Category Physics

Quantum light sources are fickle. They can flicker like stars in the night sky and can fade out like a dying flashlight. However, newly published research from the University of Oklahoma proves that adding a covering to one of these light sources, called a colloidal quantum dot, can cause them to shine without faltering, opening the door to new, affordable quantum possibilities. The findings are available in Nature Communications.

Quantum dots, or QDs, are so small that if you scaled up a single quantum dot to the size of a baseball, a baseball would be the size of the moon...

Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly large language models like GPT-4, has shown impressive performance on reasoning tasks. But does AI truly understand abstract concepts, or is it just mimicking patterns? A new study from the University of Amsterdam and the Santa Fe Institute reveals that while GPT models perform well on some analogy tasks, they fall short when the problems are altered, highlighting key weaknesses in AI’s reasoning capabilities. The work is published in Transactions on Machine Learning Research.

Analogical reasoning is the ability to draw a comparison between two different things based on their similarities in certain aspects...

In a leap forward for quantum computing, a Microsoft team led by UC Santa Barbara physicists on Wednesday unveiled an eight-qubit topological quantum processor, the first of its kind. The chip, built as a proof-of-concept for the scientists’ design, opens the door to the development of the long-awaited topological quantum computer.

“We’ve got a bunch of stuff that we’ve been keeping under wraps that we’re dropping all at once now,” said Microsoft Station Q Director Chetan Nayak, a professor of physics at UCSB and a Technical Fellow for Quantum Hardware at Microsoft...

Physicists have developed a novel approach to maintain special quantum characteristics, even in 3D materials, with potential applications in optical systems and advanced computing.

There is a big problem with quantum technology — it’s tiny...