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A quantum property dubbed "magic" could be the key to explaining how space and time emerged, a new mathematical analysis by three RIKEN physicists suggests. The research is published in the journal Physical Review D.

It's hard to conceive of anything more basic than the fabric of spacetime that underpins the universe, but theoretical physicists have been questioning this assumption. "Physicists have long been fascinated about the possibility that space and time are not fundamental, but rather are derived from something deeper," says Kanato Goto of the RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS).

This notion received a boost in the 1990s, when theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena related the gravitational theory that governs spacetime to a theory involving quantum particles. In particular, he imagined a hypothetical spacewhich can be pictured as being enclosed in something like an infinite soup can, or "bulk"holding objects like black holes that are acted on by gravity. Maldacena also imagined particles moving on the surface of the can, controlled by quantum mechanics. He realized that mathematically a quantum theory used to describe the particles on the boundary is equivalent to a gravitational theory describing the black holes and spacetime inside the bulk.

"This relationship indicates that spacetime itself does not exist fundamentally, but emerges from some quantum nature," says Goto. "Physicists are trying to understand the quantum property that is key."

The original thought was that quantum entanglementwhich links particles no matter how far they are separatedwas the most important factor: the more entangled particles on the boundary are, the smoother the spacetime within the bulk.

"But just considering the degree of entanglement on the boundary cannot explain all the properties of black holes, for instance, how their interiors can grow," says Goto.

So Goto and iTHEMS colleagues Tomoki Nosaka and Masahiro Nozaki searched for another quantum quantity that could apply to the boundary system and could also be mapped to the bulk to describe black holes more fully. In particular, they noted that black holes have a chaotic characteristic that needs to be described.

"When you throw something into a black hole, information about it gets scrambled and cannot be recovered," says Goto. "This scrambling is a manifestation of chaos."

The team came across "magic," which is a mathematical measure of how difficult a quantum state is to simulate using an ordinary classical (non-quantum) computer. Their calculations showed that in a chaotic system almost any state will evolve into one that is "maximally magical"the most difficult to simulate.

This provides the first direct link between the quantum property of magic and the chaotic nature of black holes. "This finding suggests that magic is strongly involved in the emergence of spacetime," says Goto.

More information: Kanato Goto et al, Probing chaos by magic monotones, Physical Review D (2022). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.106.126009

Journal information: Physical Review D

Link:
Quantum 'magic' could help explain the origin of spacetime - Phys.org

Quantum eMotion Corp (TSX-V:QNC, OTCQB:QNCCF) has filed a patent application for a new method to operate a blockchain wallet that benefits from the protection provided by the QeM Quantum Random Number Generator (QRNG2), the company announced.

A hardware wallet is a physical device used to securely store private keys to access and manage cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. The wallets are designed to keep private keys offline, thus making them less vulnerable to cyber-attacks than software-based wallets that are connected to the internet.

"We continue to deploy our patent-protected technology based on quantum electron tunneling in a multitude of applications, CEO Francis Bellido said in a statement. Our quantum-protected blockchain wallet will be the first application of the program funded by Mitacs in collaboration with Dr. Kaiwen Zhang at ETS (cole de technologie suprieure, Montreal, Canada) for Blockchain applications of its QRNG technology.

The market for hardware wallets has taken off in recent years as demand has risen for secure cryptocurrency storage solutions.

However, even hardware wallets are susceptible to sophisticated cybercriminal activities and future quantum-computer attacks. Last year alone, hackers stole a record $3.8 billion worth of cryptocurrency globally according to a blockchain analytics firm that tracks cybercrime.

Future quantum computers could even break the encryption algorithms currently used to secure many online communications, including those used for financial transactions, government communications, and personal data storage.

Thats where Quantum eMotions patent filing comes in.

Our quantum crypto-wallet will eventually be considered one of the safest ways to store and manage cryptocurrencies, and they will become indispensable for anyone who wants to keep their digital assets highly secure, Bellido said.

Quantum eMotions technology addresses the growing demand for affordable hardware security for connected devices. The patented solution for a Quantum Random Number Generator exploits the built-in unpredictability of quantum mechanics and promises to provide enhanced security for protecting high-value assets and critical systems.

