Indias Minister of Science and Technology Dr Jitendra Singh visited Imperial to meet researchers and students and strengthen ties with India.

The Minister, accompanied byProfessor Ajay Kumar Sood, Principle Scientific Advisor to the Government of India, and other scientists and officials,visited Imperials labs and heard about Imperial's growing research collaborations with India.

The Minister also met with some of Imperial's Indian students and scholars and encouraged them to reach their potential. He also highlighted the rapid progress science in India was making in a number of fields and the growth of Indian startups.

Professor Mary Ryan, Vice Provost (Research and Enterprise) at Imperial College London, said:Wereincredibly proud of our longstanding connections with India.

"We are privileged to host just over 800 talented and highly entrepreneurial students from India.Imperial is also home to a thriving community of researchers and staff with connections to India.

"Our academics collaborate with a range of partners in India, as well as our incredible alumni community, to tackle shared health and climate challenges such as the transition to clean energy, antimicrobial resistance, and infectious disease."

During the visit Imperial announced that it was creating a new scholarship programme for Indian Masters students.

The'Future Leaders Scholarship' programmewill support 30 students over the next three years with half of the scholarships reserved for female scholars. The scholarships will be for students inMSc programmes across Imperial's Faculties of Engineering, Natural Sciences, Medicine and the Business School.

Professor Peter Haynes, Vice-Provost (Education and Student Experience) at Imperial, said: It is a real priority for Imperial to continue tofacilitateand support two-way mobility between India and the UK.

"I hope that weare able towelcome even more students from India in the future and I amvery pleasedto announce that Imperial is investing just over 400,000 in scholarships for the future STEM-B leaders of India.The investment will see the launch of 30 merit-based scholarships over the next three years, with the first application round opening next academic year.

At least 50 per cent of these prestigious Future Leaders scholarships will be reserved for female scholars.I hope that we can continue to work together to build upon our success and that Imperial can be at the fore of supporting UK-India partnerships in the coming decade.

Imperial also announced a new partnership with Chevening for scholars from India. Funding will be available forscholars who demonstrate the greatest potential to become leaders, decision-makers and opinion-formers in India. The Chevening scholarship award will support academic fees and provide a monthly stipend.

TheScience Ministervisited Imperials Carbon Capture Pilot Plant to see how Imperial students aretraining to become the next generation of chemical engineers.

He also saw a demonstration of the latest imaging from the Mars Rover at the Data Science Institute by Professor Sanjeev Gupta.

The Minister then visited Imperials Hydrodynamics lab for a demonstration of the wave tank byProfessor Washington Ochieng and Professor Graham Hughes.

Imperial has longstanding and successful links with India - and is committed to expanding and strengthening partnerships with the country.

Imperial andthe Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore launched an ambitious partnership in research and education.

The joint seed fund with IISc has already enabled exchange mobility this academic year, with partners spending time in each others labs to explore topics as diverse as bio-acoustics, air pollutants and quantum physics.

Imperials School of Public Health has been collaborating with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)in support of Indias COVID-19 response. Academics from theJameel InstituteandMRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, including Professor Katharina Hauckand Professor Nimalan Arinaminpathy,have supported scientists within the ICMR, toperform modelling analysis to address key questions faced by public health authorities in the country. For example, early in Indias vaccination drive against COVID-19 the largest in the world Imperialcollaborated with the ICMR to provide modelling analysis informing the prioritisation of risk groups.

A major focus of ProfessorArinaminpathy teams research is in the control of human tuberculosis (TB) in high-burden countries. They work closely with India's National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme, contributing mathematical models to help inform intervention planning to meet India's ambitious goals for TB elimination.

Earlier this year Imperial welcomed the Indian High Commissioner tothe College to discuss deepening ties with the country.

Last year Imperial hosted the former Principal Scientific Advisor, Prof Vijay Raghavan and his UK counterpart, Sir Patrick Vallance, at an event to discuss the role of science and innovation partnerships in driving the India-UK Roadmap and creating healthier, resilient societies.

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India's Minister of Science visits Imperial to strengthen research links - Imperial College London

The Centre has approved Rs 6,003 crore for the National Quantum Mission, to fund scientific and industrial research development in quantum technology. What is quantum technology and why is India so keen on investing in it? Where will the applications of this lie? Sarthak Ray takes a look at these questions

Quantum technology is largely understood as the segment of technology that is based on principles of quantum physics. Quantum physics, in turn, is the study of matter and energy at the most fundamental level, where classical laws of physics dont apply. It aims to uncover the properties and behaviours of the very building blocks of nature, says Caltech.

