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Transporting renewable energy to where it’s needed lies at the heart of the human endeavour to get rid of the need for fossil fuels. Superconductors can do so without loosing any of the precious electricity on the way, seemingly defying physical intuition. Find out in this article why many body physics is needed to understand their counter-intuitive behaviour, what role quantum entanglement plays and how quantum computation might lead to the discovery of materials which may give us the tools for a greener future. One of the oldest still existing rainforest in the world — Daintree at Cape Tribulation in Australia. It was the enourmous plant material produced in the forests of the Carbon age which got compressed to coal and oil in the depths of the earth — and it is forests like this which are now endangered by global warming. Dealing with cli m ate change and the shortening fossil resources of our planet is one of the most pressing problems of our generation. Phy...

If you’ve ever attended the premiere of a film or an event where a new type of car is presented, you’ll know that there’s a slight buzz of excitement that comes from not knowing what to expect. I’ve been feeling that buzz for the past two weeks, leading up to an event that promised a “world premiere live demonstration of the next step in quantum cryptography”. It was not that the whole event was clouded in mystery, as some small teasers were released leading up to it. Still, with all the recent developments on the quantum Internet, I was left wondering: what exactly is the “state of the art” they plan to demonstrate? The event, which took place on Tuesday this week, was organized by a group of institutes and companies involved in quantum cryptography in the Netherlands. Amongst them were  QuTech , a collaboration of the Delft University of Technology and the Dutch Institute of Applied Scientific Research (TNO). Another was  Quantum Delta NL , a Dutch umbrella ...

In order to define the Higgs field, it was necessary to find the associated particle, also known popularly as the Holy Grail of the quantum world, the secret melody or the particle of God As a matter of fact, there is a song by Nick Cave called  Higgs Boson Blues.  It is a sad sort of song, delivered in a broken voice, as if by a crooner of the dark; a song where the search and the journey are described in a tone that sounds more sinister than familiar. This gives some sense of the impact that the discovery of the Higgs boson had at the popular level. But what is the Higgs boson? The Higgs boson is an elementary particle relating to mass, a property without which the universe could not have been created. Scientific curiosity applied to the Higgs boson shows us that mass expresses the resistance formed by the Higgs quantum field. This field extends throughout the universe, and it is named after the physicist who discovered it, Peter Higgs. But let’s avoi...

If someone asked you to picture a quantum computer, what would you see in your mind? Maybe you see a normal computer-- just bigger, with some mysterious physics magic going on inside? Forget laptops or desktops. Forget computer server farms. A quantum computer is fundamentally different in both the way it looks, and ,more importantly, in the way it processes information. There are currently several ways to build a quantum computer. But let’s start by describing one of the leading designs to help explain how it works. Imagine a lightbulb filament, hanging upside down, but it’s the most complicated light you’ve ever seen. Instead of one slender twist of wire, it has  organized silvery swarms of them , neatly braided around a core. They are arranged in layers that narrow as you move down. Golden plates separate the structure into sections. The outer part of this vessel is called the chandelier. It’s a supercharged refrigerator that uses a special liquified heli...

Many birds have a sixth sense. No, not seeing dead people: They detect Earth’s magnetic field, an ability that allows them to return to the same sites, year after year, during seasonal migration. Now, scientists have come closer to identifying the mechanism that our feathery friends use to feel Earth’s magnetic field—and it involves quantum mechanics in their eyes. A research team, led by scientists from the University of Oldenburg in Germany and Oxford University, studied a protein known as cryptochrome-4, found in birds’ retinas. For 20 years, experts hypothesized that this protein served as birds’ magnetic sensor, a microscopic compass that points the bird in a particular direction. The protein participates in chemical reactions that produce varying quantities of new molecules that depend on the direction of Earth’s magnetic field. A bird’s neurons ultimately respond to the amount of these molecules to reorient the animal. “But no one could confirm or verify this in the ...

  In simple terms : An illustration of how larger quantum systems can be partitioned according to the amount of entanglement (lines) between the spins (circles). The spins and entanglements can then be simulated in parallel with the interactions between them represented in a far simpler way, as on the right-hand diagram. (Courtesy: Andrew G Green)"> In simple terms : An illustration of how larger quantum systems can be partitioned according to the amount of entanglement (lines) between the spins (circles). The spins and entanglements can then be simulated in parallel with the interactions between them represented in a far simpler way, as on the right-hand diagram. (Courtesy: Andrew G Green) Quantum computers can now simulate much larger quantum systems than was previously thought possible thanks to algorithms developed by researchers in the UK and Germany. The new algorithms divide up quantum computational resources according to which parts of the simulation require them most, ...

As far as we currently know, there is a single expanding blob of spacetime speckled with trillions of galaxies - that's our Universe. If there are others, we have no compelling evidence for their existence. That said, theories of cosmology, quantum physics, and the very philosophy of science have a few problems that could be solved if our blob of 'everything' wasn't, well, everything. That doesn't mean other universes  must  exist. But what if they do? What is a universe? It should be a simple question to answer. But different areas of science will have subtly different takes on what a universe even is. Cosmologists might say  it describes the total mass of stuff (and the space in between) that has been slowly expanding from a highly concentrated volume over the past 13.77 billion years, becoming increasingly disordered with age.  It now stretches 93 billion light years from edge to edge, at least based on all of the visible (and invisible) stuff we can ...

While President Biden was visiting Europe, he should have stopped taking a close look at what the European Union and European countries and labs are doing to protect against future quantum computer attack. A threat this column has highlighted over the past two years. While the U.S. is betting all its quantum security chips on post-quantum cryptography, i.e. mathematically-based algorithms scientists and cryptographers hope will resist a future quantum computer assault—scientists, companies, and officials in Europe are investing in a technology that uses quantum science itself to secure data and networks, now and for decades into the future. In October 2018, the European Commission launched the first phase of the Quantum Technologies Flagship, 1 billion EURO, ten-year initiative, that pools resources for advancing quantum technology on a broad front. That includes building a future communication network based on Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), a technology th...