Quantum computing holds the potential to one-day resolve some of the worlds most intricate and pressing conundrums. With the science and technology industry at the forefront of the global battle to defeat COVID-19, for example, it has played a part in discovering viable solutions, not just in the short term but for future pandemics. However, quantum computing is bound to force major changes to the cybersecurity landscape.

Rodney Joffe, SVP, senior technologist and Fellow, Neustar.

While quantum computing is still in its relative stages of infancy, its rapid evolution means it will soon overtake technologies weve previously relied on, including high performance cloud computing.

This is why numerous tech giants such as IBM, Google, Amazon and Microsoft have entered the race to achieve what has been coined quantum supremacy: the competition to build the first fully-functioning and practical quantum computer. Microsoft, for instance, just announced that its quantum computing platform, Azure Quantum, is now available in limited preview.

Advancements such as these, however, have resulted in experts debating how the power of quantum will affect the cybersecurity landscape. Research from the Neustar International Security Council (NISC) recently revealed that almost a quarter of security professionals are already experimenting with quantum computing strategies, worried that it will outpace the development of existing security technologies.

These concerns are, in fact, extremely valid and require urgent action. Looking ahead, laying the foundations for rebuilding our current overarching cybersecurity approach including our algorithms, strategies and systems should be a key priority.

Across our most critical industries, quantum computing has the promise to solve what would have previously been described as unsolvable or existential problems.

When it comes to medical development, it has the potential to simulate how drugs will react. This reduces the risk during the commonly used trial and error method, and saves computational chemists both time and money. Already, researchers at Penn State University have announced that they are exploring how machine learning and quantum physics can be used to discover possible treatments for COVID-19.

In addition, Accenture recently published a paper with biotechnology innovator Biogen, which found that as quantum computers become more available, drug discovery will accelerate significantly, allowing scientists to compare much larger molecules.

Drug discovery is not the only area quantum computing will improve. Much has been reported about the technologys potential to beat climate change in the future. The World Economic Forum recently outlined how, by simulating large complex molecules, it will potentially be able to create new ones for carbon capture.

Whats more, last year, Google and NASA sparked frenzy within the technology community when together they revealed quantum computers hold the capability to compute in three minutes what would usually take supercomputers 10,000 years. While this feat is still years away, it is this level of power that cybersecurity professionals need to begin planning for.

At present, the cybersecurity industry depends on encryption to safeguard devices and personal data. In theory, encryption is possible to crack. In practice, however, it is impossible and would take a colossal amount of time to do so, over timescales of trillions of years.

Cryptography can be categorized in two ways: symmetric and asymmetric cryptography. In symmetric schemes, the same key is used to encrypt and decrypt data. In asymmetric schemes also known as public key there is a publicly shared key for encryption and a private key for decryption. Built on complex mathematical calculations, these are crafted for a fundamental purpose: to be so complicated that they would take classical computers too long and use too much computational power to be solved.

However, encryptions time as a viable solution is limited. Neustars research revealed that nearly three quarters (75%) of cybersecurity professionals expect advances in quantum technology to beat current technologies, such as encryption, within the next five years. Its ability to break encryption techniques such as private key poses a major challenge to the cybersecurity industry. In the wrong hands, it could be used to launch a cyberattack on an unprecedented scale.

Given quantums ability to crack problems weve specifically created to be unsolvable at an unrivaled pace, there is a crucial need to create new public key schemes that are resistant to quantum technology. Even though a quantum computer capable of beating encryption is approximately ten years away, quantum-proof encryption needs to be implemented before then.

Planning for quantum requires a careful consideration of its progress. Luckily, most organisations have quantum computing on their radar. In fact, 74% of cybersecurity professionals have admitted to paying close attention to the technologys development.

Businesses are also required to take note of all encrypted data and make sure it is surrounded by 24/7 monitoring and threat intelligence tools, alongside robust processes. There needs to be a recognition that even though it is impossible for this data to be decrypted currently, advances in quantum computing will mean that it will be vulnerable in future.

The current global pandemic has taught us that we need science and technology more than ever to guide us through challenging times and produce the innovations that will see us benefit in the long run.

