Category Archives: Quantum Physics
The Week of October 12, 2020 – FYI: Science Policy News
Research Groups Seek Rollback of Diversity TrainingRestrictions
A Sept. 22 executive order restricting certain kinds of diversity and inclusion training has created confusion for universities and federal contractors, spurring some institutions to suspendtraining programs and postpone planned events. Federal agencies have also been instructed to suspend all diversity training programs pending a review of compliance with the order. Dozens of higher education associations sent a letter to President Trump last week requesting he withdraw the order, saying it has a chilling effect on campus efforts to ensure non-discriminatory workplaces and requires an unprecedented expansive review of internal training materials at both public and private entities. Separately, 50 scientific societies, including AIP, sent a letter to the White House last week denouncing the order, arguing it wrongfully insinuates that certain trainings are inherently anti-American and "sends a message of division, intolerance, and subjectivity that is damaging to our R&D community.
On Oct. 8, the New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial blasting the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic and, while not mentioning President Trump specifically, appealed to voters to cast out current federal government leaders. Calling them dangerously incompetent, the editorial argues those leaders have undercut trust in science and in government, causing damage that will certainly outlast them. The top-tier medical journal has not previously made such an exhortation to voters in its 208 year history. On Oct. 5, the United Kingdom-based journal Nature published a news feature surveying ways the Trump administration has damaged science, touching on issues such as the pandemic response, climate change, environmental regulation, and immigration policy. Citing policy experts, the article also reports that the administration has, across agencies, undermined scientific integrity by suppressing or distorting evidence to support political decisions. The journal has not taken an editorial position on the election, but its editors also announced last week that they plan to increase coverage of global politics and publish more political science research, partly due tosigns that politicians around the world are pushing back against the principle of protecting scholarly autonomy, or academic freedom. The two journals are the latest prestigious science publications to cast Trump as corrosive to science and science-informed policy. In recent weeks, the editor-in-chief of Science has excoriated Trump for lying about the pandemic, while Scientific American made its first-ever presidential endorsement, backing Democratic candidate Joe Biden. (Update: Nature has since endorsed Biden.)
On Oct. 2, former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration heads Conrad Lautenbacher and Jane Lubchenco wrote to the agency on behalf of an ocean policy advocacy group, expressing alarm over the recent appointments of climatologist David Legates and meteorologist Ryan Maue to high-level positions there. The appointments have attracted criticism because Legates and Maue have often dismissed mainstream views about the severity of anthropogenic climate change, and E&E News has reported the Trump administration expects its new appointees to influence the agencys work on climate and the next interagency National Climate Assessment. Lautenbacher and Lubchenco led NOAA during the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, respectively, and while Lubchenco has often protested Trump administration actions, Lautenbacher has been more reserved. Justifying their intervention, the two wrote, We cannot be silent on this we are concerned that the freedom of NOAA scientists to communicate honestly and openly about the impacts of climate change, the future of honest and accurate weather forecasting, objective fisheries management, disaster response, and much more will be further curtailed if these appointments go forward.
The Departments of Labor and Homeland Security issued rules last week that together increase the wages employers must offer workers seeking H-1B visas and require the applicants degree to more closely match their job category, among other changes. Both departments cite the increased unemployment caused by COVID-19 as justification for the rules taking effect immediately without a public notice and comment period. The H-1B visa program is used by many technology companies and universities to hire workers in STEM fields, but it has come under criticism in recent years that is largely focused on alleged abuses of the program by certain information technology companies. President Trump has already suspended issuance of H-1B visas through the end of the year, though a federal judge partially blocked the policy on Oct. 1.
The House Intelligence Subcommittee on Strategic Technologies and Advanced Research released a report last week recommending ways the U.S. can maintain a leading role in developing emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and biotechnology. Among its proposals, the report calls for the federal government to expand spending on basic research and couple those investments with changes to how the intelligence community organizes, establishes relationships, and sets priorities for R&D. The report also argues that the emphasis often placed on competition with China represents an overly narrow view, and stresses that the subcommittees recommendations are generally not calls for the hierarchy, direction, and centralized control that characterize Chinese innovation efforts [and instead] reflect the ideas of openness, flexibility and agility that gave rise to American innovative success from Los Alamos to Silicon Valley. The reportrecommends a number of moves to bolster the intelligence community workforce, including by creating a STEM fellowship program and reforming U.S. immigration policies. Subcommittee Chair Jim Himes (D-CT) is discussing the report at an event on Thursday.
Last week, the National Quantum Coordination Office rolled out its official logo and website quantum.gov, which collects strategy documents and updates about the National Quantum Initiative. The office also released a report summarizing frontier research areas in quantum information science and announced the inaugural meeting of the National Q12 Education Partnership, an effort to introduce students to QIS concepts at earlier grade levels. The White House established the coordination office last year, as required by the National Quantum Initiative Act, to keep tabs on the governments growing portfolio of QIS research centers and workforce development efforts. The office is led by physicist Charles Tahan, who is on detail from the National Security Agencys Laboratory for Physical Sciences, where he is chief scientist. Tahan also serves as co-chair of the newly established National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee, which is holding its first meeting on Oct. 27.
