Keeping secrets is hard. Kids know it. Celebrities know it. National security experts know it, too. And it’s about to get even harder. There’s always someone who wants to get at the juicy details we’d rather keep hidden. Yet at every moment, untold volumes of private information are zipping along internet cables and optical fibers. […]
Quantum computers braided ‘anyons,’ long-sought quasiparticles with memory
Anyons, anyone? Scientists have created strange new particle-like objects called non-abelian anyons. These long-sought quasiparticles can be “braided,” meaning that they can be moved around one another and retain a memory of that swapping, similar to how a braided ponytail keeps a record of the order in which strands cross over each other. Two independent […]
A sapphire Schrödinger’s cat shows that quantum effects can scale up
In keeping with the grand tradition of tubby cats, a newly created quantum “cat” is particularly massive — at least for the quantum realm. Scientists put a jiggling piece of sapphire crystal in what’s known as a “cat state,” in which an object exists in two different states simultaneously. It’s a situation reminiscent of physicists’ […]
Google’s quantum computer reached an error-correcting milestone
To shrink error rates in quantum computers, sometimes more is better. More qubits, that is. The quantum bits, or qubits, that make up a quantum computer are prone to mistakes that could render a calculation useless if not corrected. To reduce that error rate, scientists aim to build a computer that can correct its own […]