Contact Andrew Kessel at andrew.kessel@proactiveinvestors.com

Follow him on Twitter @andrew_kessel

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Quantum eMotion files patent application for quantum-protected ... - Proactive Investors USA

Kenji Maeda, a second-year engineering physics major, was named a 2023 Barry M. Goldwater Scholar. This is the fifth consecutive year that a UMass Boston student has been selected to receive the esteemed award, and the third time in the last five years that a student from the Physics Department has been chosen.

The Goldwater Scholarship Program is designed to foster and encourage outstanding college sophomores and juniors to pursue research careers in mathematics, natural sciences, and engineering. Undergraduate students who receive the award demonstrate a passion for doing research and also exhibit the creative spark that can lead to becoming leaders in their fields.

We are extremely proud of Kenji Maeda and also of the support for research excellence that is a hallmark of the UMass Boston Physics Department, said Chancellor Marcelo Surez-Orozco. The Goldwater Scholarship is considered the preeminent scholarship in the nation for undergraduates planning to pursue PhDs in science and mathematics fields. This is a highly impressive achievement.

Maedas path in quantum physics began last summer when he noticed a poster advertising Assistant Professor of Physics Akira Sones Quantum Information course. He took the class, along with a class on the fundamentals of quantum physics with Professor and Physics Department Chair Rahul Kulkarni. Mid-semester, Sone invited Maeda to join his quantum thermodynamics research team and encouraged him to develop a strong foundation by reading a wide range of literature on quantum physics.

Kenji is a remarkable student, Sone said. Earning a Goldwater scholarship is a result of his dedication to his work in quantum information theory, his love and intuition for physics, and his exceptional mathematical skill in analytics and numerics.

Our faculty are humbled and thrilled that the rigorous research in quantum physics taking place at UMass Boston provides opportunities and support for students to achieve the highest levels of academic excellence and sets them up for exciting futures in the field.

Maeda explained he is working on a project about quantum thermodynamics to explain the laws of thermodynamics from the perspective of quantum information science.

In our research group, we are examining how the application of our special measurement scheme on quantum systems would yield informative results compared to using other measurement schemes, Maeda said.

He is looking forward to taking advanced physics courses and upper-level engineering courses during his junior and senior yearsespecially Quantum Information II & IV. Once he completes his undergraduate degree, he intends to pursue a PhD in physics.

In the future, I would like to contribute to the development of quantum-related technology such as quantum computer, sensing, and communication, Maeda said.

Deeply appreciative of the inspiration, guidance, and spirit of collaboration from faculty such as Sone and Kulkarni, along with Assistant Professor Sumientra Rampersad, and Assistant Professor Olga Goulko, and his classmates and physics graduate students, Maeda said, I have earned this honor with everyone.

Goldwater scholarships are awarded annually by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, an organization established by Congress in 1986 to honor the lifetime work of the late Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. From an estimated pool of over 5,000 college sophomores and juniors, 1,267 natural science, engineering and mathematics students were nominated by 427 academic institutions to compete for the 2023 Goldwater scholarships. This year, 413 scholarships were awarded.

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College of Science and Mathematics Student Named a Goldwater ... - University of Massachusetts Boston

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by Ingrid Fadelli , Phys.org

Researchers at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Vienna recently devised a universal mechanism to invert the evolution of a qubit with a high probability of success. This protocol, outlined in Physical Review Letters, can propagate any target qubit back to the state it was in at a specific time in the past.

The introduction of this protocol builds on a previous paper published in 2020, where the same team presented a series of time translating protocols that could be applied in uncontrolled settings. While some of these protocols were promising, in most tested scenarios their probability of success was found to be too small. In their new study, the researchers thus set out to create an alternative protocol with a higher probability of success.

"Our newly developed protocol inverts the unitary evolution of a qubit," David Trillo, one of the researchers who carried out the study together with Benjamin Dive and Miguel Navascus, told Phys.org. "A qubit (or quantum bit) is a two-level quantum system that serves as the quantum equivalent of bits used in quantum computers. Any quantum system has some natural evolution in time that needs to be controlled or at least accounted for when designing physical processes around them (e.g., when building a quantum computer). Our protocol takes a qubit and outputs the same system, but in the state that it would be in if it had evolved backwards in time."

