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Quantum physics is moving out of the laboratory and into everyday life. Despite headline results about quantum computers solving problems impossible for classical computers, technical challenges are standing in the way of getting quantum physics into the real world. New research published in Nature Communications from teams at Aalto University and Lund University could provide an important tool in this quest. One of the open questions in quantum research is how heat and thermodynamics coexist with quantum physics. This research field of quantum thermodynamics is one of the areas Professor Jukka Pekola, the leader of the QTF Centre of Excellence of the Academy of Finland, has worked on in his career. "This field has been dominated by theory, and only now are important experiments are starting to emerge," says Professor Pekola. His research group has set about creating quantum thermodynamic nanodevices that can solve open questions experimentally.           ...

This year will see the commercialization of high-level tech that gained ground in 2019, CB Insights found. The top tech trends for 2020 cover a wide array of areas including quantum computing, artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and 5G, according to a CB Insights report released Thursday. Most of the items on the list were included in CompTIA's top 10 emerging technologies of 2019. This crossover indicates that 2019 may have been the beginning for many of these technologies, but 2020 is the year when they take flight. To determine the top trends for 2020, the research team used anonymized and aggregate client searches on the CB Insights platform, patent activity, investment activity by VCs, and media and executive chatter tracked by the CB Insights Earnings Transcript and News Mentions search tools, according to the report. The following are the tech trends that "deserve close attention in the first year of the 2020s," as...

The chess world was amazed when the computer algorithm AlphaZero learned, after just four hours on its own, to beat the best chess programs built on human expertise. Now a research group at Aarhus University in Denmark has used the very same algorithm to control a quantum computer. All across the world, numerous research groups are attempting to build a quantum computer. Such a computer would be able to solve certain problems that cannot be solved with current classical computers, even if we combined all these computers in the world into one. At Aarhus University, researchers share the ambition of building a quantum computer. For this reason, a research group under the direction of Professor Jacob Sherson has just used the computer algorithm AlphaZero to learn to control a quantum system.    What makes AlphaZero interesting is that it can learn on its own without any form of human expertise. In this manner, AlphaZero has beaten both humans and specialized computer progr...

Just like its classical cousin, the qubit can take a value of either 0 or 1. Physically, qubits can be represented as any two-level quantum systems such as • The spin of a particle in a magnetic field where up means 0 and down means 1 or • The polarization of a single photon where horizontal polarization means 1 and vertical polarization means 0. You can make a quantum computer out of light. How weird is that. In both cases 0 and 1 are the only possible states. Geometrically, qubits can be visualized using a shape called the Bloch sphere, an instrument named after Swiss physicist Felix Bloch (see Figure )  . Formally, the Bloch sphere is the geometrical representation in the three-dimensional Hil bert space of the pure state of a two-level quantum system or qubit. The north and south poles of the sphere represent the standard basis vectors |0> and |1>, respectively;                          ...

It all began in the 1930s with Max Planck, the reluctant genius. He came up with a new interpretation for the energy distribution of the light spectrum. He started it all by unwillingly postulating that the energy of the photon was not described by a continuous function, as believed by classical physicists, but by tiny chucks he called quanta. He was about to start the greatest revolution in science in this century: quantum mechanics. This is an appetizer to the main course and explores the clash of two titans of physics: Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Quantum mechanics was a revolutionary theory in the 1930s, and most of the scientific establishment was reluctant to accept it, including the colossus of the century: Albert Einstein. Fresh from winning the Nobel Prize, Einstein never accepted the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. This caused a rift with its biggest champion: Niels Bohr. The two greats debated it out for decades and never resolved their differences. Ultimatel...