Scientists Find New Way To Control Quantum Computers
[Music] thank you welcome everyone to this week's science news today we'll talk about climate engineering quantum computers how to tell a nuclear bomb from TNT what an atom really looks like random keys from cosmic rays who is filing the most patterns and on what climate labels for food a tractor beam that didn't quite live up to my expectations and of course the telephone will ring a small startup in the U.S is pushing forward with climate engineering by injecting chemicals into the atmosphere before anyone can stop them we know that injecting certain substances into the atmosphere at high altitudes reflects sunlight back into space and cools the planet we know that this works because volcanoes sometimes blast dust so high up in the air that it continues to linger at tens of kilometers height for years this happened for example in the 1991 eruption of Mount pinatubu in the Philippines which pumped out 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide it caused the global temperature average to drop by half a degree for several years the company makes sunsets wants to do basically the same just without the volcano they want to put sulfur dioxide into a weather balloon and release the stuff at high altitude the company's name refers to a side effect of injecting substances into the upper atmosphere because they scatter the last sunlight of the day they make sunsets more colorful the company did a test run already in December and they are planning to launch at least three balloons in January from a site in southern Baja Mexico don't get too alarmed these weather balloons can't carry a lot of weight so the amount of sulfur dioxide they can inject into the atmosphere is just about a pound per each run according to a study from Rutgers University from 2018 it would take about 5 million tons a year to kill the planet by one degree Celsius that's about a quarter of what Mount pinotubu spat out but those five million tons must be injected accurately in the right places preferably near the equator and it would probably have to be done by a fleet of aircraft what you should be worried about is that there aren't currently any laws regulating either climate or weather modification at the moment anyone can buy a weather balloon and inject it into the atmosphere if it was done at Large Scale injecting sulfur dioxide into the Stratosphere would almost certainly indeed reduce the average global temperature but it wouldn't reverse the effects of carbon dioxide on our planet because the carbon dioxide would remain in the atmosphere and carb dioxide does more than heating up the planet it also leads to ocean acidification moreover injecting stuff into the stratosphere might change rainfall patterns in unexpected ways and it would have to be repeated so long as carbon dioxide levels remain high maybe for thousands of years I wish American startups would stick with social engineering at least we're used to that according to a press release from the quantum Computing startup day Rock Australian Engineers have discovered a new way of precisely controlling single electrons nestled in Quantum dots to run logic gates this may sound like what I've discovered is primarily a new way of confusing people with technical terms and that may be part of it but that's not all there is to it building a quantum computer requires several ingredients first you need the quantum bits the qubits then you need a way to control the qubits you need an algorithm to do your calculation and then you need a way to read out the result the new research which was just published in nature nanotechnology improves the control of silicon-based qubits silicon-based qubits are popular in some companies because they can be mass produced with the existing technology for standard computers the two states of those qubits are spin States either of an electron or of an atomic nucleus the Silicon qubits do not work with superconductivity but they still have to be cooled to about 20 Milli Kelvin to keep the spin State stable this is a much higher temperature than superconducting qubits which must be cooed to a temperature of a few millikelvin though I'd argue that 20 millicarbon still isn't exactly warm in any case the new research tackles the question of how to control those qubits researchers usually control spin qubits with microscopic magnets but the tricky part is to manipulate the spins of electrons without disturbing their neighbors kind of like trying to raise your hand in a crowded lecture hall without knocking the phone out of your neighbor's hand the team had been experimenting with different magnetic fields and materials to increase the accuracy with which the qubits could be operated and they succeeded but not in the way they expected by coincidence or maybe good fate the microwave antenna emitted a more powerful electrical feed than plant and they noticed that they could actually use an electric field to manipulate a spin by exploiting a different type of spin coupling the good thing about this is that controlling qubits with electric Fields is simpler and the equipment takes up less space so this rather unexpected spin-off excuse the pun might come in handy for building bigger quantum computers you might think you'd know if a nuclear bomb went off what with the mushroom cloud and the Twitter outrage and all that but explode a weapon underground and it's easy to mistake a nuke for a few megatons of TNT a problem that we're all familiar with luckily new research from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory can help you out while it's relatively simple to pinpoint the time and location of such an explosion with seismometers those aren't of much help to figure out whether its origin was chemical or nuclear traditionally detecting a nuclear incident whether a bomb or reactor explosion comes from sniffing for radioactive particles particularly radioactive Xenon which can trouble very long distances those are tracked by an international monitoring system and analysts then sift through this data to teleport potential nuclear bomb tests from background noise for