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Facebook and Carnegie Mellon launch project to discover better ways to store renewable energy – VentureBeat
Facebook today announced a partnership with Carnegie Mellon University on a research project the Open Catalyst Project that will leverage AI to accelerate the search for electrocatalysts, or catalysts that participate in electrochemical reactions. The goal is to enable scalable renewable energy storage by speeding up quantum mechanical simulations by as high as 1,000 times.
Renewable energy sources like wind and solar generate power intermittently and require storage to transfer power from times of peak generation to times of peak demand. Without technological advances, some researchers estimated the overall penetration of solar power, for example, is capped at 30%, with costs starting to rise substantially after 20% penetration.
Historically, batteries have been too expensive to scale; an alternative is using chemical reactions to convert energy into fuels like hydrogen and ethanol, enabling power to be efficiently stored for days, weeks, or months.But this process needs catalysts to drive the chemical reactions, the discovery of which can involve complex, time-consuming quantum simulations.
Thats where Open Catalyst 2020 (OC2020) comes in. OC2020 is the result of a year-long collaboration between Facebook and the research group of Professor Zachary Ulissi at Carnegie Mellons Department of Chemical Engineering. Focusing on molecules that are important in renewable energy applications, its a dataset compiled using Facebooks datacenter-optimizing Optimus tool on spare compute cycles over the course of four months. OC2020 comprises over 1.3 million relaxations of molecular adsorptions onto surfaces the collection of electrocatalyst structures to date.
Modern catalyst design taps simulation to determine if a material is suitable for further exploration. The simulation models the interaction of a molecule with a catalysts surface, a physical process called adsorption. The adsorbed molecules i.e., adsorbates are typically the key types involved in the reactions of interest, such as OH, O2, or H2O.
Assuming catalysts are created from up to three of the 40 known metals, there are nearly 10,000 combinations of elements. And because each combination must be tested by adjusting the ratios, the possibilities expand into the billions.
Current workflows allow scientists to try three or four possible catalyst combinations per year. Quantum mechanical simulation tools like those developed by Ulissis team can provide insight into roadblocks and focus efforts on the most promising catalyst candidates, but even modern computational laboratories struggle to exceed 40,000 simulations per year.
Thats because tools such as Density Functional Theory (DFT) use a process colloquially called relaxation, where they combine the locations of the atomic nuclei with quantum mechanics to predict the energy of the system and the forces acting on each atom. The locations of the nuclei are updated to minimize the energy, consequently changing the electronic distributions and energies. This iterative process continues until the energy of the system reaches a local minima; by examining the energy of the system with the lowest energy, researchers can get a sense of how much energy is needed to drive the reaction.
The process of relaxation is computationally complex and intensive, taking hours or even days per relaxation on high-end servers. It also scales poorly when the number of atoms is increased, with both longer computation times and an increased failure rate.
Facebook and Carnegie Mellon believe machine learning techniques might be the answer because of their ability to make quick, good approximations. By taking as input the state of a system including the atom positions, element types, bond information, and more, AI algorithms can predict system properties such as energy. Efficient DFT approximations, then, could make it possible to compute all potential catalyst surfaces and binding sites through brute force before theyre verified with traditional methods.
Theres reason to believe in the efficacy of AI approaches to catalyst discovery. Already, researchers have applied models to discover intermetallic surfaces and catalysts that transform waste carbon into commercially valuable products. Using AI to search for clean energy materials was explored at a 2017 workshop organized in collaboration with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. And Ulissi was one of several researchers to receive a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2019 to use machine learning and data science to design more effective catalysts for chemical processing.
Within the purview of the Open Catalyst Project, Facebook and Carnegie Mellon say theyve begun to experiment with using a small number of DFT calculations to train more efficient AI models on the physics governing quantum mechanics. Effectively, theyve been teaching the models to approximate the energy and forces of molecules based on past data.
This research direction motivated the creation of OC2020, which Facebook and Carnegie Mellon describe as much larger and better-suited for the purpose than many existing datasets. Baseline models trained on OC2020 take between 12 and 72 hours to execute a relaxation with Optimus and Facebooks servers, with each relaxation consisting of hundreds of smaller time steps. The goal is to eventually compute relaxations in seconds.
Speed isnt the only factor. At each relaxation step, the forces at play on each atom in the system must be accurately predicted. Failure to do so means compounding errors until eventually the simulation bears little to no resemblance to reality. A mistake on the scale of hundredths of an angstrom, a fraction of the size of an atom, might result in pursuing catalysts that are less efficient than we expected from our model or worse, result in us overlooking a crucial breakthrough in electrocatalysis, Larry Zitnick, a Facebook research scientist on the Open Catalyst Project, explains in a blog post. Approximating DFT calculations poses an exceedingly difficult AI problem.
