more interesting when you consider how far light has travelled since the beginning. Assuming a traditional big bang cosmology and a light speed of 300,000 km/s, then we can calculate that light has travelled roughly 10 to the 24th power kilometres in the 13.8 billion years of the universes existence. Or rather, the observable universes existence.
The universe is expanding at a rate of approximately 70km/s per Mpc (1 Mpc = 1 Megaparsec ~ 30 million km), so current estimates suggest that the distance to the edge of the universe is 46 billion light years. As time goes on, the volume of space increases and light has to travel for longer to reach us.
There is a lot more universe out there than we can view, but the most distant object that we have seen is a galaxy, GN-z11, observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. This is approximately 13.4 billion light years away, meaning that it has taken 13.4 billion years for light from the galaxy to reach us. But when the light set off, the galaxy was only about 3 billion light years away from our galaxy, the Milky Way.
We cannot observe or see across the entirety of the universe that has grown since the big bang because insufficient time has passed for light from the first fractions of a second to reach us.
Some argue that we therefore cannot be sure whether the laws of physics could be broken in other cosmic regions perhaps they are just local, accidental laws. And that leads us on to something even bigger than the universe.
Many cosmologists believe that the universe may be part of a more extended cosmos, a multiverse, where many different universes co-exist but do not interact. The idea of the multiverse is backed by the theory of inflation the idea that the universe expanded hugely before it was 10 to the minus 32nd power seconds old. Inflation is an important theory because it can explain why the universe has the shape and structure that we see around us.
But if inflation could happen once, why not many times? We know from experiments that quantum fluctuations can give rise to pairs of particles suddenly coming into existence, only to disappear moments later.
And if such fluctuations can produce particles, why not entire atoms or universes? It is been suggested that, during the period of chaotic inflation, not everything was happening at the same rate quantum fluctuations in the expansion could have produced bubbles that blew up to become universes in their own right.
But how does god fit into the multiverse? One headache for cosmologists has been the fact that our universe seems fine-tuned for life to exist. The fundamental particles created in the big bang had the correct properties to enable the formation of hydrogen and deuterium substances which produced the first stars.
The physical laws governing nuclear reactions in these stars then produced the stuff that lifes made of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. So how come all the physical laws and parameters in the universe happen to have the values that allowed stars, planets and ultimately life to develop?
Some argue it is just a lucky coincidence. Others say we should not be surprised to see biofriendly physical laws they after all produced us, so what else would we see? Some theists, however, argue it points to the existence of a god creating favourable conditions.
But god is not a valid scientific explanation. The theory of the multiverse, instead, solves the mystery because it allows different universes to have different physical laws. So it is not surprising that we should happen to see ourselves in one of the few universes that could support life. Of course, you cannot disprove the idea that a god may have created the multiverse.
This is all very hypothetical, and one of the biggest criticisms of theories of the multiverse is that because there seem to have been no interactions between our universe and other universes, then the notion of the multiverse cannot be directly tested.
Now let us consider whether god can be in more than one place at the same time. Much of the science and technology we use in space science is based on the counter-intuitive theory of the tiny world of atoms and particles known as quantum mechanics.
The theory enables something called quantum entanglement: spookily connected particles. If two particles are entangled, you automatically manipulate its partner when you manipulate it, even if they are very far apart and without the two interacting. There are better descriptions of entanglement than the one I give here but this is simple enough that I can follow it.
Imagine a particle that decays into two sub-particles, A and B. The properties of the sub-particles must add up to the properties of the original particle this is the principle of conservation. For example, all particles have a quantum property called spin roughly, they move as if they were tiny compass needles.
If the original particle has a spin of zero, one of the two sub-particles must have a positive spin and the other a negative spin, which means that each of A and B has a 50% chance of having a positive or a negative spin. (According to quantum mechanics, particles are by definition in a mix of different states until you actually measure them.)
The properties of A and B are not independent of each other they are entangled even if located in separate laboratories on separate planets. So if you measure the spin of A and you find it to be positive. Imagine a friend measured the spin of B at exactly the same time that you measured A. In order for the principle of conservation to work, she must find the spin of B to be negative.
But and this is where things become murky like sub-particle A, B had a 50:50 chance of being positive, so its spin state became negative at the time that the spin state of A was measured as positive.
In other words, information about spin state was transferred between the two sub-particles instantly. Such transfer of quantum information apparently happens faster than the speed of light. Given that Einstein himself described quantum entanglement as spooky action at a distance, I think all of us can be forgiven for finding this a rather bizarre effect.