Also Read: Watch out for AI, multi-cloud & quantum computing in 2023

Quantum physics principles and discoveries already mark their presence in our worldthe discoveries over the decades fuelled innovation and allowed us to come up with devices and applications, such as lasers and transistors, etc. They have also put us forth on the path to quantum computing, which is still under development.

Quantum computers have the same foundational elements as classical onesthey use chips, circuits and logic gates, and operations are orchestrated by algorithms. Data is also transmitted in the binary code of 0s and 1s. Where they differ is classical computing uses bit as the fundamental unit of data; a bit can either be 1 or 0 exclusively.

Quantum computing, on the other hand, uses quantum bits or qubits. A qubit exhibits superpositiona quantum physics principle per which an object exists as the combination of multiple possible states in a simultaneous manner. Imagine waves originating from separate points on a pond and travelling outward. Eventually, waves from the distinct points of origin form a more complex pattern when they overlap. This is superposition. A qubit is a superposition of both 1 and 0 simultaneously until its state is measured.

Why do we need quantum computing? Well, for a start, it offers unprecedented speed of computing. We only have nascent quantum computers now, but the speed achieved by even these is mindblowing. Googles 54-qubit Sycamore processor performed a target computation in 200 seconds; the worlds fastest supercomputer would have taken 10,000 years.

Also Read: Indias first quantum computing-based telecom network link now operational, says Ashwini Vaishnaw

One can make qubits by manipulating normal atoms, atoms carrying electrical charge (or ions), even electrons. They can also be made by nano-engineering artificial atoms, or semiconductor nanocrystals that have their own discrete electronic structure, like atoms. These are made with a printing method callled lithography. The states of different qubits, exhibiting superposition, can get entangledthey can be linked to each other via quantum mechanics.

The computing edge and the impact on a host of areas, including communication, is one that no country would want to miss. There are massive gains to be made in the areas of quantum cryptography and quantum sensing.

So, naturally, many nations, especially the developed ones, have been quick to announce public-sector focus on quantum computing. Six nationsthe US, Canada, China, Finland, France and Germany have loosened their pursestrings to that endthe US has committed $7 billion and China $15 billion.

India, on the other hand, has scaled back fundingwhen the Mission was first announced in 2019, the amount earmarked was Rs 8,000 crore. The latest announcement has scaled back the amount. There are a few Indian companies that are working with MNCs on quantum computing, but what India needs is a push from the government to walk faster on quantum computing research.

Globally, some marquee tech companies are working on quantum computing projects, including IBM. The technology, now, is too costly & cumbersome to get commercialised. For instance, qubits are kept in a chambers that chill them to near absolute zero temperature.

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Explainer: Indias quantum computing ambitions - The Financial Express

Global development

The formidable Indian environmentalist discusses her 50-year struggle to protect seeds and farmers from the poison cartel of corporate agriculture

Fri 28 Apr 2023 01.00 EDT

You dont have to look very far to find the essence of life, says Vandana Shiva. But in a society caught up in a blur of technological advances, bio-hacks and attempts to improve ourselves and the natural world, she fears we are hellbent on destroying it.

Everything comes from the seed, but we have forgotten that the seed isnt a machine, says Shiva. We think we can engineer life, we can change the carefully organised DNA of a living organism, and there will be no wider impact. But this is a dangerous illusion.

For almost five decades, Shiva has been deeply engaged in the fight for environmental justice in India. Regarded as one of the worlds most formidable environmentalists, she has worked to save forests, shut down polluting mines, exposed the dangers of pesticides, spurred on the global campaign for organic farming, championed ecofeminism and gone up against powerful giant chemical corporations.

Her battle to protect the worlds seeds in their natural form rather than genetically altered and commercially controlled versions continues to be her lifes work.

Shivas anti-globalisation philosophy and pilgrimages across India have often been compared to Mahatma Gandhi. Yet while Gandhi became synonymous with the spinning wheel as a symbol of self-reliance, Shivas emblem is the seed.