Facebook and Carnegie Mellon say they hope that the Open Catalyst Project and the release of the dataset and models will inspire researchers in the broader community and jump-start efforts hindered by a lack of compute. Moreover, Zitnick postulates that the techniques applied to quantum interactions modeling problems might apply to challenges in water quality remediation, medical treatment discovery, advanced manufacturing, and geochemistry.
We are determined to enable the community to build on our work and developments in an effort to advance the state of the art as quickly as possible, Zitnick continued. The Open Catalyst Project is committed to sharing our future AI models, baselines, and evaluation metrics, as well as any future datasets we create If successful, this research has the potential to significantly accelerate the global shift towards renewable energy, removing the high costs associated with current electrocatalysts, providing a scalable alternative to expensive storage technologies like batteries, and supplying clean and sustainable power the world over.
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Analyst: Holding Company Sentiment Has Gone From ‘Cautiously Optimistic’ To ‘Apathetic,’ IPG To Lead The Group 10/14/2020 – MediaPost Communications
Describing its sentiment for the majoragency holding company stocks it follows as going from "cautiously optimistic" to "apathetic," a major Wall Street equity research team nonetheless projects Interpublic as the best poised company forthe near term among the group.
"We expect IPG to lead the group in organic revenue growth as there are currently no major losses weighing down results (as was the case in 2019), while apotential uptick in media account reviews could be an opportunity for IPG to gain further share in this area (a consistent theme over the past several years of outperformance)," BMO internet and mediaindustry analyst Daniel Salmon writes in a third quarter earnings preview report sent to investors.
The report, entitled "A Group In Transition," raises a number of meaningfulquestions for Interpublic, as well two other holding companies -- Omnicom and WPP -- highlighted in it.
Among the key questions for IPG's management are:
Questions for Omnicom's management include:
Questions for WPP include:
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Book Review: Six Impossible Things, By John Gribbbin – Forbes
Cover of John Gribbin's "Six Impossible Things" from MIT Press
John Gribbin is a fairly significant figure in general-audience physics writing, with his In Search of Schrdingers Cat widely regarded as a classic of the genre. So when a small new book by him showed up in my mailbox at work, I flagged it as something Id need to read. Unfortunately, it arrived at a time when I was busy with work, and then of course this was this whole global pandemic situation, and as a result, its taken me quite a while to get around to it...
Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World is a book about the interpretation of quantum mechanics (a subject that, I should note up front, I am more than a little tired of). Riffing off the obvious Alice in Wonderland quote, this presents two Fits describing problematic elements of quantum physics (particle-wave duality and entanglement), whose true meaning needs to be interpreted. These are followed by six Solaces, brief summaries of particular interpretations (Copenhagen, de Broglie-Bohm pilot waves, Many-Worlds, decoherence, the ensemble interpretation, and the retrocausal Transactional Interpretation) . Gribbins stated goal is to present an agnostic overview for each, offering both pros and cons.
This is a very short book none of the Solaces runs more than a dozen pages and as a consequence, the discussions are very abbreviated. Some of the discussions are very poorly served by this enforced brevity. Theres one particular bit in the many-worlds chapter where he discussed quantum computing thats so compressed as to be nearly incomprehensible. I know a fair bit about quantum computers, and it still took me an inordinately long time to figure out what one particular passage was getting at. Its not wrong, but its very unclear, and took me a while to convince myself that it was just a lossy compression of something mostly correct.
I think that gets at the central issue I had with this book, which is that Im really not sure who its for. The presentations of the individual interpretations arent detailed enough to really work for someone who doesnt already have some idea of the issues involved, but they dont go into enough depth to reveal anything novel to people who do know something of the underlying physics. Its likely to leave experts underwhelmed and newbies underinformed.
But then, as noted above, I find myself somewhat dyspeptic regarding the whole topic of quantum interpretations these days, so take that with the appropriate seasoning. One of the more appealing aspects of the book, oddly, was that his striving for agnosticism made most of the presentations feel skewed toward the negative, which sort of suited my mood...
And, to be sure, there is definitely an audience for books that strike me as short on information but long on literary virtues. In that sense, its somewhat akin to Carlo Rovellis Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (reviewed here), or exercises like Roberto Trottas The Edge of the Sky (reviewed a long time ago) that use highly restricted vocabulary.
And despite the self-imposed limitations on the depth of the content, Gribbin brings plenty of writerly skill to the table. In fact, given the limitations of the very short form, it would almost make more sense to praise its impressive concision than to lament its lack of depth. Gribbin writes engagingly and approachably about deep and subtle topics, and theres more right than wrong in his descriptions. It may also serve to point readers in the direction of other, more in-depth explorations (Id recommend Anil Ananthaswamys Through Two Doors At Once, which I reviewed here).