The sheer power and uncertainty of quantum should not be viewed negatively in fact, 87% of CISOs, CSOs, CTOs and security directors admitted that they are excited about the potential positive impact it will have. Quantum computing is part of the future, and the cybersecurity industry has to prepare early for its impact if they wish to reap the benefits.

Original post:

Restructuring cybersecurity with the power of quantum - TechRadar

At the beginning of the 20th century, physicists were aware of a pervasive shower of particles that seemed to rain down from space. By filling glass chambers with highly condensed vapor, they could indirectly see tracks left by these highly energetic particles now known as cosmic rays. In doing so, they quickly discovered the subatomic world was more complex than initially suspected.

The first new matter particle they discovered was the muon. It was a lot like an electron, just more massive. At first, no one knew what to make of it.

Some thought it might be a particle theorized to hold protons and neutrons together in an atom. But a pair of Italians conducting experiments in Rome during World War II proved otherwise.

After discarding a few alternative theoriesincluding one that posited that this particle might be a new kind of electronphysicists were left with one conclusion: They had discovered a particle that nobody had predicted. As Nobel Laureate I.I. Rabi famously quipped, Who ordered that?

Although scientists hadnt realized muons would be on the menu, the discovery of muons eventually led to a discovery about how that menu was set up: Particles can come in different versions, each alike in charge, spin and interactions but different in mass. The muon, for example, has the same charge, spin and electroweak interactions as the electron, but is about 200 times heavier, and theres an even heavier version of the electron and muon, called the tau.

Physicists built on this principle to predict the existence of generations of other particles, such as neutrinos, which with electrons, muons and taus round out the set of particles called leptons. Eventually, scientists would find that all of the matter particles in the Standard Model, including quarks, could be organized into three generations, though only the lightest are stable.

Muons continue to be useful tools for discovery to this day. Two international experiments, one currently underway and the other slated to begin in the early 2020s, are using the previously perplexing particles to push the boundaries of physics.

Each of the three generations is called a different flavor of particle.

At first, scientists assumed that flavor was a property that, like mass or energy, had to be conserved when particles interacted with each other. That wasnt quite right, but in their defense, they did find this to be true almost all of the time.

When you have some kind of an interaction that involves charged leptons, such as nuclear or particle decay or some type of high-energy particle interaction, the number of a given flavor of charged leptons remains the same, says Jim Miller, a professor of physics at Boston University.

When muons decay, for example, they transform into an electron, an anti-electron neutrino, and a muon neutrino. The electron and anti-electron neutrino cancel each other out, flavor-wise, leaving just the muon neutrino, which has the same flavor as the original muon.

Flavor conservation was useful; it allowed physicists to predict the interactions they would observe in particle accelerators and nuclear reactions. And those predictions proved to be correct.

But then physicists discovered that the group of (uncharged lepton) particles called neutrinos are unaware they are expected to follow the rules. On their long journey to Earth from the center of the sun, where they are created in fusion reactions, neutrinos freely oscillate between generations, transforming from electron neutrinos to muon neutrinos to tau neutrinos and back without releasing any additional particles.

This phenomenon, which won researchers Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2015, left scientists with a question: If neutrinos could violate flavor conservation, could other particles do it, too?

Physicists hope to answer that exact question with Mu2e, an experiment scheduled to start generating data in the next few years at the US Department of Energys Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The experiment is supported by funding from DOEs Office of Science.

Mu2e will search for muons converting into electrons without releasing other particles, a process that would clearly violate flavor conservation.

But why use muons? Its because theyre the just-right middle of the lepton family. Not too big or too small, muons are a sort of Goldilocks particle that are perfectly suited to aid physicists in their search for new physics.

Electrons, the least massive charged leptons, are small and stable. Taus, the most massive ones, are so massive and short-lived that they decay far too quickly for physicists to effectively study. Muons, however, are massive enough to decay but not massive enough to decay too quickly, making them the perfect tool in the search for new physics.

In the Mu2e experiment, physicists will accelerate a beam of low-energy muons toward a target made of aluminum. In the resulting collisions, muons will knock electrons out of their orbits around the aluminum nuclei and take their place, creating muonic atoms for a brief moment in time.