Now 70, Shiva who is divorced and has one son has spent her life refusing to conform to the patriarchal norms so often imposed on women in India, particularly in the 1950s. She has published more than 20 books and when she is not travelling the world for workshops or speaking tours, she spends her time between her office in Delhi and her organic farm in the foothills of the Himalayas.

She credits her spirit of resistance to her parents, who were feminists at a higher level than Ive ever known long before we even knew the word feminism. After 1947, when India gained independence, her father left the military for a job in the forests of the mountainous state of Uttarakhand, where Shiva was born and brought up always to believe she was equal to men. The forests were my identity and from an early age the laws of nature captivated me, she says.

She was about six when she stumbled on a book of quotes by Albert Einstein buried in a small, musty library in a forest lodge. She was transfixed, determined against all odds to be a physicist. Though science was not taught at her rural convent school, Shivas parents encouraged her curiosity and found ways for her to learn. By the time she was in her 20s, she was completing her PhD in quantum physics at a Canadian university.

Yet as logging, dams and development wreaked ecological devastation on Uttarakhands forests and local peasant women rose up to fight it a movement known as Chipko Shiva realised, on returning to India, that her heart lay not with quantum physics but with a different, nagging question. I couldnt understand why were we told that new technology brings progress, but everywhere I looked, local people were getting poorer and landscapes were being devastated as soon as this development or new technology came in, she says.

In 1982, in her mothers cow shed in the mountain town of Dehradun, Shiva set up her research foundation, exploring the crossover between science, technology and ecology. She began to document the green revolution that swept rural India from the late 1960s, where in a bid to drive up crop yields and avert famine, the government had pushed farmers to introduce technology, mechanisation and agrochemicals.

It instilled in her a lifelong opposition to industrial interference in agriculture. Though the green revolution is acknowledged to have prevented widespread starvation and introduced some necessary modernisation into rural communities, it was also the beginning of a continuing system of monoculture in India, where farmers were pushed to abandon native varieties and instead plant a few high-yielding wheat and rice crops in quick-turnaround cycles, burning the stubble in their fields in between.

It also created a reliance on subsidised fertilisers and chemicals that, though costly and environmentally disastrous, lasts to this day. Soil in fertile states such as Punjab, once known as the breadbasket of India, has been stripped of its rich minerals, with watercourses running dry, rivers polluted with chemical run-off and farmers in a perpetual state of deep crisis and anger.

Shivas suspicions about the chemical industry worsened further when, in the early 1990s, she was privy to some of the first multilateral discussions around agricultural biotechnology and plans by chemical companies to alter crop genes for commercial purposes.

There was a race on by companies to develop and patent these GM crops, but no one was stopping to ask: what will be the impact on the environment? How will they impact on diversity? What will this cost the farmers? They only wanted to win the race and control all the worlds seeds. To me, it all seemed so wrong, says Shiva.

In 1991, five years before the first genetically modified (GM) crops had been planted, she founded Navdanya, meaning nine seeds, an initiative to save Indias native seeds and spread their use among farmers. Eight years later, she took the chemical monolith Monsanto, the worlds largest producer of seeds, to the supreme court for bringing its GM cotton into India without permission.

Monsanto became notorious in the 1960s for producing the herbicide Agent Orange for the US military during the Vietnam war, and subsequently led the development of GM crops in the 1990s. It moved quickly to penetrate the international market with its privatised seeds, particularly in developing, predominantly agricultural countries.

The company, which was bought in 2018 by the German pharmaceutical and biotech company Bayer, became embroiled in legal action. In 2020 it announced a $11bn (8.7bn) payout to settle claims of links between its herbicide and cancer on behalf of almost 100,000 people but denied any wrongdoing. In 2016, dozens of civil society groups staged a peoples tribunal in The Hague, finding Monsanto guilty of human rights violations and developing an unsustainable system of farming.

Shiva says taking Monsanto to court felt like going up against a mafia and alleges that many attempts were made to threaten and pressure her into not filing the case.

Monsanto finally got permission to bring GM cotton to India in 2002, but Shiva has kept up her fight against chemical multinationals, which Shiva refers to as the poison cartel. Currently more than 60% of the worlds commercial seeds are sold by just four companies, which have led the push to patent seeds, orchestrated a global monopoly of certain GM crops such as cotton and soya and sued hundreds of small-scale farmers for saving seeds from commercial crops.

We have taken on these giants when they said weve invented rice, weve invented wheat, and we have won, she says.

