Fundamental building blocks for fault-tolerant quantum computing demonstrated. For quantum computers to be useful in practice, errors must be detected and corrected. At the University of Innsbruck, Austria, a team of experimental physicists has now implemented a universal set of computational operations on fault-tolerant quantum bits for the first time, demonstrating how an algorithm can be programmed on a quantum computer so that errors do not spoil the result.

In modern computers errors during processing and storage of information have become a rarity due to high-quality fabrication...

A team o...

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S. and one in Japan has developed a new type of vaccine that helps the immune system destroy cancerous tumors by overcoming their defense system. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes the new vaccine and its effects in mouse and rhesus macaque models.

Until recently, the only tools available to doctors treating cancer patients have been chemotherapy, radiation treatment and surgery. More recently, medical researchers have been exploring vaccines in the fight against cancer—the development of a vaccine against HPV-related diseases, for example, has reduced the risks of cervical and other types of cancers...

Researchers at ETH Zurich have succeeded for the first time in trapping excitons—quasiparticles consisting of negatively charged electrons and positively charged holes—in a semiconductor material using controllable electric fields. The new technique is important for creating single photon sources as well as for basic research.

In semiconductor materials, electric current can be conducted both by electrons and by positively charged holes, or missing electrons. Light hitting the material can also excite electrons to a higher energy band, leaving behind a hole in the original band...