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Tag archives: quantum physics
Colliding exhibits, influential researchers, edible particle-detectors and more
The “Collider” exhibition at London’s Science Museum. (Courtesy: Jennie Hills / Science Museum)
By Matin Durrani and Tushna Commissariat
If you’re in the tiny minority of people whose job title says “particle physicist”, chances are you’ll have been to CERN at least once in your career to help build a detector, analyse some collision data or muse in the cafeteria over supersymmetry (or the apparent lack of it so far). But for the rest of the world, going to the Geneva lab is simply not on the agenda, which is one reason why the Science Museum in London has this week unveiled a big new exhibition devoted to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Entitled simply Collider, the exhibition “blends theatre, video and sound art with real artefacts from CERN” that will, say organizers, “recreate a visit to the famous particle-physics laboratory”.
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The November 2013 issue of Physics World is now out
By Matin Durrani
Well, despite all the excitement of last month’s special 25th-anniversary issue of Physics World, there’s been no let-up for us – we’ve been busy beavering away on the next issue of your favourite physics magazine, which is now ready for you to read in print, via our apps or online.
If you’re a member of the Institute of Physics (IOP), you can access the entire new issue free via the digital version of the magazine or by downloading the Physics World app onto your iPhone or iPad or Android device, available from the App Store and Google Play, respectively.
Our cover story this month is about a strange series of experiments, carried out by Yves Couder and Emmanuel Fort at Paris Diderot University, examining the behaviour of oil droplets vibrating on the surface of an oil bath. The droplets are classical in nature but also seem to show much of what would be expected of a quantum system, including interference patterns. So is this coincidence or not? Jon Cartwright investigates.
Quantum hackers foiled – for now
By Hamish Johnston
QKD is a popular quantum-cryptography technique that is already being used commercially. It allows two parties, usually called Alice and Bob, to exchange an encryption key, secure in the knowledge that the key will not have been read by an eavesdropper (Eve). This guarantee is possible because the key is transmitted in terms of quantum bits (qubits) of information, which if intercepted and read are changed irrevocably, thus revealing the actions of Eve.
QKD cannot be cracked if it is implemented using equipment that behaves exactly as expected. Qubits are normally transmitted as single photons, for example, and therefore Alice and Bob must be equipped with single-photon detectors. The problem is that these detectors are not perfect and by simply shining a bright laser at a detector, Eve can trick it into thinking that it has detected a single photon even though that photon has been read by her.
While physicists have come up with several ways of thwarting such attacks, these tend to complicate the QKD process so as to make it impractical. Now, two independent teams of physicists have demonstrated aspects of a new scheme called measurement device independent QKD (MDI-QKD) that seems to close the loophole.
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Lectures with Peter Higgs, award-winning photographs, multidimentional shapes and more
By Tushna Commissariat
Each week, all of us here at Physics World comb the Internet for all things physics – we look at national and local newspapers, university news outlets, a variety of magazines, science websites and blogs, and, of course, all the latest scientific papers. We then pool our research and pick the cream of our crop to report on. But we can’t always cover all the interesting bits of physics news that we have chanced upon and a lot of good stuff is left behind in a red folder. So, starting from today, at the end of each week we’ve decided to point all of you, our eager readers, to the stories that have caught our fancy but not made it to the site yet and leave you with some extra weekend reading from The Red Folder.
Life inside the Perimeter
Blackboards and equations galore at the PI.
By Hamish Johnston in Canada’s Quantum Valley
Today I am living the dream, at least for many theoretical physicists. I have my very own office at the Perimeter Institute (PI) for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. It comes complete with free coffee, a blackboard pre-loaded with equations and access to some of the world’s top physicists.
This morning I spoke to Daniel Gottesman, who if I am not mistaken was the first PI faculty member to work on quantum information after joining in 2002. His speciality is quantum error correction and we had a fantastic chat about the directions in which quantum computing could go in the future.
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Entering the quantum world
Not a black hole in sight: Raymond Laflamme in one of the IQC labs. The machine behind him makes diamonds for quantum-computing experiments.
By Hamish Johnston in Canada’s Quantum Valley
“We have entered the quantum world and we can control it” is how Raymond Laflamme characterizes the current quantum renaissance that is sweeping across many fields of physics. Laflamme is director of the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at Canada’s University of Waterloo and he began his career at the University of Cambridge as a student of Stephen Hawking, working on cosmology.
A ‘unique’ quantum research centre
Vadim Makarov with a few old friends.
By Hamish Johnston in Canada’s Quantum Valley
“There’s no place like this in the world,” said Vadim Makarov (above) as we walked up to his lab at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at Canada’s University of Waterloo. What’s unique about the place, according to Makarov and others I spoke to in Waterloo, is that it brings together a diverse group of researchers (physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians, engineers, etc) in one place to develop quantum-information technology.
High-sticking in the Quantum Valley
Keep your stick on the ice! How to give a talk at PI.
By Hamish Johnston in Canada’s Quantum Valley
I had a fantastic day today touring Canada’s “Quantum Valley”, which is what people are starting to call the region surrounding the University of Waterloo in Ontario. Waterloo is an hour’s drive west of Toronto and home to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) and the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC). There is also a small but growing cluster of quantum technology start-ups that have spun out of the university.
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An afternoon of quantum theory
By Louise Mayor
Yesterday I had an exciting trip out of the office.
This month’s cover story.
Earlier this week, one of Physics World’s freelance writers, Jon Cartwright, told how me he’d been invited to the Bristol University theory department’s weekly seminar. Felix Flicker, a 2nd-year PhD student who organizes these events, had seen Jon’s article “The life of psi” in this month’s Physics World, which discusses a theorem published in Nature Physics. The theorem is interesting because if its assumptions hold, it rules out one of the four interpretations of quantum mechanics and leaves us with three.
I wanted in on the seminar action!
Last year when I was planning the Physics World special issue on quantum frontiers (which was out in March and is still available as a free PDF download), I had approached Jon to ask whether he’d like to tackle a quantum topic, and he let me know he was interested in covering the paper by Matthew Pusey, Jonathan Barrett and Terry Rudolph. Jon had seen the story reported elsewhere but had found these accounts were light on the details and didn’t get to the bottom of the science. I liked the idea and Jon went ahead. Once the story arrived in my inbox I was hooked! I found it to be one of those stories that covers some tricky concepts but if you let yourself become immersed in the story and think through what’s being explained, is very rewarding.
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Quantum frontiers – free PDF download
By Matin Durrani
Physics World March 2013.
If you’re a member of the Institute of Physics, you’ll have had access for almost a week now to the March 2013 special issue of Physics World on quantum physics – either in print or through our digital issue, which you can access online or via our apps for smartphones and tablets (free from the App Store and Google Play).
But as we know how fascinating so many of you find the quantum world – with all that talk of quantum entanglement, Schrödinger’s cat and spooky action at a distance – we felt we wanted to share the issue more widely. So from today we’re making the issue available as a free downloadable PDF.
Of course, the PDF doesn’t have all the goodies of the digital issue, which this month includes some exclusive quantum-related audio and video content. But there’s still plenty to get stuck into, including a look at the fascinating new paradigm of “weak measurement”, the application of quantum physics to biology, the use of cold atoms to simulate the quantum world, and the use of entanglement for completely secure satellite communication.