example from the production of medical isotopes a better way to do it would be to combine the seismic data with the tracking of the radioactive particles this is more difficult than it sounds because you need to know how long it takes for the gas to seep through the cracks and the rocks to the surface to find out what happens the researchers did not test the nuclear bomb but instead blew up a small part of New Mexico they set off chemical explosions on the ground via boreholes and used electrical currents to image The Rock structures before and after the blasts these models to make it easier to estimate how long it would take for gases to leak out and to better identify underground nuclear explosions hello Oh Hey Joe who hasn't misplaced a few classified documents [Applause] whatever you talk about don't mention nuclear power it really splits the audience you're welcome foreign draw atoms like this but would you believe it it's not what they look like electrons don't zip around the atomic nucleus like little planets they rather hover around it like clouds but would you believe it they don't really look like clouds either just what an atom looks like is so difficult to say because it doesn't look like anything we can see the electrons around an atomic nucleus are described by a wave function usually denoted PSI that takes on complex values but what does that look like one way to take an image of an atom that filters have come up with is to use light to kick off the electrons and then measure their properties researchers from The Zeta University in Japan have now taken the most detailed image of a neon atom using atosecond light pulses and at a second is a billionth of a billionth of a second and about the average attention span of a Twitter user they use these pulses to kick off the electrons and then measure their momentum that is a combination of their mass and velocity according to their paper that was just published in pra the researchers used two different pulses to kick the electrons off in two different ways the electrons can then interfere which reveals information about the face of the electron wave function the result is stunning in those images on the right you see the measurement results and on the left the computational Reconstruction these are the wave functions in momentum space the color encodes the phase of the wave function and the intensity of the color shows the amplitude that is How likely the electron is to have this value I find this fascinating it actually gives you feeling for what anatom is now electron orbits in a neonatum aren't exactly Cutting Edge research but this method can be applied to more complex molecules and materials and may find applications in nanotechnology quantum chemistry and molecular biology but nothing will stop us from drawing atoms like this embracing Cosmic Randomness sounds like old advice from new ages but maybe there's something to it hiroyuki Tanaka from the University of Tokyo suggests that we use the random arrival of particles from outer space to securely share random keys webcomers relies on random numbers for its security by inserting them into encryption keys to make sure transactions are uncrackable but generating truly random numbers is hard for computers which were designed to not do random things and sharing random numbers without getting intersected is even harder but cosmic rays are a natural source of Randomness cosmic rays are usually Atomic nuclear stripped off their electrons that come from outer space and hit the upper atmosphere some come from our sun some from other stars in the Milky Way some even from other galaxies when they hit our atmosphere they create a shower of secondary particles known as a cosmic ray shower a lot of the particles in those cosmic ray showers are muons that are heavier versions of electrons they can be fairly easily detected it's these muons that the new cryptographic system relies on muons arrive on the ground at random times so the exact arrival time can serve as a random number but these mules have so much energy they don't get stopped in the detector they go through this means they can be measured a second time suppose you have immune passing through two Detectors of which you know the exact distance then you can at the second detector reconstruct directly arrival time at the first one it's a shared random key but anyone in between who doesn't know the exact distance can't recreate the random number the issue is that for this method to work it needs to be sufficiently likely to have immune going through both detectors and you need to be able to determine the distance between the detectors extremely precisely in the experiment whose results were just published the two devices sharing a random key were 70 centimeters apart I'm not a security expert but maybe at that distance you could just show them your credit card the author believes that the method can be extended up to 10 meters and then relay stations can be used a new report about trans and U.S patents from Wi-Fi claims comes with a few surprises the number of patent applications reached an all-time high in 2020 with more than four hundred thousand longtime Champion IBM has been knocked off from top position by the South Korean company Samsung Note that the vertical axis of this graph starts at 4K not at zero IBM had topped the chart for the number of patents registered in the US each year ever since 1993 and this isn't the only change While most of the U.S patents are granted to companies in the U.S the U.S