She remains adamant that GM crops have failed. But though the legacy of GM pest-resistant cotton in India is complex and has increased pesticide use, not all would agree that the issue is black and white. Indeed, her outspoken and often intransigent positions on GM organisms and globalisation have earned her many critics and powerful enemies.

She has been accused of exaggerating the dangers of GM and simplifying facts around the direct correlation between farmers suicides and genetically modified crops, and been called an enemy of progress for her rhetoric against globalisation, given the threats facing the world.

As the global population has ballooned to 8 billion people, and the climate crisis throws agriculture into disarray, even some prominent environmentalists have shifted their positions and have argued that GM crops can underpin food security. Countries including the UK, which had imposed strict laws around GM foods, are now pushing for more gene editing of crops and animals. Last year India approved the release of a new GM mustard seed.

Shiva is scathing of this renewed push for GM organisms, arguing that much of the gene-editing process is still dangerously unpredictable and calling it ignorance to think climate-adapted crops can only come from industrial labs.

Farmers have already bred thousands of climate-resilient and salt-tolerant seeds; they werent the invention of a few big companies, no matter what patents they claim, she says.

For Shiva, the global crisis facing agriculture will not be solved by the poison cartel nor a continuation of fossil fuel-guzzling, industrialised farming, but instead a return to local, small-scale farming no longer reliant on agrochemicals. Globally, the subsidies are $400bn a year to make an unviable agriculture system work, she says.

This industrialised globalised system of food is destroying soil, it is destroying water and it is generating 30% of our greenhouse gases. If we want to fix this, weve got to shift from industrial to ecological farming.

Nonetheless, while her crusade against the might of chemical corporations will continue, Shiva considers her most important work to be her travels through Indias villages, collecting and saving seeds including 4,000 varieties of rice setting up more than 100 seed banks, and helping farmers return to organic methods.

My proudest work is listening to the seed and her creativity, she says. Im proud of the fact that a lie is a lie is a lie, no matter how big the power that tells the lie. And Im proud that Ive never ever hesitated in speaking the truth.

This article was amended on 28 April 2023. A previous version incorrectly stated that Vandana Shiva had no children; she has a son.

Vandana Shivas latest book, Terra Viva: My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements, is published by Chelsea Green. Shiva will speak at the Extinction or Regeneration conference at the QEII Centre, London, on 11-12 May

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Fighting giants: eco-activist Vandana Shiva on her battle against GM multinationals - The Guardian

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In a new study, scientists have observed long-lived excitons in a topological material, opening intriguing new research directions for optoelectronics and quantum computing.

Excitons are charge-neutral quasiparticles created when light is absorbed by a semiconductor. Consisting of an excited electron coupled to a lower-energy electron vacancy or hole, an exciton is typically short-lived, surviving only until the electron and hole recombine, which limits its usefulness in applications.

"If we want to make progress in quantum computing and create more sustainable electronics, we need longer exciton lifetimes and new ways of transferring information that don't rely on the charge of electrons," said Alessandra Lanzara, who led the study. Lanzara is a senior faculty scientist at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and a UC Berkeley physics professor. "Here we're leveraging topological material properties to make an exciton that is long lived and very robust to disorder."

In a topological insulator, electrons can only move on the surface. By creating an exciton in such a material, the researchers hoped to achieve a state in which an electron trapped on the surface was coupled to a hole that remained confined in the bulk. Such a state would be spatially indirectextending from the surface into the bulkand could retain the special spin properties inherent to topological surface states.

The team used a state-of-the-art technique that Lanzara helped pioneer, known as time-, spin-, and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, which uses ultrafast pulses of light to probe the properties of electrons in a material. They worked with bismuth telluride, a well-studied topological insulator that offered the precise properties they needed: an electronic state combining the topological surface characteristics with those of the insulating bulk.

"We knew that bismuth telluride had the right electronic structure to support a spatially indirect exciton, but finding the right experimental conditions took hundreds of hours," said Lanzara. "It was a huge joy for everyone when we saw the excitonic state we were looking for."

The team studied the formation of the excitonic state and characterized its interaction with other charge carriers in the material. These observations already constituted a breakthrough, but the team went a step further by also measuring the state's spin character and demonstrating the persistence of the topological material's strong spin polarization in the excitonic state.