So there is something faster than the speed of light after all: quantum information. This does not prove or disprove god, but it can help us think of god in physical terms maybe as a shower of entangled particles, transferring quantum information back and forth, and so occupying many places at the same time? Even many universes at the same time?
I have this image of god keeping galaxy-sized plates spinning while juggling planet-sized balls tossing bits of information from one teetering universe to another, to keep everything in motion. Fortunately, God can multitask keeping the fabric of space and time in operation. All that is required is a little faith.
Has this essay come close to answering the questions posed? I suspect not: if you believe in god (as I do), then the idea of god being bound by the laws of physics is nonsense because God can do everything, even travel faster than light. If you do not believe in god, then the question is equally nonsensical, because there is not a god and nothing can travel faster than light. Perhaps the question is really one for agnostics, who do not know whether there is a god.
This is indeed where science and religion differ. Science requires proof, religious belief requires faith. Scientists do not try to prove or disprove gods existence because they know there is not an experiment that can ever detect god. And if you believe in god, it does not matter what scientists discover about the universe any cosmos can be thought of as being consistent with god.
Our views of god, physics or anything else ultimately depends on perspective. But let us end with a quotation from a truly authoritative source. No, it is not the bible. Nor is it a cosmology textbook. It is from Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett: Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
Monica Grady is a Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at The Open University.
This article first appeared on The Conversation.
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Exclusive! Ashwin Sanghi on his dream to cast Sushant Singh Rajput in ‘Keepers Of The Kalachakra’ series: He was like an excited child when it came to…
Indian author Ashwin Sanghi's book Keepers Of The Kalachakra is being adapted into a series. The bestseller is a mythological-science fiction thriller that tells the story of men who guard the Kalachakra' or Wheel of Time.
In an exclusive chat with ETimes, Ashwin Sanghi spoke candidly about this upcoming venture, his dream cast and Bollywoods new trend of turning book adaptations into blockbusters.
Sharing his thoughts about the ideal person to take this franchise forward, he said, The person I wanted, alas, is no more - Sushant Singh Rajput. He was like an excited child when it came to quantum physics, which is what this thriller is about.
While the nation continues to feel the void left by late Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput, one of the country's most eminent awards in entertainment, Dadasaheb Phalke Award, has honoured the star with the 'Critic's Best Actor' accolade in the prestigious award ceremony held on Saturday.
When quizzed about his favoured movie adapted from a book, pat came his reply, The Godfather wins hands down.
As far as 'Keepers Of The Kalachakra' is concerned, the Vikram Malhotra-headed Abundantia Entertainment has acquired the rights to the book and plans to convert it into a multi-season series. The author will work closely with the screenwriters' team to bring the book to life.
Sharing his excitement on his new venture, Ashwin said, Vikram Malhotra, Shikhas Sharma and Abundantia are outstanding partners to collaborate with. Their vision for this book is exhilarating. I am sure that we will deliver a series that will pack a punch.
The book follows scientist Vijay Sundaram, who races against time to save humanity from impending doom. Zigzagging from the Ramayana to the birth of Buddhism; from the origin of Wahhabism to the Einsteinian gravitational wave-detectors of LIGO; from tantric practitioners to the Oval Office; and from the rites of Minerva, shrouded in frankincense, to the smoke-darkened ruins of Nalanda, Keepers Of The Kalachakra has it all.
The virtual world can be as fake as you want your story to be
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Quantum Technology Innovation Hub to transform local businesses – University of Birmingham
Small and medium-sized businesses within the Greater Birmingham and Solihull LEP (GBSLEP) region will be given a unique opportunity to access specialist technical equipment through the launch of the new Quantum Technology Innovation Hub (QTIH) at the University of Birmingham.
The Hub is hosted by the Centre for Innovation in Advanced Measurement in Manufacturing (CIAMM) in partnership with GBSLEP. It offers specialist equipment to enable research, experimentation and detailed product testing for a wide range of businesses, particularly in the engineering, manufacturing and telecommunications sectors. Experts at theUK Quantum Technology Hub Sensors and Timing also based at the University of Birmingham will be available to advise on usage and technological development.
Set up in 2018, CIAMM has already provided free support and collaboration with hundreds of businesses supporting them in discovering the full potential of quantum technologies and the world-leading expertise offered by the University of Birmingham, helping to drive innovation in the local economy.
The new Hub will expand this support, offering access to equipment such as high specification lasers, perfect for thermal tuning and supporting quantum optics. The Hubs impressive Frequency Comb will also allow the measurement of absolute frequencies and enabled stabilisation of continuous wave lasers. This item of equipment is particularly core to quantum technologies, as it allows for cold atom manipulation experimentation. Finally, the RF Spectrum Analyser delivers extremely high sensitivity for phase noise measurements, which will be of particular interest to electronic engineers and optics technicians.