The protocol created by Trillo and his colleagues is universal, which means that it can be applied to any qubit, irrespective of its natural time evolution or what state it is when the protocol is used. Universal protocols are inherently probabilistic, meaning that they cannot succeed all the time, but rather have a certain probability of success.

In initial evaluations, the researchers found that their universal quantum rewinding mechanism has a high probability of success, namely of 1. Essentially, the protocol works by setting a target qubit on a superposition of flight paths and then performing a series of quantum operations on it.

"Our protocol works for uncontrolled systems, or in other words qubits on which we don't know how to apply particular transformations," Trillo explained. "Its cool new feature is that, whenever it fails, we can correct the failure and drive the system to the desired state. By adaptively performing these corrections, we can make the probability of success as high as we want, at the cost of increasing the running time of the protocol."

The new universal protocol introduced by Trillo and his colleagues allows researchers to rewind any given qubit in an uncontrolled setting with a high probability of success. While protocols that could achieve this in controlled settings already existed, unlocking the ability to propagate individual qubits in uncontrolled environments to a previous state could open new valuable possibilities for research.

"One wonders what other phenomena from the controlled setting we can transfer to an uncontrolled one," Trillo added. "Ideally, we would like to generalize this protocol to higher dimensional systems. This seems to be quite challenging though, as new ideas are needed for this. We are also looking into improving the success probability of the other protocols in the original paper, particularly SWAP protocols."

More information: D. Trillo et al, Universal Quantum Rewinding Protocol with an Arbitrarily High Probability of Success, Physical Review Letters (2023). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.110201

Journal information: Physical Review Letters

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A universal protocol that inverts the evolution of a qubit with a high probability of success - Phys.org

Life hasnt been kind to social media giant TikTok recently. First, Congress grilled it over its privacy practices. Then the UK government fined it 12.7 million (about $15.8 million) for using childrens personal data without parental consent. The list of governmentsincluding the US, EU, Canada, New Zealand, and Australiathat ban its use by employees continues to grow. And in the US, users supporting a TikTok ban outnumber those who dont by two to one.

Tiktok isnt alone. Scrutiny of the tech sector is at an all-time high. And hating on Big Tech these days is arguably the one thing Republicans and Democrats can agree on. It is time for 2023, said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) on NBC News, when discussing recent bipartisan legislative efforts to rein in Big Tech. Let it be our resolution that we finally pass one of these bills.

In a word, it comes down to trust. For tech companies that resource is in short supply. Regaining it is now mission-critical.

Use benchmarking to compare how you rank against industry peers with a single, accurate, impact-based view of risk.

The problem: Trust requires ethical awareness, and most companiestech and nontech alikelack an ethical framework related to technology, according to Deloittes inaugural State of Ethics and Trust in Technology report, released in December.

The percentage of enterprises lacking ethical guidelines for the development and use of emerging technologies

It surveyed almost 1,800 professionals across eight sectors (including technology, financial services, healthcare, and government) on ethical approaches to emerging technologies such as autonomous vehicles, quantum computing, and augmented or virtual reality. It found 87% lacking or unaware of any ethical principles governing the development and use of emerging technology within their organizations.

While this finding applies to enterprises across the board, it is of vital importance to tech companies, now operating under heightened scrutiny and a tough economy.

Trust is the new currency in an increasingly competitive environment, says Rozita Dara, associate professor of computer science at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Trust gives organizations a competitive edge, she says.

Ethical gaps show up in different ways. TikToks manifested in its alleged misuse of data, and addictive qualities in the app that critics worry ensnare users. A Harvard University study revealed racial bias in facial recognition technology developed by IBM and Microsoft. And observers have identified gender bias in Google Translate and an Amazon AI-powered hiring recruitment system (which the company eventually scrapped).

Trust gives organizations a competitive edge.

Trust in a company depends on its commitment to the ethical use of technology. And that goes doubly for companies who actually create that technology.