So, at the end of the day, this is one of those Reviews of Limited Utility that mostly boils down to This book wasnt really for me. I remain somewhat uncertain as to who it really is for, but if you enjoyed the Rovelli and Trotta books mentioned above, its probably worth a look. If nothing else, it wont take long to read...
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Book Review: Six Impossible Things, By John Gribbbin - Forbes
Book review: ‘The Book of Two Ways’ | Features | telegraphherald.com – telegraphherald.com
The Book of Two Ways, by Jodi Picoult (Ballantine)
Jodi Picoults The Book of Two Ways follows Dawn Edelstein, a death doula with a physicist husband and a teenage daughter. Dawns job is to help terminally ill patients and their loved ones transition from life to death.
But before she was a death doula, she was a graduate student living in Egypt, studying archeology and in love with a fellow graduate student named Wyatt.
When Dawn is in a plane crash, she finds not the life she lives flashing before her eyes, but rather the life she once had with Wyatt 15 years earlier.
After miraculously surviving the crash, Dawn must consider whether to return home to her family or travel to Egypt, find Wyatt and discover the life that could have been and maybe could be.
What unfolds are two side-by-side stories of where each of Dawns choices lead her.
The Book of Two Ways is a thrilling adventure, but the many timelines woven through the novel can be a bit difficult to follow. With Picoults stories, there is always something new to learn, and The Book of Two Ways is no exception. The characters interests in ancient Egypt, quantum physics, death, and more bring a certain dynamism to the story, but at times, can also get a bit dense.
Nevertheless, Picoult has certainly crafted a fun and interesting read, one that will lead readers to both learn a lot and also ask themselves key questions about how to create happy lives for themselves during the short time we have on earth.
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Book review: 'The Book of Two Ways' | Features | telegraphherald.com - telegraphherald.com
Honeywells Tony Uttley And The Quest For Quantum – Forbes
Tony Uttley, the President of Honeywell Quantum Solutions (
If you are not a scientist or a techie, and perhaps even if you are, the word quantum might sound like something out of Star Trek. Its futuristic, for sure, but it is not fiction. Quantum computers, and the genuinely revolutionary computational power it promises, may not be too far off at all. At the vanguard of quantum computing is a name you might not expectHoneywell. While the company used to be known for its smart home products, such as thermostats or smoke alarms, the multinational conglomerate has more of its fingers in a lot more technology pies. Honeywell plays in four main areas: aerospace, performance materials and technologies, building technologies, and safety and productivity solutions. The industrial side of the business, through Honeywell Connected Enterprise, is creating momentum in the EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) category, with its industry-leading IoT platform, Honeywell Forge.
And, as we will go into today, one of the most radical, potentially world-changing technologies currently in developmentquantum computing. Behind Honeywells push in advancing quantum is a man named Tony Uttley, the President of Honeywells Quantum Solutions unit. Moor Insights & Strategy has been following Honeywells efforts in this area closely, and I jumped at the recent opportunity to interview Uttley on his units efforts and progress. Lets dive into Honeywell and Uttleys quantum journey.
What is quantum computing?
Before we get started, we should define what were talking about. Highly simplified, instead of using traditional computer bits (which operate on the binary of either on or off or 1 or 0), quantum computers utilize qubits, which possess the unique ability to be in both the 1 and 0 states simultaneously thanks to a property of quantum physics called superposition. Additionally, these computers can perform computations simultaneously, instead of sequentially (like traditional computing). It can do this due to entanglement, a quality of qubits that allows them to be joined together in a way that will enable each qubit to hold the information about all the others in the grouping (called a register in quantum jargon).
These qualities, combined, promise to blow the current most advanced supercomputers out of the water in terms of compute power and speed, with the potential to unlock technological advancements beyond what we can even fathom at this point.
While discussing the potential, Uttley shared a useful analogy: when classical computers were being developed, at the time, people thought there would only need to be a handful of them in the world. Sixty years later, and most people carry around their tiny computers in their pockets wherever they go. Computers have progressed and become more ubiquitous and profitable than anyone could have possibly imagined in the early days. And thats where we are now with quantum computingthe early days.
Tony Uttley in a spacesuit submerged inside NASAs Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory where astronauts are ... [+] trained to do spacewalks
Along came Tony
But lets rewind a little bit because its worth knowing how the man at the helm of Honeywells Quantum Solutions division ended up there. Uttley got his career start at NASAs Johnson Space Center, as the operations manager at NASAs Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory excited to apply his skills to the space program. He spent a decade at NASA, but at some point along the way realized that he was better at convincing really, really smart people to do things than actually doing them himself. This led to him transitioning to the world of strategy consulting, where he ended up working for the Boston Consulting Group for seven years, helping clients figure out how to achieve their business goals.