Since the mass of the muon is 200 times greater than the mass of the electron, and its average distance from the nucleus is 200 times smaller, theres an overlap between the muons position and the position of the aluminum nucleus, allowing them to interact, Miller says.

As the muon decays into an electron, physicists predict that the extra energy that usually goes into creating two neutrinos in a typical muon decay will instead be transferred to the atoms nucleus. This would allow the conversion from one flavor to another, muon to electron, without any neutrinos or antineutrinos to provide balance. If observed, this direct transition of a muon into an electron would be the hoped-for discovery of flavor violation among charged leptons.

Mu2e is not the only experiment that will use muons to test our understanding of physics.

Eight years before the discovery of muons, physicist Paul Dirac was developing a theory to describe the motion of electrons. In a single, elegant equation, Dirac successfully described that motionwhile simultaneously merging Albert Einsteins special theory of relativity with quantum mechanics and predicting the existence of antimatter.

Its hard to overstate how important and incredibly accurate Diracs equation turned out to be. Physicists still act giddy whenever its mentioned.

To understand why its important, take a look at the electron.

Diracs equation correctly described exactly how the electromagnetic force worked and gave the correct estimate for how an electrons spin would shiftor precessif placed in a magnetic field, a measurement known as g. (That prediction was later refined through calculations from the field of quantum electrodynamics.)

When muons were discovered in 1936, Diracs equation was used to calculate what their precession rate would be as well. The value g for muons was predicted to be equal to 2.

But when physicists began generating muons in accelerators at CERN in the 1950s to test his predictions, the results were not quite what they expected. Had they found a discrepancy between observation and theory? Although physicists worked hard for the next 20 years, they couldnt generate enough energy with their accelerators to obtain a conclusive answer.

Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory were able to test Diracs prediction at higher energies between 1999 and 2001 with an experiment meant to directly determine the anomalous part of the magnetic moment called Muon g-2 (pronounced Muon g minus 2). They found hints of the same anomalous measurement, but even with their improved technology, they lacked sufficient precision to prove a disagreement with theory.

Could Diracs equation turn out to be wrong? Physicists think it could be that their findings in muons are actually hinting at a deeper structure in physics that has yet to be discovered and that studying muons could once again lead to new revelations.

The g-2 factor has been measured for other particles, says Fermilab physicist Tammy Walton. Its been very precisely measured for the electron. Its also been measured for composite particles, like the proton and neutron. But the large mass of muons make them more sensitive to new physics.

Fermilab recently began the next generation Muon g-2 experiment, which physicists hope along with J-PARC in Japan will unequivocally confirm whether or not theory agrees with nature. Funded by the DOE's Office of Science, the experiment at Fermilab has been taking data since 2017.

We hope to get 20 times the number of muons, giving us a fourfold reduction in statistical uncertainty, says Erik Swanson, a research engineer at the University of Washington. If our central value stays the same as that generated at Brookhaven, then we will have confirmed without a doubt the discrepancy between theory and observation. Otherwise it might just be that theory was right all along.

If the theory is broken, physicists will have a lot of explaining to do, which could lead them to a new understanding of the particles and forces that make up our universe and the forces that govern them. Not bad work for a particle nobody ordered.

View original post here:

The stories a muon could tell - Symmetry magazine

Physicists have traced three of the four forces of nature the electromagnetic force and the strong and weak nuclear forces to their origins in quantum particles. But the fourth fundamental force, gravity, is different.

Our current framework for understanding gravity, devised a century ago by Albert Einstein, tells us that apples fall from trees and planets orbit stars because they move along curves in the space-time continuum. These curves are gravity. According to Einstein, gravity is a feature of the space-time medium; the other forces of nature play out on that stage.

But near the center of a black hole or in the first moments of the universe, Einsteins equations break. Physicists need a truer picture of gravity to accurately describe these extremes. This truer theory must make the same predictions Einsteins equations make everywhere else.

Physicists think that in this truer theory, gravity must have a quantum form, like the other forces of nature. Researchers have sought the quantum theory of gravity since the 1930s. Theyve found candidate ideas notably string theory, which says gravity and all other phenomena arise from minuscule vibrating strings but so far these possibilities remain conjectural and incompletely understood. A working quantum theory of gravity is perhaps the loftiest goal in physics today.