share is dropping while the share of patents going to Asia is increasing the largest increase of patents this year comes from China the fastest growing technology sectors are partly what you'd expect but also hold a few surprises on place number 10 we have breathing masks amazing what a little virus can do to the world keep in mind that this is a list of fastest growing sectors not necessarily large sectors number nine is machine learning more evidence that the world will be taken over by artificially intelligent robots soon number eight is biological 3D cultures that slap grown cells it's currently mostly used for medical studies and most of the patterns come from academic institutions but maybe one day it'll come in handy for artificial meat on play 7 we have cigarettes and zigars and most of the patterns come from Philip Morris supposedly to benefit harm reduction Place 6 is held by quantum computers most of the quantum Computing patterns presently come from IBM followed by Google on Place 5 we have more smoking but this time of the electric type also led by Philip Morris some things don't change number four are computer models for biology that's 3D models of blood vessels and organs and things like this the leader in this area is also IBM on Play 3 there's drills and everything related to drilling mostly for oil and gas but also for the exploration of geothermal energy we're working on a video about that on Place 2 we have an area with the catchy name electric digital data processing that's everything from 3D printing to automated sensors Boeing is leading the pack and on Place one we have drums please autonomous vehicles AKA Turf driving cars and Toyota is presently filing the most patterns on that IFI claims which put out this report as part of digital science a technology company that is quietly working to revolutionize science and that itself deserves having an ion they own among others old metrics read Cube and overly hello hi Elon yeah the bite joke was pretty lame some things weren't meant to fly Biden jokes pigs Richard Branson's Rockets I knew you'd like this one talk to you soon if you've ever looked at a packet of Peruvian strawberries and marveled at the globe spanning supply chain it took to bring them to your plate your Marvel might soon get a color code scientists at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health recruited 5 000 Americans to test food labels that told them how environmentally friendly the item was participants were randomly assigned to three groups they were all shown a fast food menu and asked to pick one item they'd like to order for dinner but depending on which group they were in the menu contained different labels a neutral control label a green climate impact label on environmentally friendly Foods or a red label on climate unfriendly food like red meat and other stuff you're supposed to feel bad about the participants who were told that their choice positively or negatively contributed to climate change were almost 25 percent more likely to choose something associated with lower carbon dioxide emissions women were more likely than men to respond to the labeling people who made a more sustainable food Choice also thought it was healthier which I think is really the the main problem someone needs to come up with carbon neutral fast food that's really unhealthy it might just save the planet speaking of food and climate change a new study by researchers from Cornell University says that as temperatures rise broccoli will begin to look more like cauliflower if you still have doubts that climate change is bad they should settle it and if the coming summer will indeed be as hot as they say then that'll be a great opportunity to study how European heads will begin to look more like tomatoes the tractor beam is a staple of Science Fiction frequently seen pulling the Starship Enterprise into trouble but in reality why they do kind of exist they're more likely to be moving dust than spaceships researchers from Queen Dao University of Science and Technology in China have now set a new record in using what they call a tractor beam to move the biggest object so far that's a thin plate about five centimeters long a tractor beam is made of radiation either light or sound you can trap an object with it and move it around which includes pulling it towards you how do you pull something by firing at it doesn't that violate the law of nature or go down at least as non-compliance with some Federal Regulation not necessarily because the tractor beam can stimulate the object to emit radiation into other directions which creates momentum and that can actually move the object towards you it's like if you yell at someone that they come to hit you in the face it's the backlash that makes it happen in this new research they use the laser to heat a specially prepared plate made from graphene and silicon dioxide they put it in a box with a at very low pressure about 20 000 times less than normal atmospheric pressure and illuminated the plate with a laser the plate conducts the heat to the side facing away from the light source that way more energy is transferred to the gas molecules on the back side of the plate so the plate is pushed toward the laser the researchers say that the method might have the potential to one day steer vehicles or aircraft on Mars maybe I like imagination but I think it might be easier to just use the laser to turn on an engine this video was sponsored by my friend and colleague Brian Keating Brian is an experimental physics professor at the University of California and leads some of the world's most exciting cosmology experiments he's also an amazing podcaster and YouTuber on his show you get to hear the two experts like Neil Turok Juan maldesena gelato sir Roger Penrose and anaisers he so far hosted 14 Nobel Prize winners plus astronauts like Chris Hadfield science communicators like Dr Becky Fraser Kane Neil deGrasse Tyson and a handful of billionaires like Jim Simons probably the world's smartest billionaire and Michael Sader bitcoin's greatest champion I've been on his podcast a few times too if long podcasts aren't your thing Brian also has short explainer videos similar to the ones I make but from him you'll get the point of view of an experimentalist this is why I'm subscribed to Brian's Channel you have to watch out what those experimentalists are up to more seriously check out Brian's Channel And subscribe you won't regret it and Brian has a special offer for the next 200 people that subscribe to his newsletter he'll send you a real life piece of space dust a real meteorite when you sign up at brindeating.com list if you enjoy my channel I'm sure you'll enjoy Brian's too thanks for watching see you next week
2023-01-20 18:40
