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A newly discovered phenomenon dubbed "collectively induced transparency" (CIT) causes groups of atoms to abruptly stop reflecting light at specific frequencies.

CIT was discovered by confining ytterbium atoms inside an optical cavityessentially, a tiny box for lightand blasting them with a laser. Although the laser's light will bounce off the atoms up to a point, as the frequency of the light is adjusted, a transparency window appears in which the light simply passes through the cavity unimpeded.

"We never knew this transparency window existed," says Caltech's Andrei Faraon (BS '04), William L. Valentine Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering, and co-corresponding author of a paper on the discovery that was published on April 26 in the journal Nature. "Our research has primarily become a journey to find out why."

An analysis of the transparency window points to it being the result of interactions in the cavity between groups of atoms and light. This phenomenon is akin to destructive interference, in which waves from two or more sources can cancel one another out. The groups of atoms continually absorb and re-emit light, which generally results in the reflection of the laser's light. However, at the CIT frequency, there is a balance created by the re-emitted light from each of the atoms in a group, resulting in a drop in reflection.

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"An ensemble of atoms strongly coupled to the same optical field can lead to unexpected results," says co-lead author Mi Lei, a graduate student at Caltech.

The optical resonator, which measures just 20 microns in length and includes features smaller than 1 micron, was fabricated at the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech.

"Through conventional quantum optics measurement techniques, we found that our system had reached an unexplored regime, revealing new physics," says graduate student Rikuto Fukumori, co-lead author of the paper.

Besides the transparency phenomenon, the researchers also observed that the collection of atoms can absorb and emit light from the laser either much faster or much slower compared to a single atom depending on the intensity of the laser. These processes, called superradiance and subradiance, and their underlying physics are still poorly understood because of the large number of interacting quantum particles.

"We were able to monitor and control quantum mechanical lightmatter interactions at nanoscale," says co-corresponding author Joonhee Choi, a former postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who is now an assistant professor at Stanford University.

Though the research is primarily fundamental and expands our understanding of the mysterious world of quantum effects, this discovery has the potential to one day help pave the way to more efficient quantum memories in which information is stored in an ensemble of strongly coupled atoms. Faraon has also worked on creating quantum storage by manipulating the interactions of multiple vanadium atoms.

"Besides memories, these experimental systems provide important insight about developing future connections between quantum computers," says Manuel Endres, professor of physics and Rosenberg Scholar, who is a co-author of the study.

Reference:Lei M, Fukumori R, Rochman J, et al. Many-body cavity quantum electrodynamics with driven inhomogeneous emitters. Nature. Published online April 26, 2023:1-6. doi:10.1038/s41586-023-05884-1

This article has been republished from the following materials. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

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Atoms Found To Have a Transparency Window to Certain Light ... - Technology Networks

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Scientists at Forschungszentrum Jlich have fabricated a new type of transistor from a germaniumtin alloy that has several advantages over conventional switching elements. Charge carriers can move faster in the material than in silicon or germanium, which enables lower voltages in operation. The transistor thus appears to be a promising candidate for future low-power, high-performance chips, and possibly also for the development of future of quantum computers.

Over the past 70 years, the number of transistors on a chip has doubled approximately every two years according to Moores Law, which is still valid today. The circuits have become correspondingly smaller, but an end to this development appears to be in sight. We have now reached a stage where structures are only 2 to 3 nanometers in size. This is approximately equal to the diameter of 10 atoms, which takes us to the limits of what is feasible. It doesnt get much smaller than this, says Qing-Tai Zhao of the Peter Grnberg Institute (PGI-9) at Forschungszentrum Jlich.

For some time now, researchers have been looking for a substitute for silicon, the primary material used in the semiconductor industry. The idea is to find a material that has more favourable electronic properties and can be used to achieve the same performance with larger structures, the professor explains.

The research is in part focused on germanium, which was already being used in the early days of the computer era. Electrons can move much faster in germanium than in silicon, at least in theory. However, Qing-Tai Zhao and his colleagues have now gone one step further. To optimize the electronic properties even further, they incorporated tin atoms into the germanium crystal lattice. The method was developed several years ago at the Peter Grnberg Institute (PGI-9) of Forschungszentrum Jlich.

The germaniumtin system we have been testing makes it possible to overcome the physical limitations of silicon technology, says Qing-Tai Zhao. In experiments, the germaniumtin transistor exhibits an electron mobility that is 2.5 times higher than a comparable transistor made of pure germanium.

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Another advantage of the new material alloy is that it is compatible with the existing CMOS process for chip fabrication. Germanium and tin come from the same main group in the periodic table as silicon. The germanium-tin transistors could therefore be integrated directly into conventional silicon chips with existing production lines.