When he arrived at Honeywell, about a decade ago, he initially led global strategy and marketing for Honeywells largest division at the time, Automation & Control Solutions, an $18B portfolio of residential, commercial, and industrial controls. Following that role, Uttley led the companys residential business within the Americas Region. There he was responsible for driving the upgrade of Honeywells legacy thermostats (the bread and butter for the company for nearly a century) into connected, app-based smart thermostatsa foray into the new world of the smart home that Honeywell had never attempted before. It was a big undertaking, but, as a guy with a penchant for strategizing big ideas into fruition, Uttley was the man for the job.
Honeywells quantum leap
Honeywells quantum exploration began with two Ph.D. researchers coming forward with an intriguing proposition: Honeywells broad scope of technology was already uniquely suited to take on building a quantum computer. The company was already a leading manufacturer of hardware and software control systems, advanced electronics and optics and photonics (lasers, fiber optics, modulators, cryogenics, and ultra-high vacuum environments), all of which you need to build a quantum computer. Despite thinking it was the coolest thing ever, Uttley admitted he was initially skeptical due to it still being the very early days of quantum computing at the time.
After discussing it with higher-ups, however, an agreement was reached that pursuing the ambitious goal of quantum computing was, in fact, in line with Honeywells strategic imperatives to be a technology leader. Additionally, since many of the underlying technologies were already in development at Honeywell, investing in them and advancing them would benefit the rest of Honeywells business simultaneously. Lastly, Honeywell is one of the worlds leading controls companies, and quantum computing is, at its heart, a controls problem. Honeywell made critical investments to pursue the idea further. The questions that needed to be answered, to push the project forward were:
a)Can Honeywell build something that is genuinely a differentiated Quantum computer?
b)How can Honeywell leverage quantum technology, at this early stage, to customers benefitwill anyone pay to use it?
After the company felt like it had developed a differentiated capability with real potential, it formed a full team around the project, employing atomic, molecular, and optical physicists and other scientists, technicians, and engineers with specializations in trapped-ion quantum computing.
Challenges ahead demand trust
Uttley stressed the importance of building trust with the ecosystem around Honeywells quantum computer. While currently, the results of algorithms run on quantum can be tested and validated against those that run on classical computers, once the company pushes past the barrier of whats possible with classical computing, there will be nothing to cross-reference and validate results with. Honeywell will have to trust in its execution and be able to transfer that trust effectively to others to convince them to step into what Uttley called the virtual unknown. I suspect his knack for selling people on big ideas might come in handy there.
He went on to say that the scarcest resource right now, as quantum moves forward, is the lack of people. As he puts it, all the people who know how to do quantum computing have been gobbled up by companies such as Honeywell, startups, national labs, or academia. The next capacity constraint, according to Uttley, lies in the quantum computing systems themselves. Honeywell is only building a few systems because it knows the second generation will be coming down right behind it. Given the nature of quantum computing, it will potentially be 100,000 times better than the first. As he tells it, this could severely cut down the time to access the system itself. Because of this, Honeywell has been collaborating with companies that are not merely dabblingit knows for a fact that quantum will profoundly impact its sector. These businesses want to take advantage of the learning opportunity and start building use cases that work on these limited-capacity early quantum systems to scale up as the quantum volume increases eventually.
Wrapping up
We wrapped up our conversation on a topic that I believe was particularly illuminating in terms of understanding Tony and his past success, as well as having faith in his current quantum project. As he tells it, he watched the classic movie, The Right Stuff, as a kid, and from that point on, all he wanted to do was work for NASA. And so he did, eventually getting to work in the very place where NASA trains astronauts how to do spacewalks. NASA was his dream, he said, because its like looking at the future. Its a mission, and people work hard and go the extra mile when theyve got a mission they believe in.
In addition to informing his career trajectory, I believe that understanding makes him such an effective leader for teams to rally around. And now, hes found a new mission in quantum computing and is entirely focused on pushing this technology forward for the future of humanity. His enthusiasm was evident in our interview, emphasizing that he has the coolest job, working on the coolest topicon the planet. If he and his team maintain that passion and drive, its hard not to believe quantum computing success is within their reach. Im not a betting man, but if I were, I wouldnt bet against Tony.
Note: Moor Insights & Strategy writers and editors may have contributed to this article.