Professor Kai Bongs, Director of Innovation at the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Birmingham, said: We are hoping to engage with the local business community to encourage and develop the use of quantum technology in commercial products. The addition of these essential items of equipment will provide an accessible gateway for small businesses to become more technologically competent and quantum-ready for the future. At the UK Quantum Technology Hub Sensors and Timing, we already engage with over 70 nationwide industry partners, and with the QTIH we are looking to boost Birminghams business community.
Chair of Greater Birmingham and Solihull LEP, Tim Pile says GBSLEPs investment of 3m in the Quantum Innovation Hub shows our commitment to enabling innovation in the West Midlands. As a business led organisation we look to create opportunities for inclusive economic growth. We believe this new hub is a much needed space for small and medium sized firms to experiment, test and commercialise their research and development work. This project is agreat example of how we collaborate with our academic, public and private sector partners to identify projects that drive forwards the modernisation of advanced manufacturing and engineering.
The University will also be investing in a magnetically shielded room, which will allow users to build and test on human subjects. Provided by Cerca Magnetics, a spin-out company launched by Quantum Technology Hub academics at the University of Nottingham, the room contains multi-layers of mu-metal and degaussing coils installed in the walls. The superbly low geomagnetic field will facilitate successful operations with ultra-sensitive magnetometers.
Equipped with a quality projector, eyetracker and sound delivery system, the room will be especially suited for testing sensors designated for magnetoencephalography (MEG), a functional neuroimaging technique for mapping brain activity by recording magnetic fields produced by electrical currents occurring naturally in the brain.
If you would like to access the QTIH, or would like more information, please contact Julian Moore, Business Engagement Manager at CIAMM, atJ.D.Moore.1@bham.ac.uk
For media enquiries please contact Beck Lockwood, Press Office, University of Birmingham, tel: +44 (0)781 3343348: email:r.lockwood@bham.ac.uk
About the University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham is ranked amongst the worlds top 100 institutions. Its work brings people from across the world to Birmingham, including researchers, teachers and more than 6,500 international students from over 150 countries.
About theUK Quantum Technology Hub Sensors and Timing
The UK Quantum Technology Hub Sensors and Timing (led by the University of Birmingham) brings together experts from Physics and Engineering from the Universities of Birmingham, Glasgow, Imperial, Nottingham, Southampton, Strathclyde and Sussex, NPL, the British Geological Survey and over 70 industry partners. The Hub has over 100 projects, valued at approximately 100 million, and has 17 patent applications.
The UK Quantum Technology Hub Sensors and Timing is part of the National Quantum Technologies Programme (NQTP), which was established in 2014 and has EPSRC, IUK, STFC, MOD, NPL, BEIS, and GCHQ as partners. Four Quantum Technology Hubs were set up at the outset, each focussing on specific application areas with anticipated societal and economic impact. The Commercialising Quantum Technologies Challenge (funded by the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund) is part of the NQTP and was launched to accelerate the development of quantum enabled products and services, removing barriers to productivity and competitiveness. The NQTP is set to invest 1B of public and private sector funds over its ten-year lifetime.
About theGreater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership(GBSLEP)
GBSLEP is a partnership of business, public sector and further and higher education. Its mission is to drive sustainable economic growth across the city-region, creating jobs and improving the quality of life for everyone.
The GBSLEP area spans nine local authority areas: Birmingham, Solihull, East Staffordshire, Cannock Chase, Lichfield, Tamworth, Redditch, Bromsgrove and Wyre Forest. It is home to over two million people, an estimated 1,038,000 jobs, and an economy worth 46.8bn.
Since 2010, the government has awarded GBSLEP 433 million to invest in a range of projects to grow the local economy. These include transport infrastructure, skills development, business support, innovation, and cultural and creative assets. GBSLEP is on course to secure more than 300 million of additional public and private investments, which will create a further 29,000 jobs and 7,000 new homes.
Since 2010, more than 162,000 new private sector jobs have been created across Greater Birmingham and Solihull. Last year, the area generated a 2.9% increase in economic growth making it the fastest growing core city LEP in area in the country. More than 7,000 businesses have been supported by the GBSLEP Growth Hub in the past two years.