Apart from classical digital computers, quantum computers could also benefit from the germaniumtin transistor. For some time, there have been efforts to integrate parts of the control electronics directly on the quantum chip, which is operated inside a quantum computer at temperatures close to absolute zero. Measurements suggest that a transistor made of germanium-tin will perform significantly better under these conditions than those made of silicon.

The challenge is to find a semiconductor whose switching can still be very fast with low voltages at very low temperatures, explains Qing-Tai Zhao. For silicon, this switching curve flattens out below 50 Kelvin. Then, the transistors need a high voltage and thus a high power, which ultimately leads to failures of the sensitive quantum bits because of the heating. Germaniumtin performs better at these temperatures in measurements down to 12 Kelvin, and there are hopes to use the material at even lower temperatures, says Qing-Tai Zhao.

In addition, the germaniumtin transistor is a further step towards optical on-chip data transmission. The transmission of information with light signals is already standard in many data networks because it is considerably faster and more energy-efficient than data transfer via electrical conductors. In the field of micro- and nanoelectronics, however, data is usually still sent electrically. Colleagues from the Jlich working group of Dr. Dan Buca have already developed a germanium-tin laser in the past that opens up the possibility to transmit data optically directly on a silicon chip. The germanium-tin transistor, along these lasers, provides a promising solution for the monolithic integration of nanoelectronics and photonics on a single chip.

Reference:Liu M, Junk Y, Han Y, et al. Vertical GeSn nanowire MOSFETs for CMOS beyond silicon. Commun Eng. 2023;2(1):1-9. doi:10.1038/s44172-023-00059-2

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GermaniumTin Transistor Developed as an Alternative to Silicon - Technology Networks

Eight Yale seniors and a recent graduate have been awarded fellowships for graduate study at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

These fellowship recipients are in addition to the students previously announced in Yale News who have won Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships.

The fellowship winners and their awards are:

Danielle Castro has received a Paul Mellon Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in population health sciences at the University of Cambridge. Next month, she will graduate from Yale with a certificate in global health and a joint B.S./M.S. degree in molecular biochemistry. Her thesis is on the development of novel drug candidates for chordoma spine cancers in the laboratory of Craig Crews, the John C. MaloneProfessor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. She has a strong connection to her Peruvian and Indigenous heritage, and is passionate about social justice and reducing health inequities. She has worked toward this goal while interning in the New Haven Public Schools, serving on the board of the HAVEN Free Clinic, and conducting public health research in Connecticut and the Peruvian Amazon. She enjoys meeting and mentoring other first-generation immigrant and low-income students, especially in her role as co-president of Latina Women at Yale.

Aidan Evans has been awarded a Huawei Hisilicon Scholarship to earn a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Cambridge. He is majoring in computer science and philosophy at Yale and additionally is completing a B.S./M.S. in computer science. During his time at Yale he published research on quantum computing at the premier conference on software engineering. He has also served as a teaching assistant for seven courses, ranging from those on systems programming and computer organization to graduate courses on the interplay of computer science with law. Most recently he has taken on the project of writing a book on the history of Yales computer science department. At Cambridge, he will study the logic and the foundations of computer science under the supervision of Professor Anuj Dawar.

Beasie Goddu was awarded a Paul Mellon Fellowship for graduate study at the University of Cambridge, where she will pursue an M.Phil. in English literature. She will examine the portrayal of womens rights in early 20th-century British fiction. She is majoring in English at Yale with a concentration in creative writing. Her academic thesis explored womens agency over physical space in the works of Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. Her creative writing thesis is a collection of essays about vision. She serves as a writing partner at Yales Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, is a senior editor of The New Journal, a student-run magazine that features creative nonfiction, and is an undergraduate editorial fellow at The Yale Review. She is also president of St. Anthony Hall, an arts and literary society. She aspires to a career in editing, highlighting marginalized female voices.

Tyler Jager was awarded a Kings-Yale Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in political thought and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge. He will focus on early 20th-century history and efforts to restrict migration and the freedom of movement, particularly in the British Empire. He will graduate from Yale with a joint B.A./M.A. degree in political science and a certificate in human rights. He was the 2022 winner of the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics for an essay he wrote on aid workers in the Mediterranean. He has also written about that topic, tenant organization, and lead poisoning in New Haven for a number of campus and national publications, and currently serves as co-editor of BRINK, Yales undergraduate book review. His senior thesis, an ethnographic study in Greece, explored how aid workers presence in host communities affects anti-refugee prejudice in European Union external border zones. Jager is a tour guide at the Yale University Art Gallery and was the coordinator of the Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project Fast, the universitys largest student fundraiser. He has interned at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and at the journal Foreign Affairs.