What is it that makes gravity unique? Whats different about the fourth force that prevents researchers from finding its underlying quantum description? We asked four different quantum gravity researchers. We got four different answers.

Claudia de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, has worked on theories of massive gravity, which posit that the quantized units of gravity are massive particles:

Einsteins general theory of relativity correctly describes the behavior of gravity over close to 30 orders of magnitude, from submillimeter scales all the way up to cosmological distances. No other force of nature has been described with such precision and over such a variety of scales. With such a level of impeccable agreement with experiments and observations, general relativity could seem to provide the ultimate description of gravity. Yet general relativity is remarkable in that it predicts its very own fall.

General relativity yields the predictions of black holes and the Big Bang at the origin of our universe. Yet the singularities in these places, mysterious points where the curvature of space-time seems to become infinite, act as flags that signal the breakdown of general relativity. As one approaches the singularity at the center of a black hole, or the Big Bang singularity, the predictions inferred from general relativity stop providing the correct answers. A more fundamental, underlying description of space and time ought to take over. If we uncover this new layer of physics, we may be able to achieve a new understanding of space and time themselves.

If gravity were any other force of nature, we could hope to probe it more deeply by engineering experiments capable of reaching ever-greater energies and smaller distances. But gravity is no ordinary force. Try to push it into unveiling its secrets past a certain point, and the experimental apparatus itself will collapse into a black hole.

Daniel Harlow, a quantum gravity theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is known for applying quantum information theory to the study of gravity and black holes:

Black holes are the reason its difficult to combine gravity with quantum mechanics. Black holes can only be a consequence of gravity because gravity is the only force that is felt by all kinds of matter.If there were any type of particle that did not feel gravity, we could use that particle to send out a message from the inside of the black hole, so it wouldnt actually be black.

The fact that all matter feels gravity introduces a constraint on the kinds of experiments that are possible: Whatever apparatus you construct, no matter what its made of, it cant be too heavy, or it will necessarily gravitationally collapse into a black hole.This constraint is not relevant in everyday situations, but it becomes essential if you try to construct an experiment to measure the quantum mechanical properties of gravity.

Our understanding of the other forces of nature is built on the principle of locality, which says that the variables that describe whats going on at each point in space such as the strength of the electric field there can all change independently. Moreover, these variables, which we call degrees of freedom, can only directly influence their immediate neighbors. Locality is important to the way we currently describe particles and their interactions because it preserves causal relationships: If the degrees of freedom here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, depended on the degrees of freedom in San Francisco, we may be able to use this dependence to achieve instantaneous communication between the two cities or even to send information backward in time, leading to possible violations of causality.

The hypothesis of locality has been tested very well in ordinary settings, and it may seem natural to assume that it extends to the very short distances that are relevant for quantum gravity (these distances are small because gravity is so much weaker than the other forces).To confirm that locality persists at those distance scales, we need to build an apparatus capable of testing the independence of degrees of freedom separated by such small distances. A simple calculation shows, however, that an apparatus thats heavy enough to avoid large quantum fluctuations in its position, which would ruin the experiment, will also necessarily be heavy enough to collapse into a black hole!Therefore, experiments confirming locality at this scale are not possible. And quantum gravity therefore has no need to respect locality at such length scales.

Indeed, our understanding of black holes so far suggests that any theory of quantum gravity should have substantially fewer degrees of freedom than we would expect based on experience with the other forces. This idea is codified in the holographic principle, which says, roughly speaking, that the number of degrees of freedom in a spatial region is proportional to its surface area instead of its volume.

Juan Maldacena, a quantum gravity theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, is best known for discovering a hologram-like relationship between gravity and quantum mechanics:

Particles can display many interesting and surprising phenomena. We can have spontaneous particle creation, entanglement between the states of particles that are far apart, and particles in a superposition of existence in multiple locations.

In quantum gravity, space-time itself behaves in novel ways. Instead of the creation of particles, we have the creation of universes. Entanglement is thought to create connections between distant regions of space-time. We have superpositions of universes with different space-time geometries.