"We studied this new excitonic state and found that it does indeed inherit characteristics of both excitons and topological states," said first-author Ryo Mori, who worked on this project as a postdoctoral scholar and is now a faculty member at the University of Tokyo. "This finding opens up opportunities for future applications that combine properties of both, such as opto-spintronics and possibly new quantum information technology."

"This work is just the beginning, and many mysteries remain in the fundamental properties," Mori continued. "For example, we still cannot conclude the hole's spin in the current measurement. How does spin affect the exciton pairing mechanism? And then, how do we control the properties of this state so we can use it in an application?"

The research is published in the journal Nature.

More information: Ryo Mori et al, Spin-polarized spatially indirect excitons in a topological insulator, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05567-3

Journal information: Nature

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Scientists create a longer-lasting exciton that may open new possibilities in quantum information science - Phys.org

BOULDER, Colo., April 24, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Infleqtion, the global quantum leader, announced the release of its next-generation compact vacuum system for neutral atom research and quantum application development, the miniMOT V2. This launch marks the first new product release under the Infleqtion brand as the company transitions to a commercial products company.

miniMOT V2

The miniMOT V2 is a unique and compact off-the-shelf trapped atom vacuum system that enables users to create and control quantum matter based on rubidium (Rb) or cesium (Cs) atoms. With an intuitive user interface, the miniMOT V2 provides greater control over critical system parameters, increasing flexibility for cold atom experiments.

Neil Anderson, Ph.D., General Manager for Infleqtion's Quantum Components business highlighted, "As the quantum industry matures, we continue to see the need for commercial products that enable researchers, scientists, and application developers to quickly execute their experimental goals and meet their product development milestones. The miniMOT V2's new design and features provide users with even greater flexibility to create and control quantum matter within hours, not months."

Unlike its bulky counterparts, the miniMOT V2 eliminates the guesswork and hassle of setting up large and expansive vacuum equipment, allowing students and researchers to focus on designing their cold atom experiments or quantum application work to generate results faster. Upgrading to the miniMOT V2 means an easy-to-use and efficient solution for your quantum matter needs.

The miniMOT V2 includes a compact UHV system suitable for MOT production from a background vapor, active and passive pumps to maintain vacuum quality over several years of operation, integrated electronics for vacuum control, alkali atom pressure control, and to drive the miniMOT Coils and a touchscreen interface for seamless user control of system operation. It also includes a thin-walled cell, but optimized AR-coated UHV glass cells are also available as a standard feature. Shipped under vacuum, the miniMOT V2 is ready for immediate use.

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Infleqtion has collaborated with undergraduate educators to develop experiments that can be integrated into traditional physics curricula. As atomic physicists, they understand the importance of incorporating physical experimentation based on quantum physics into physics education. This is crucial as quantum technologies, such as quantum information processing, Positioning, Navigation and Time-keeping (PNT), gravimetry, and magnetometry, have become increasingly important for industry and governments around the world. To take advantage of the opportunities that the quantum world will offer, it is critical to develop a workforce with the necessary skill sets.

The miniMOT V2 is a solution for revitalizing traditional physics curricula and introducing students to the practical aspects of working in the quantum realm. The new miniMOT V2 platform allows institutions without the required infrastructure and skill sets to create a magneto-optical trap to immediately begin creating cold atoms and conducting related experiments.

The miniMOT V2 has been used in several physics experiments, including investigating inertial sensing using electromagnetically induced transparency, and laser cooling of 85Rb atoms to the recoil temperature limit. These experiments demonstrate the miniMOT V2's versatility in various applications.

To learn more about the miniMOT V2, visit Infleqtion's website athttps://infleqtion.com/minimotv2.

About InfleqtionInfleqtion is building an ecosystem of quantum technologies and commercial products for today, that will drive the company and the entire industry toward tomorrow. The company believes in taking quantum to its limit and leading from the edge. Infleqtion is built on 16 years of pioneering quantum research from ColdQuanta. Its scalable and versatile quantum technology is used by organizations around the globe and deployed by NASA on the International Space Station. Infleqtion is based in Austin, TX, with offices in Boulder, CO; Chicago, IL; Madison, WI; Melbourne, AU and Oxford, UK. Find out how Infleqtion is building the future at http://www.Infleqtion.com.

Infleqtion (PRNewsfoto/Infleqtion)

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Next Generation miniMOT Platform Unveiled for Quantum Physics Research and Education - Yahoo Finance