We set up an expectation for what this technology is going to be and what its going to do, says Yasemin J. Erden, assistant professor at the University of Twentes Digital Society Institute in Enschede, Netherlands. In promoting the tech to users, theres a risk that the maker or vendor wont fully capture its implications. All of that impacts on the trust that people have in the technology.

We are seeing this play out now with regard to cognitive (AI) technology. In March, more than 1,100 computer scientists and other tech luminaries, including Elon Musk, signed an open letter asking all labs to suspend work on any training models more powerful than GPT-4, a large language model from research company OpenAI that powers its controversial ChatGPT service.

[Read also: Yes, ChatGPT will turbocharge hackingand help fight it, too]

Erden feels uncomfortable discussing the specifics of GPTs latest version because the makers have not been transparent enough. We dont know exactly how its doing what its doing, she warns, echoing complaints from other AI experts. So then how can we really assess the claims that are made about it? (The fact that this little-understood chatbot was quickly co-opted by cyber threat actors to create malware and other dangerous content doesnt help matters either.)

Standards and policies governing the technology industry are coming, theres no question about that. But until they take effect, it is critical that tech firms enact their own set of ethical principles, which may be used both internally (to guide the development of new trustworthy technologies) and externally (to win over consumers).

[Mozilla is] really transparenttheyre clear about what their aims are, what their limitations are, what theyre doing, and what theyre changing.

Deloittes report serves as a useful primer. It advises that company leaders meet with the actual teams completing the work. And to get the conversation started, it offers a seven-part framework to help diagnose the ethical health of a tech companys products and services. According to Deloittes technology trust ethics framework, any new technologies employed by a tech firm should be:

Defining the principles is just one part of the challenge. The other is executing them, points out Brian Green, director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. How do you actually make these things happen in the context of a corporation when youre creating new products? he asks.

The Markkula Center has a toolkit meant for engineers and technology designers to help tackle this process. It will shortly release a handbook on applying technology ethics.

[Read also: More companies are practicing privacy by design to prioritize data securityand avoid hefty fines. Heres why you should, too]

Dara cites ethics by design as a foundational best practice. It bakes ethics into the development of a product or service from the beginning, acknowledging its entire ecosystem, including the users rights and interests. Its like adding Eth to the DevSecOps team. Developers must consider ethics as they test the functionality of a tool, evaluating its reliability and applicability.

As Deloittes report points out, the application of specific ethical principles might vary across different technologies. AI has different implications, users, and technical characteristics than, say, quantum computing, blockchain, or virtual reality.

Ethicists should drill down on the specifics based on a companys individual parameters, which raises the question: Among the companies exploring this new ethical landscape, are any doing it right?

Erden nominates Mozilla, the California-based software maker that is part foundation, part corporation.

Theyre really transparenttheyre clear about what their aims are, what their limitations are, what theyre doing, and what theyre changing, she says. I think theres a lot of respect for their platforms, like Firefox, and their ambitions.

Mozilla also invests heavily in engagement, Erden points out. It has demonstrated its commitment to ethical technology in its manifesto, with initiatives such as its Responsible Computing Challenge, its educational material on how to navigate ethical issues in the tech industry, and now its Responsible AI Challenge. These just scratch the surface.

[Read also: Lacking an ethical framework is a business risk. Here are three other pressing risksand ways to reduce them]

Green co-authored a World Economic Forum case study on ethics at IBM and cites Big Blue as a leader here. The company established an AI ethics board in 2018, published its own principles for trust and transparency, and supported them with five pillars of trust, advocating values like privacy and fairness. It has also donated tools to the open-source community to help with adversarial robustnessthat is, defending AI against misuse by attackers.

He wrote a similar analysis on Salesforce, which in 2018 developed its Office of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology, and another on Microsoft.

Of course, no company is perfect, which is why many experts in the thorny field of ethics try to avoid issuing blanket stamps of approval.

All we can do is assess individual practices, individual technologies, and individual steps, concludes Erden. Its a repetitive process that evaluates actions on their ethical merits, and should in theory encourage companies to keep striving to improve, product by product, new tech service by new tech service. Theres no end to that.

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What the Tech Sector Can Learn From TikTok: Trust Is Everything ... - Tanium Endpoint