Quantum Catception: Using Schrodinger's cat to measure Schroedinger's cat

darckriver · Dec 26, 2012

Here's an interesting little two and a half minute video illustrating the ground-breaking quantum experiments conducted back in 1995 and 1996 that won Serge Haroche and American David Wineland the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics. This involves a method for the NON-DESTRUCTIVE TESTING OF LIGHT (photons). In other words, it's a clever method for observing the quantum states of photons without disturbing their quantum states!

Quantum Catception: Using Schrodinger's cat to measure Schroedinger's cat.

[video=youtube;2dRr-fnPCwM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dRr-fnPCwM&list=PLED25F943F8D6081C[/video]

See also, Nobel Prize for Physics rewards 'groundbreaking' quantum experiments

The two men and their colleagues overcame what many had held up as an insurmountable barrier to studying particles as quantum systems. The barrier found its most famous formulation as Schrödinger's cat – a thought experiment that the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger offered up in 1935 to show the bizarre conclusions quantum mechanics implied if it was extended beyond the world of subatomic particles.

He imagined a cat in a steel box, sharing its space with a source of radioactive material, a radiation detector, and a container of hydrogen cyanide. If the detector sensed the decay of an atom, it would trigger a device that would break the container, poisoning the cat.

Governed by quantum mechanics, if the particle had a 50-50 chance of decaying, the cat has a 50-50 chance of being dead or alive. In effect, the cat would be assumed to be both dead and alive at the same time until someone from the Humane Society opened the box to check. Then the cat either is dead or alive.

Wineland and Haroche tackled the challenge of detecting a superposition of several states at once from opposite directions.

Wineland captured beryllium ions in an electric field, then subjected the ions to the big chill – cooling them to within a gnat's eyelash of absolute zero using laser pulses to gradually reduce the vibrations of the ions. Another laser teased the ions into a kind of no-man's land between two energy states, producing an ion that, in effect, has an equal chance of settling on either one.

Haroche and his team went at the challenge from another direction – trapping microwaves in a tiny device whose reflective mirrors are said to be the shiniest in the world, then using solitary atoms as probes of the microwave photons he's tricked into a cat-like state. The approach also allowed him to come up with a way of watching how the quantum state of a photon can change with time.
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waltky · Jan 28, 2013

Quantum physics - it's all around us...

Quantum biology: Do weird physics effects abound in nature?
27 January 2013 - The multi-billion-dollar fragrance industry might just benefit from the ideas in quantum biology

Disappearing in one place and reappearing in another. Being in two places at once. Communicating information seemingly faster than the speed of light. This kind of weird behaviour is commonplace in dark, still laboratories studying the branch of physics called quantum mechanics, but what might it have to do with fresh flowers, migrating birds, and the smell of rotten eggs?

Welcome to the frontier of what is called quantum biology. It is still a tentative, even speculative discipline, but what scientists are learning from it might just spark revolutions in the development of new drugs, computers and perfumes - or even help in the fight against cancer. Until recently, the delicate states of matter predicted by quantum mechanics have only been accessed with the most careful experiments: isolated particles at blisteringly low temperatures or pressures approaching that of deep space.

Deep within plants' energy-harvesting machinery lie distinctly quantum tricks

The idea that biology - impossibly warm, wet and messy to your average physicist - should play host to these states was almost heretical. But a few strands of evidence were bringing the idea into the mainstream, said Luca Turin of the Fleming Institute in Greece. "There are definitely three areas that have turned out to be manifestly quantum," Dr Turin told the BBC. "These three things... have dispelled the idea that quantum mechanics had nothing to say about biology."

The most established of the three is photosynthesis - the staggeringly efficient process by which plants and some bacteria build the molecules they need, using energy from sunlight. It seems to use what is called "superposition" - being seemingly in more than one place at one time. Watch the process closely enough and it appears there are little packets of energy simultaneously "trying" all of the possible paths to get where they need to go, and then settling on the most efficient. "Biology seems to have been able to use these subtle effects in a warm, wet environment and still maintain the [superposition]. How it does that we don't understand," Richard Cogdell of the University of Glasgow told the BBC.

More http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21150047
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waltky · May 16, 2013

Dat's how possum gets our computer to go into 'turbo' mode...

Nasa buys into 'quantum' computer
16 May 2013 - A $15m computer that uses "quantum physics" effects to boost its speed is to be installed at a Nasa facility.

It will be shared by Google, Nasa, and other scientists, providing access to a machine said to be up to 3,600 times faster than conventional computers. Unlike standard machines, the D-Wave Two processor appears to make use of an effect called quantum tunnelling. This allows it to reach solutions to certain types of mathematical problems in fractions of a second. Effectively, it can try all possible solutions at the same time and then select the best. Google wants to use the facility at Nasa's Ames Research Center in California to find out how quantum computing might advance techniques of machine learning and artificial intelligence, including voice recognition. University researchers will also get 20% of the time on the machine via the Universities Space Research Agency (USRA). Nasa will likely use the commercially available machine for scheduling problems and planning.

The machine does not fit the conventional concept of a quantum computer, but makes use of quantum effects

Canadian company D-Wave Systems, which makes the machine, has drawn scepticism over the years from quantum computing experts around the world. Until research outlined earlier this year, some even suggested its machines showed no evidence of using specifically quantum effects. Quantum computing is based around exploiting the strange behaviour of matter at quantum scales. Most work on this type of computing has focused on building quantum logic gates similar to the gate devices at the basis of conventional computing. But physicists have repeatedly found that the problem with a gate-based approach is keeping the quantum bits, or qubits (the basic units of quantum information), in their quantum state. "You get drop out decoherence, where the qubits lapse into being simple 1s and 0s instead of the entangled quantum states you need. Errors creep in," says Prof Alan Woodward of Surrey University.

One gate opens...

Instead, D-Wave Systems has been focused on building machines that exploit a technique called quantum annealing - a way of distilling the optimal mathematical solutions from all the possibilities. Annealing is made possible by physics effect known as quantum tunnelling, which can endow each qubit with an awareness of every other one. "The gate model... is the single worst thing that ever happened to quantum computing", Geordie Rose, chief technology officer for D-Wave, told BBC Radio 4's Material World programme. "And when we look back 20 years from now, at the history of this field, we'll wonder why anyone ever thought that was a good idea." Dr Rose's approach entails a completely different way of posing your question, and it only works for certain questions. But according to a paper presented this week (the result of benchmarking tests required by Nasa and Google), it is very fast indeed at finding the optimal solution to a problem that potentially has many different combinations of answers.

In one case it took less than half a second to do something that took conventional software 30 minutes. A classic example of one of these "combinatorial optimisation" problems is that of the travelling sales rep, who needs to visit several cities in one day, and wants to know the shortest path that connects them all together in order to minimise their mileage. The D-Wave Two chip can compare all the possible itineraries at once, rather than having to work through each in turn. Reportedly costing up to $15m, housed in a garden shed-sized box that cools the chip to near absolute zero, it should be installed at Nasa and available for research by autumn 2013. US giant Lockheed Martin earlier this year upgraded its own D-Wave machine to the 512 qubit D-Wave Two.

BBC News - Nasa buys into 'quantum' computer
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Bishadi · May 18, 2013

waltky said: ↑

Quantum physics - it's all around us...

Quantum biology: Do weird physics effects abound in nature?
27 January 2013 - The multi-billion-dollar fragrance industry might just benefit from the ideas in quantum biology
Click to expand...

look up the p680 structute

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Quantum Catception: Using Schrodinger's cat to measure Schroedinger's cat

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Quantum Catception: Using Schrodinger's cat to measure Schroedinger's cat

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