Furthermore, from the perspective of particle physics, the vacuum of space is a complex object. We can picture many entities called fieldssuperimposed on top of one another and extending throughout space. The value of each field is constantly fluctuating at short distances.Out of thesefluctuating fieldsand their interactions, the vacuum state emerges. Particles are disturbances in this vacuum state. We can picture them as small defects in the structure of the vacuum.

When we consider gravity, we find that the expansion of the universe appears to produce more of this vacuum stuff out of nothing. When space-time is created, it just happens to be in the state that corresponds to the vacuum without any defects. How the vacuum appears in precisely the right arrangement is one of the main questions we need to answer to obtain a consistent quantum description of black holes and cosmology. In both of these cases there is a kind of stretching of space-time that results in the creation of more of the vacuum substance.

Sera Cremonini, a theoretical physicist at Lehigh University, works on string theory, quantum gravity and cosmology:

There are many reasons why gravity is special. Let me focus on one aspect, the idea that the quantum version of Einsteins general relativity is nonrenormalizable. This has implications for the behavior of gravity at high energies.

In quantum theories, infinite terms appear when you try to calculate how very energetic particles scatter off each other and interact. In theories that are renormalizable which include the theories describing all the forces of nature other than gravity we can remove these infinities in a rigorous way by appropriately adding other quantities that effectively cancel them, so-called counterterms. This renormalization process leads to physically sensible answers that agree with experiments to a very high degree of accuracy.

The problem with a quantum version of general relativity is that the calculations that would describe interactions of very energetic gravitons the quantized units of gravity would have infinitely many infinite terms. You would need to add infinitely many counterterms in a never-ending process. Renormalization would fail. Because of this, a quantum version of Einsteins general relativity is not a good description of gravity at very high energies. It must be missing some of gravitys key features and ingredients.

However, we can still have a perfectly good approximate description of gravity at lower energies using the standard quantum techniques that work for the other interactions in nature. The crucial point is that this approximate description of gravity will break down at some energy scale or equivalently, below some length.

Above this energy scale, or below the associated length scale, we expect to find new degrees of freedom and new symmetries. To capture these features accurately we need a new theoretical framework. This is precisely where string theory or some suitable generalization comes in: According to string theory, at very short distances, we would see that gravitons and other particles are extended objects, called strings. Studying this possibility can teach us valuable lessons about the quantum behavior of gravity.

See the article here:

Why Gravity Is Not Like the Other Forces - Quanta Magazine

The atmosphere of Mars has a distinct green glow, just like Earth's.

The European Space Agency's Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) spotted an emerald glow in Mars' wispy atmosphere, marking the first time the phenomenon has been spotted on a world beyond Earth, a new study reports.

"One of the brightest emissions seen on Earth stems from night glow. More specifically, from oxygen atoms emitting a particular wavelength of light that has never been seen around another planet," study lead author Jean-Claude Grard, of the Universit de Lige in Belgium, said in a statement.

"However, this emission has been predicted to exist at Mars for around 40 years and, thanks to TGO, weve found it," Grard said.

Related: The 7 biggest mysteries of Mars

As Grard noted, the green emission is characteristic of oxygen. Skywatchers at high latitudes here on Earth can see this signature in the ethereal, multicolored displays known as the auroras, which are generated by charged particles from the sun slamming into molecules high up in the atmosphere.

But night glow is different. It's caused by the interaction of sunlight with atoms and molecules in the air, which generates a subtle but continuous light. This emission is hard to see, even here on Earth; observers often need an edge-on perspective to make it out, which is why some of the best images of our planet's green night glow come courtesy of astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Day glow, the diurnal component of this constant emission, is even harder to spot. And it's driven by a slightly different mechanism.

"Night glow occurs as broken-apart molecules recombine, whereas day glow arises when the sun's light directly excites atoms and molecules such as nitrogen and oxygen," European Space Agency (ESA) officials wrote in the same statement.

Grard and his colleagues used TGO's Nadir and Occultation for Mars Discovery (NOMAD) instrument suite, which includes the Ultraviolet and Visible Spectrometer (UVIS), to study the Red Planet's air in a special observing mode from April through December of last year.