Hamzah Jhaveri has received a Keasbey Scholarship to pursue an M.Phil. in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. At Yale, he majored in anthropology, with a particular interest in the study of moral economics and the corporate form. He has been researching gun culture and commerce in America, and his senior thesis investigates the transformation of the gun-making trade in an early American settlement in Pennsylvania known for its pacifist religious values and socialist economy. Jhaveri served as the editor-in-chief of the Yale Herald, wrote and performed with sketch company groups including the Fifth Humor and Playspace, and has been an organizer with the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition, Sunrise New Haven (the local chapter of a national movement to stop the climate crisis and create millions of new jobs), and New Haven Rising (a community organization dedicated to achieving economic, racial, and social justice through collective action). He has spent summers teaching fifth-graders about climate organizing, interning at a First Amendment law firm, researching petrochemical companies, and harvesting micro greens at an urban hydroponics farm.

Elizabeth Hopkinson was awarded a Paul Mellon Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in health, medicine, and society at Clare College, Cambridge. She graduated from Yale in December 2022 with a B.A. in environmental studies. Her senior thesis explored end-of-life care using geographic concepts of place and place-making. At Cambridge, she will continue to study how places affect experiences of aging, dying, and disability. She was a leader of FOOT (First-year Orientation Trips), was a first-year counselor in Jonathan Edwards College, a Yale Daily News editor, and a research assistant at the Yale School of Nursing and in the Human Nature Lab. During the height of the COVID pandemic, she worked as an EMT near her home in Westborough, Massachusetts.

Shaezmina Khan has been awarded the Rotary Global Grant Scholarship to pursue an M.Sc. in global governance and diplomacy from the University of Oxford. She is majoring in global affairs at Yale and will obtain a certificate in human rights from Yale Law School. For her senior capstone, Khan worked for the Afghanistan War Commission and assessed U.S. diplomatic efforts to achieve political settlement in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2021. At Oxford, she hopes to focus her research on regional security dilemmas and conflict mediation in the Afghanistan-Pakistan-India region. She is passionate about American foreign policy, national security, diplomacy, and peacebuilding in the Middle East and North Africa region. She served as a policy trainee at the European Commission in Brussels and as a legislative intern for U.S. Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro in Washington, D.C. She served as the executive director of the Yale International Relations Association and president of the Muslim Students Association, and was a research assistant at both the Yale Law School and Jackson School for Global Affairs.

Ethan Pesikoff received a Henry Fellowship to earn a Master of Advanced Studies (MASt) degree in pure mathematics at the University of Cambridge. At Yale, he is majoring in both mathematics and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC). He served on the board of the Yale Undergraduate Math Society, which organizes academic support and social activities for students, and he conducted original mathematical research at Williams College and the University of Minnesota during summer breaks. His senior thesis for NELC seeks to understand previously untranslated Akkadian texts from the early second millennium BCE. After completing his MASt at Cambridge, Pesikoff plans to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics.

Melissa Wang was awarded a Paul Mellon Fellowship to pursue an M.Phil. in U.S. history at the University of Cambridge, where she will study the consolidation of correctional officer power in late 20th-century America and its effect on mass incarceration policy and prisoners lives. Her research is intended to place correctional officers within a broader history of American law enforcement, militarism, and race. At Yale, she is majoring in history, and ethnicity, race, and migration, and is a scholar in the Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights. She has served on the board of the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project (YUPP) and Yale Womens Center, and captains the Yale club Wushu team. Her research interests were inspired by work with the Stop Solitary Connecticuts legislative campaign as a project leader at YUPP and as a research assistant at the Yale Law School Lowenstein Clinic. A painter, she is also a volunteer with Justice Arts Coalition, a national network and resource for those creating art in and around the criminal legal system.

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Fellowship winners will continue their studies in England - Yale News

New research from a multidisciplinary team helps to illuminate the mechanisms behind circadian rhythms, offering new hope for dealing with jet lag, insomnia and other sleep disorders.

Using innovative cryo-electron microscopy techniques, the researchers have identified the structure of the circadian rhythm photosensor and its target in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), one of the major organisms used to study circadian rhythms. The research,Cryptochrome-Timeless Structure Reveals Circadian Clock Timing Mechanismspublished April 26 in Nature.

The research focused on fruit fly cryptochromes, key components of the circadian clocks of plants and animals, including humans. In flies and other insects, cryptochromes, activated by blue light, serve as the primary light sensors for setting circadian rhythms. The target of the cryptochrome photosensor, known as Timeless (TIM), is a large, complex protein that could not previously be imaged and thus its interactions with the cryptochrome are not well understood.