Disclosure: Moor Insights & Strategy, like all research and analyst firms, provides or has provided paid research, analysis, advising, or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry, including 8x8, Advanced Micro Devices, Amazon, Applied Micro, ARM, Aruba Networks, AT&T, AWS, A-10 Strategies,Bitfusion, Blaize, Calix, Cisco Systems, Clear Software, Cloudera,Clumio, Cognitive Systems, CompuCom, Dell, Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, Diablo Technologies, Digital Optics,Dreamchain, Echelon, Ericsson, Extreme Networks, Flex, Foxconn, Frame, Fujitsu, Gen Z Consortium, Glue Networks, GlobalFoundries, Google (Nest-Revolve), Google Cloud, HP Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Honeywell, Huawei Technologies, IBM, Ion VR,Inseego, Intel, Interdigital, Jabil Circuit, Konica Minolta, Lattice Semiconductor, Lenovo, Linux Foundation,MapBox,Mavenir, Marseille Inc, Mayfair Equity, Meraki (Cisco),Mesophere, Microsoft, Mojo Networks, National Instruments, NetApp, Nightwatch, NOKIA (Alcatel-Lucent), Nortek,Novumind, NVIDIA, ON Semiconductor, ONUG, OpenStack Foundation, Oracle, Poly, Panasas,Peraso, Pexip, Pixelworks, Plume Design,Portworx, Pure Storage, Qualcomm, Rackspace, Rambus,RayvoltE-Bikes, Red Hat,Residio, Samsung Electronics, SAP, SAS, Scale Computing, Schneider Electric, Silver Peak, SONY,Springpath, Spirent, Splunk, Sprint, Stratus Technologies, Symantec, Synaptics, Syniverse, Synopsys, Tanium, TE Connectivity,TensTorrent,TobiiTechnology, Twitter, Unity Technologies, UiPath, Verizon Communications,Vidyo, VMware, Wave Computing,Wellsmith, Xilinx, Zebra,Zededa, and Zoho which may be cited in this article.
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Photon-recoil imaging: Expanding the view of nonlinear x-ray physics – Science Magazine
Nonlinear x-ray spectroscopy
The extension of nonlinear optics to the x-ray spectral domain is a promising direction in the development of x-ray spectroscopy. Although theoretical concepts of nonlinear x-ray spectroscopy were developed decades ago, scientists still struggle to implement them because of the elusive nature of nonlinear effects. Eichmann et al. now present atomic momentum spectroscopy (AMS), which is based on the detection of the scattered atom after momentum transfer from x-ray photons (see the Perspective by Pfeifer). The authors show how AMS can observe stimulated x-ray Raman scattering signals at the neon K edge on a single-atom level and distinguish them from other competing processes. These results pave the way for future nonlinear x-ray spectroscopy methods for the study of x-raymatter interactions.
Science, this issue p. 1630; see also p. 1568
Addressing the ultrafast coherent evolution of electronic wave functions has long been a goal of nonlinear x-ray physics. A first step toward this goal is the investigation of stimulated x-ray Raman scattering (SXRS) using intense pulses from an x-ray free-electron laser. Earlier SXRS experiments relied on signal amplification during pulse propagation through dense resonant media. By contrast, our method reveals the fundamental process in which photons from the primary radiation source directly interact with a single atom. We introduce an experimental protocol in which scattered neutral atoms rather than scattered photons are detected. We present SXRS measurements at the neon K edge and a quantitative theoretical analysis. The method should become a powerful tool in the exploration of nonlinear x-ray physics.
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Photon-recoil imaging: Expanding the view of nonlinear x-ray physics - Science Magazine
New on the book shelf: Saturday, Sept. 26, 2020 – Kankakee Daily Journal
Art creates art in new Johnson mystery
In Next to Last Stand, the 16th book in Craig Johnsons popular mystery series, Absaroka County Sheriff Walt Longmire is feeling his age. Hes not sure he even wants to stand for reelection. However, a good mystery always can get the veteran lawmans heart pumping again.
He finds one when the director of the Wyoming Home for Soldiers and Sailors calls to inform him his pal, Charlie Lee Stillwater, has passed away and he needs to examine what was found in the old mans room. Arriving there, Longmire sees stacks of papers and file folders, a huge hoard of books about art, a scrap of canvass that appears to be a copy (or perhaps an actual piece) of a famous painting and a box containing $1 million in $100 bills.
It appears Charlie died of natural causes, but where did the long-penniless old soldier get $1 million in cash? When did he develop an apparent obsession with art? And is that scrap of canvass a clue or a red herring?
Johnson builds his story around a real work of art: Custers Last Fight, a not particularly good and historically inaccurate painting of the battle of Little Big Horn that was destroyed in a fire in 1946 at the U.S. Armys 7th Cavalry Headquarters in Fort Bliss, Texas. However, because millions of copies were distributed by Anheuser-Busch, it is one of the most well-known art works in American history. The original would be worth millions.
Johnson excels at introducing his series characters to new readers without boring longtime fans with details they already know.
Bruce DeSilva, The Associated Press
2 love affairs fuel Picoult offering
Jodi Picoults The Book of Two Ways follows Dawn Edelstein, a death doula with a physicist husband and a teenage daughter. Dawns job is to help terminally ill patients and their loved ones transition from life to death.
But before she was a death doula, she was a graduate student living in Egypt, studying archeology and in love with a fellow graduate student named Wyatt.
When Dawn is in a plane crash, she finds not the life she currently lives flashing before her eyes but rather the life she once had with Wyatt 15 years earlier.
After miraculously surviving the crash, Dawn must consider whether to return home to her family or travel to Egypt, find Wyatt and discover the life that could have been and maybe still could be.
What unfolds are two side-by-side stories of where each of Dawns choices lead her.
