On Monday, a team of scientists in Australia announced an exciting breakthrough: For the first time, researchers were able to turn light into sound on a microchip. But—as crazy-sounding new physics applications tend to be—it’s probably going to be a long time before you see one of these chips on a computer you can…
As cool as they sound, quantum computers will probably not be best suited for designing websites or making pretty word processors. Instead, their quirky bits may one day be used to solve special algorithms, for artificial intelligence applications, or to model things that actually follow the wild rules of quantum…
There are weeks where it seems like every piece of physics news mentions quantum computing—but we are nowhere near a quantum iPhone. You probably remember that computers can consist of billions of nanometer-scale transistors etched into silicon. Those chips used to be enormous, room-sized setups where instead of…
Quantum mechanics may force you to think some wild things about the way the Universe works, but it has some real applications. One of the theory’s main quirks allows for a special kind of quantum link, one that can send incredibly secure messages or transmit data for quantum computing. Tests of these links exist on…
For decades, quantum computing has been the preserve of research labs. But now IBM has made its working prototype quantum computer accessible via the internet—and literally anyone can use it.
When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau schooled a journalist on the basics of quantum computing yesterday, I was initially as charmed and delighted as everyone else. But then a niggling sense of dismay set in. Why should this be such a singular newsworthy event? How come so few of us can do what Trudeau did, when…
Google’s AlphaGo computer may have bested a human in four out of five matches last month, but human beings still excel when it comes to intuitive leaps in problem solving. That’s the conclusion of a new paper in Nature by Danish scientists. Blending the two approaches yields the best of both worlds—a marriage of man…
Scientists have theorized for decades that an additional state of matter exists, but despite tantalizing hints to its presence, details about this mystery state have remained elusive—until now.
Quantum computers could immeasurably speed up the rate at which calculations run—but so far, their promise has yet to be realized. Now, a team of researchers has built a versatile quantum chip that it reckons could be pieced together to create a powerful computational device.
Programming a quantum computer is not straightforward. But playing computer games is–and this one will help academics gather information to help them write code for quantum computers in the future.
We may be one step closer to quantum computing that’s inherently protected from errors. Physicists at the University of Copenhagen have successfully created an exotic type of pseudo-particle that is immune to outside interference. The results are described in a new paper in Nature.
The NSA is worried about quantum computers. It warns that it “must act now” to ensure that encryption systems can’t be broken wide open by the new super-fast hardware.
A team of researchers from Google’s artificial intelligence labs has published results which it claims demonstrate that its controversial D-Wave quantum computer really works.
Quantum computing is a devilishly complex pursuit and one of the main problems is that it demands exotic materials to create its equally exotic circuitry. Now a team of researchers has managed to create the world’s first quantum logic gate in faithful old silicon.
Quantum computing could make complex calculations trivial in the future, but right now it's fraught with problems. Consider one of them solved, though, in the shape of a new quantum error correction technique.
You'd think quantum computers exist in heavily-guarded labs, with many men in white suits manning control stations filled with unfathomable screens and charts. Actually, they exist in a small cupboard in England's West Country.
Normally, photons want nothing to do with one another. Light waves just pass through each other like ghosts. But now, for the first time ever, scientists at the University of Vienna have coaxed a strong interaction between two single photons. It's an achievement that opens up radical new possibilities for a number of…
Cooling modern-day computers is hard work: fans, heat sinks and even pumped liquid struggle to keep the temperatures of our hardware down. But how might we cool tomorrow's computers—those powered using the strange and exotic power of quantum physics?
The D-Wave 2 is a much-hyped quantum computer, but, as scientists now report, it's not actually any faster than a regular old PC. Wait, didn't we say it was 3,600 times faster just a few months ago? Yes, and both are right. Whether one computer is faster than another is actually a mighty complicated question.
Tangents is an occasional collection of short, lightly annotated mentions of sound-related activities.