For more information about GBSLEP, please visit thewebsite, subscribe to its newsletter or follow on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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Quantum Technology Innovation Hub to transform local businesses - University of Birmingham
Global Quantum Computing Technologies Market will grow to at CAGR 15.89% from 2020 to 2027 KSU | The Sentinel Newspaper – KSU | The Sentinel…
Quantum computing are being used in computationally intensive applications such as artificial intelligence. Quantum machine learning (QML) is a combination of machine learning and quantum physics. Alphabet Inc. launched TensorFlow Quantum library in March 2020 for developing QML apps. Researchers at Pennsylvania State University are using QML for developing COVID-19 treatment. These applications will drive the quantum computing technologies market in future. From the healthcare perspective, quantum computing technologies can lead to dramatic acceleration in speed and performance both. Radiation therapy is the widely-used form of treatment for oncology. Radiation beams are used to destroy cancerous cells. Devising a radiation plan is to minimize damage to surrounding healthy tissue and body parts is a very complicated optimization problem with thousands of data. To arrive at the optimal radiation plan requires many simulations until an optimal solution is determined. The horizon of possibilities that can be considered between each simulation is much broader and large in nature. Such a factor is expected to boost the overall market growth.
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And So It Begins Quantum Physicists Create a New Universe With Its Own Rules – The Daily Galaxy –Great Discoveries Channel
Albert Einstein was fond of saying that Imagination is everything. It is the preview of lifes coming attractions. What if our world, our universe, following Einsteins insight, is the result of a quantum-physics experiment performed by some ancient hyper-advanced alien civilization. A civilization that, as astrophysicist Paul Davies speculates, may exist beyond matter.
In The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence Davies writes: Thinking about advanced alien life requires us to abandon all our presuppositions about the nature of life, mind, civilization, technology and community destiny. In short, it means thinking the unthinkable. Five hundred years ago the very concept of a device manipulating information, or software, would have been incomprehensible. Might there be a still higher level, as yet outside all human experience?
Within an infinite space of current cosmology, suggests the University of Chicago theoretical physicist, Dan Hooper, there are inevitably an infinite number of universes that are indistinguishable from our own. Yet some of the regions within the multiverse, says Hooper, are likely to be alien worlds with unknown forces and new forms of matter along with more or fewer than three dimensions of space worlds utterly unlike anything we can imagine.
Coming Attractions Alien Intelligence as Physics
Challenging 100-year Old Notions at the Quantum Level
As if on cue, reports Finlands Aalto University, a team of physicists used an IBM quantum computer to explore an overlooked area of physics, and have challenged 100 year old cherished notions about information at the quantum level, creating new quantum equations that describe a universe with its own peculiar set of rules. For example, by looking in the mirror and reversing the direction of time you should see the same version of you as in the actual world. In their new paper they created a toy-universe that behaves according to these new rules.
Beyond Fundamental Equations
The rules of quantum physics which govern how very small things behave use mathematical operators called Hermitian Hamiltonians. Hermitian operators have underpinned quantum physics for nearly 100 years but recently, theorists have realized that it is possible to extend its fundamental equations to making use of Hermitian operators that are not Hermitian. The new equations describe a universe with its own peculiar set of rules: for example, by looking in the mirror and reversing the direction of time you should see the same version of you as in the actual world.
New Rules of Non-Hermitian Quantum Mechanics
The researchers made qubits, the part of the quantum computer that carries out calculations, behave according to the new rules of non-Hermitian quantum mechanics. They demonstrated experimentally a couple of exciting results which are forbidden by regular Hermitian quantum mechanics. The first discovery was that applying operations to the qubits did not conserve quantum information a behavior so fundamental to standard quantum theory that it results in currently unsolved problems like Stephen Hawkings Black Hole Information paradox.
The Spooky Reality Behind the Quantum Universe We Havent a Clue What It Is
Enter Entanglement
The second exciting result came when they experimented with two entangled qubits. Entanglement is a type of correlations that appears between qubits, as if they would experience a magic connection that makes them behave in sync with each other. Einstein was famously very uncomfortable with this concept, referring to it as spooky action at a distance. Under regular quantum physics, it is not possible to alter the degree of entanglement between two particles by tampering with one of the particles on its own. However in non-Hermitian quantum mechanics, the researchers were able to alter the level of entanglement of the qubits by manipulating just one of them: a result that is expressly off-limits in regular quantum physics.
Einsteins Spooky Action Becomes Spookier
The exciting thing about these results is that quantum computers are now developed enough to start using them for testing unconventional ideas that have been only mathematical so far said lead researcher Sorin Paraoanu. With the present work, Einsteins spooky action at a distance becomes even spookier. And, although we understand very well what is going on, it still gives you the shivers.
Source: Quantum simulation of parity-time symmetry breaking with a superconducting quantum processor. The work was performed under the Finnish Center of Excellence in Quantum Technology (QTF) of the Academy of Finland.
The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via Aalto University and Nature
Image credit: Shutterstock License
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you twice-weekly news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
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