The Book of Two Ways is a thrilling adventure, but the many timelines woven through the novel also can be a bit difficult to follow. With Picoults stories, there always is something new to learn, and The Book of Two Ways is no exception. The characters interests in ancient Egypt, quantum physics, death and more bring a certain dynamism to the story but, at times, also can get a bit dense.
Nevertheless, Picoult certainly has crafted a fun and interesting read, one that will lead readers to both learn a lot and also ask themselves key questions about how to create happy lives for themselves during the short time we have on earth.
By Molly Sprayregen, The Associated Press
Family road trip goes from bad to worse
From the beginning of the highly entertaining He Started It, Beth Morgan makes it clear why she should not, cannot, be your heroine. Her flaws and behavior wont allow her to be considered a heroine. But she does have a story to tell, she says, and it is a doozy.
The witty, self-deprecating and observant Beth is locked in a mind-numbing, cross-country road trip with her estranged brother, Eddie, and sister, Portia, as well as her husband, Felix, and her new sister-in-law, Krista. This is not a pleasant family vacation, but one forced on them. Their controlling grandfathers will demands they recreate a trip they took 20 years before with him when they were children. This time, its to bring his ashes to California. If they succeed without deviating from the original trip they will share their grandfathers fortune.
That original trip had been meant to give their parents a chance to mend their marriage. Instead, it tore apart their family as each child witnessed just how angry, nasty and domineering their grandfather was. This new trip might be even worse, as decades of grudges, betrayals and lies rise to the surface. Then, there is that black pickup that seems to be following them, the frequent flat tires, the constant sniping.
Downings breezy style gives way to a menacing undercurrent that works well in He Started It, a technique she utilized in her debut, the Edgar-nominated My Lovely Wife. A stunningly surprising ending adds the finishing touch to He Started It, a melding of domestic drama with psychological thriller.
Oline H. Cogdill, Sun Sentinel
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New on the book shelf: Saturday, Sept. 26, 2020 - Kankakee Daily Journal
Physicists Play With the Laws of Nature: Controlling Ultrastrong Light-Matter Coupling at Room Temperature – SciTechDaily
Researchers have shown that it is possible to create a controllable ultrastrong light-matter coupling at room temperature. The interaction is realised within a tiny system consisting of two gold mirrors separated by a small distance and plasmonic gold nanorods. The discovery is of importance for fundamental research and might pave the way for advances within, for example, light sources, nanomachinery, and quantum technology. Credit: Denis Baranov, Chalmers University of Technology
Physicists at Chalmers, together with colleagues in Russia and Poland, have managed to achieve ultrastrong coupling between light and matter at room temperature. The discovery is of importance for fundamental research and might pave the way for advances within, for example, light sources, nanomachinery, and quantum technology.
A set of two coupled oscillators is one of the most fundamental and abundant systems in physics. It is a very general toy model that describes a plethora of systems ranging from guitar strings, acoustic resonators, and the physics of childrens swings, to molecules and chemical reactions, from gravitationally bound systems to quantum cavity electrodynamics. The degree of coupling between the two oscillators is an important parameter that mostly determines the behavior of the coupled system. However, the question is rarely asked about the upper limit by which two pendula can couple to each other and what consequences such coupling can have.
The newly presented results, published in Nature Communications, offer a glimpse into the domain of the so-called ultrastrong coupling, wherein the coupling strength becomes comparable to the resonant frequency of the oscillators. The coupling in this work is realized through interaction between light and electrons in a tiny system consisting of two gold mirrors separated by a small distance and plasmonic gold nanorods. On a surface that is a hundred times smaller than the end of a human hair, the researchers have shown that it is possible to create controllable ultrastrong interaction between light and matter at ambient conditions that is, at room temperature and atmospheric pressure.
Denis Baranov, Post Doc, Department of Physics, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. Credit: Heln Rosenfeldt, Chalmers University of Technology
We are not the first ones to realise ultrastrong coupling. But generally, strong magnetic fields, high vacuum, and extremely low temperatures are required to achieve such a degree of coupling. When you can perform it in an ordinary lab, it enables more researchers to work in this field and it provides valuable knowledge in the borderland between nanotechnology and quantum optics, says Denis Baranov, a researcher at the Department of Physics at Chalmers and the first author of the scientific paper.
To understand the system the authors have realized, one can imagine a resonator, in this case represented by two gold mirrors separated by a few hundred nanometers, as a single tone in music. The nanorods fabricated between the mirrors affect how light moves between the mirrors and change their resonance frequency. Instead of just sounding like a single tone, in the coupled system the tone splits into two: a lower pitch, and a higher pitch. The energy separation between the two new pitches represents the strength of interaction. Specifically, in the ultrastrong coupling case, the strength of interaction is so large that it becomes comparable to the frequency of the original resonator. This leads to a unique duet, where light and matter intermix into a common object, forming quasi-particles called polaritons. The hybrid character of polaritons provides a set of intriguing optical and electronic properties.