"Previous observations hadn't captured any kind of green glow at Mars, so we decided to reorient the UVIS nadir channel to point at the 'edge' of Mars, similar to the perspective you see in images of Earth taken from the ISS," study co-author and NOMAD principal investigator Ann Carine Vandaele, of the Institut Royal d'Aronomie Spatiale de Belgique in Belgium, said in the same statement.

The team scanned the Martian atmosphere at altitudes between 12 miles and 250 miles (20 to 400 kilometers). They found the green oxygen glow at all heights, though it was strongest around 50 miles (80 km) up and varied with the Red Planet's distance from the sun.

The researchers also performed modeling work to better understand what's driving the glow. Those calculations suggested the light is driven mainly by the breakup of carbon dioxide, which makes up 95% of Mars' thin atmosphere, into carbon monoxide and oxygen.

TGO saw these stripped oxygen atoms glowing in both visible and ultraviolet light, with the visible emission about 16.5 times more intense than the UV.

"The observations at Mars agree with previous theoretical models, but not with the actual glowing we've spotted around Earth, where the visible emission is far weaker," Grard said. "This suggests we have more to learn about how oxygen atoms behave, which is hugely important for our understanding of atomic and quantum physics."

TGO has been circling Mars since October 2016. The orbiter is part of the two-phase European-Russian ExoMars program, which plans to launch a life-hunting rover called Rosalind Franklin toward the Red Planet in 2022. (The Rosalind Franklin was originally supposed to lift off this summer, but technical issues with the spacecraft's parachute and other systems caused the mission to miss that window.)

The new TGO results, which were published online today (June 15) in the journal Nature Astronomy, will be helpful to the Rosalind Franklin team, ESA officials said.

"This type of remote-sensing observation, coupled with in situ measurements at higher altitudes, helps us to predict how the Martian atmosphere will respond to seasonal changes and variations in solar activity," Hkan Svedhem, ESA's TGO project scientist, said in the same statement.

"Predicting changes in atmospheric density is especially important for forthcoming missions, including the ExoMars 2022 mission that will send a rover and surface science platform to explore the surface of the Red Planet," said Svedhem, who is not a co-author of the new study.

Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

Read more from the original source:

Weird green glow spotted in atmosphere of Mars - Space.com

Lead author Riddhi Gupta.

Our idea was to adapt algorithms used in robotics that map the environment and place an object relative to other objects in their estimated terrain, she said. We effectively use some qubits in the device as sensors to help understand the classical terrain in which other qubits are processing information.

In robotics, machines rely on simultaneous localisation and mapping, or SLAM, algorithms. Devices like robotic vacuum cleaners are continuously mapping their environments then estimating their location within that environment in order to move.

The difficulty with adapting SLAM algorithms to quantum systems is that if you measure, or characterise, the performance of a single qubit, you destroy its quantum information.

What Ms Gupta has done is develop an adaptive algorithm that measures the performance of one qubit and uses that information to estimate the capabilities of nearby qubits.

We have called this Noise Mapping for Quantum Architectures. Rather than estimate the classical environment for each and every qubit, we are able to automate the process, reducing the number of measurements and qubits required, which speeds up the whole process, Ms Gupta said.

Dr Cornelius Hempel, whose experimental team provided Ms Gupta with data from experiments on a one-dimensional string of trapped ions, said he was pleased to see a threefold improvement even in the mapping of such a small quantum system.

However, when Riddhi modelled this process in a larger and more complex system, the improvement in speed was as high as twentyfold. This is a great result given the future of quantum processing is in larger devices, he said.

Ms Guptas supervisor isProfessor Michael J. Biercuk, founder of quantum technology companyQ-CTRLand director of the University of SydneyQuantum Control Laboratoryin the Sydney Nanoscience Hub.

He said: This work is an exciting demonstration that state-of-the-art knowledge in robotics can directly shape the future of quantum computing. This was a first step to unify concepts from these two fields, and we see a very bright future for the continued development of quantumcontrol engineering.

This work was partially supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems, the US Army Research Office and a private grant from H. & A. Harley.

Read more here:

Borrowing from robotics, scientists automate mapping of quantum systems - News - The University of Sydney