The number of gold nanorods sandwiched between the mirrors controls how strong the interaction is. But at the same time, it controls the so-called zero-point energy of the system. By increasing or decreasing the number of rods, it is possible to supply or remove energy from the ground state of the system and thereby increase or decrease the energy stored in the resonator box.
What makes this work particularly interesting is that the authors managed to indirectly measure how the number of nanorods changes the vacuum energy by listening to the tones of the coupled system (that is, looking at the light transmission spectra through the mirrors with the nanorods) and performing simple mathematics. The resulting values turned out to be comparable to the thermal energy, which may lead to observable phenomena in the future.
A concept for creating controllable ultrastrong coupling at room temperature in relatively simple systems can offer a testbed for fundamental physics. The fact that this ultrastrong coupling costs energy could lead to observable effects, for example it could modify the reactivity of chemicals or tailor van der Waals interactions. Ultrastrong coupling enables a variety of intriguing physical phenomena, says Timur Shegai, Associate Professor at the Department of Physics at Chalmers and the last author of the scientific article.
In other words, this discovery allows researchers to play with the laws of nature and to test the limits of coupling.
As the topic is quite fundamental, potential applications may range. Our system allows for reaching even stronger levels of coupling, something known as deep strong coupling. We are still not entirely sure what is the limit of coupling in our system, but it is clearly much higher than we see now. Importantly, the platform that allows studying ultrastrong coupling is now accessible at room temperature, says Timur Shegai.
Reference: Ultrastrong coupling between nanoparticle plasmons and cavity photons at ambient conditions by Denis G. Baranov, Battulga Munkhbat, Elena Zhukova, Ankit Bisht, Adriana Canales, Benjamin Rousseaux, Gran Johansson, Tomasz J. Antosiewicz and Timur Shegai, 1 June 2020, Nature Communications.DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16524-x
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Einstein was wrong! Scientists call for new theory of relativity after black hole find – Daily Express
Thegeneral theory of relativitywas published by the physicsgeniusmore than a century ago, to refine Isaac Newtons law of universal gravitation. Providing a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of space and time, or spacetime, this model is still currently used by scientists asan explanationof gravitation in modern physics. Einsteins theory has important astrophysical implications as it alludes to the existence ofblack holes cosmic phenomenons in which space and time are distorted in such a way that nothing, not even light, can escape.
At the centre of a black hole, as described by general relativity, may lie agravitational singularity, a region where the spacetime curvature becomes infinite.
But whilemathematics says a singularity is possible, nature apparently proves these do not exist, Discovery Channels How The Universe Works exposed.
The series explained: When a giant dying star collapses, the mass of the star falls in and keeps falling in crushing down into an infinitely small point.
This is called the singularity.
But physicist Max Tegmark believes the singularity is just a fancy way of saying we have no idea what is happening here.
Astronomer Phil Plait explained why some experts have an issue with using this theory.
He said: The way our physics describes black holes when they form is youre taking a finite amount of mass and youre collapsing it down.
Its volume should shrink all the way down to zero, but that means it has infinite density and infinite gravity.
That doesnt make sense.
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Theoretical physics Lawrence Krauss then explained why some are questioning Einsteins theory.
He added: If you make a prediction and the answer is infinite, then it tells you that there is something wrong with your prediction.
We have never seen infinity in the universe.
Maybe a black hole with an event horizon described by general relativity just isnt the proper description of the physics.
Quantum mechanicsis a fundamental theory inphysicsthat provides a description of the physical properties ofnatureat the scale ofatomsandsubatomic particles.
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Leading astronomer and assistant director for Science Communication at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Centre, Michelle Thaller, explained why it is key to the debate.
She said in 2018: Have you ever thought about the term quantum mechanics and what those terms actually mean?
Everything in the universe is broken up into tiny units and there is a basic unit of energy, time and space that cannot be divided any smaller.
There is a limit to how small those things can be.
The smallest unit in the universe is what is known as a Planck Length to physicists.
But if there is a universal limit on the smallest size, then somethinginfinitelysmall cannot exist, according to some scientists.
Quantum mechanics expert Sean Carroll explained: If infinity doesnt exist, then singularities dont exist.
And if singularities dont exist, then Einsteins theory of General Relativity is not correct.
The simplest thing we can do is change some equations, change his theory of gravity.
Lets invent what we would call exotic speculative physics.
This has led scientists to invent the theory of the Planck Star.
Passing one in space would look like a black hole, but without a point of singularity at its core.
The star is just like a black hole, but it obeys the rules of quantum mechanics.
Physicist Max Tegmark detailed the new theory that has been proposed.
He said: Maybe things can be collapsed down to less than the Planck Length, or maybe you get stuck with a Planck-sized nugget.
It stabilises everything, keeps everything finite.
The reason why there are so many alternatives to black holes is because you can write down a gazillion different postulated mysterious new kinds of matter and say this exists, so maybe that explains the data.
The problem is there is no evidence that any of that kind of stuff exists.
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