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Circadian rhythms work via what are basically genetic feedback loops. The researchers found that the TIM protein, along with its partner, the Period (PER) protein, act together to inhibit the genes that are responsible for their own production. With suitable delays between the events of gene expression and repression, an oscillation in protein levels is established.

This oscillation represents the the ticking of the clock and seems to be fairly unique to the circadian rhythm, said senior authorBrian Crane, the George W. and Grace L. Todd Professor and chair of chemistry and chemical biology in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Blue light, Crane said, changes the chemistry and structure of cryptochromes flavin cofactor, which allows the protein to bind the TIM protein and inhibit TIMs ability to repress gene expression and thereby reset the oscillation.

Much of the hard work of the study went into figuring out how to produce the complex of cryptochrome-TIM so it could be studied, because TIM is such a large, unwieldy protein, Crane said. To achieve their results, first author Changfan Lin, M.S. 17, Ph.D. 21, modified the cryptochrome protein to improve the stability of the cryptochrome-TIM complex and used innovative techniques to purify the samples, making them suitable for high-resolution imaging.

These new methods allowed us to obtain detailed images of the protein structures and gain valuable insights into their function, said Lin, a Friedrich's Ataxia Research Alliance Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. This research not only deepens our understanding of circadian rhythm regulation but also opens up new possibilities for developing therapies targeting related processes.

Co-author Shi Feng, a doctoral student in the field of biophysics, did much of the cryo-electron microscopy work. Cristina C. DeOliveira, a doctoral student in the field of biochemistry and molecular and cell biology, was also a co-author.

One unexpected result from the study sheds light on how DNA damage is repaired in a cell. Cryptochromes are closely related to a family of enzymes involved in repairing damage to DNA, called photolyases. Crane said the research explains why these families of proteins are closely related to each other, even though they're doing quite different things theyre making use of the same molecular recognition in different contexts.

The study also offers an explanation for the genetic variation of flies that allows them to adapt to higher latitudes, where days are shorter in the winter and it's cooler. These flies have more of a certain genetic variant that involves a change in the TIM protein, and it wasnt clear why the variation could help them. The researchers found that because of how the cryptochrome binds TIM, the variation reduces the affinity of TIM for the cryptochrome. The interaction between the proteins is then modulated and the ability of light to reset the oscillation is changed, thus altering the circadian clock and extending the period of the flys dormancy, which helps it survive the winter.

Some of the interactions that we see here in the fruit fly can be mapped onto human proteins, Crane said. This study may help us understand key interactions between components that regulate sleep behavior in people, such as how the critical delays in the basic timing mechanism get built into the system.

Another exciting finding, said Lin, was the discovery of an important structural area in TIM, called the groove, which helps explain how TIM enters the cell nucleus. Previous studies had identified some factors involved in this process, but the exact mechanism remained unclear. Our research provided a clearer understanding of this phenomenon, Lin said.

Reference:Lin C, Feng S, DeOliveira CC, Crane BR. CryptochromeTimeless structure reveals circadian clock timing mechanisms. Nature. 2023:1-6. doi:10.1038/s41586-023-06009-4

This article has been republished from the following materials. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

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Circadian Rhythm Mechanism Revealed by Fly Study - Technology Networks

Preliminary Examination:Indian Polity and Governance-Constitution, Political System, Panchayati Raj, Public Policy, Rights Issues, etc.

Main Examination:General Studies II: Structure, organization and functioning of the Executive and the JudiciaryMinistries and Departments of the Government; pressure groups and formal/informal associations and their role in the Polity.

This came on a day a stream of leaders of political parties and farmers organisations, including former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, reached Jantar Mantar to express solidarity with top wrestlers, who have been holding a sit-in protest for the past three days to demand action against Brij Bhushan.

What is POSCO Act?

How does the issue connects to Sports Ethics and Acccountability?

From Explained:

What are the protesting wrestlers demanding?

The wrestlers are demanding that anFIR be registered against Brij Bhushan on the basis of their police complaint, and that he be arrested under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act as one of the complainants is a minor. They have also demanded that he should be removed as the WFI president, and that the federation should be dissolved

How has the WFI responded to the protests?

Brij Bhushan has rubbished the allegations of sexual harassment. In January, he said he was willing to be hanged if proven guilty. He has not been responding to calls seeking his comments on the ongoing protests. The WFI has denied claims of financial mismanagement and arbitrariness in its functioning.

What steps has the government taken?

In January, the government persuaded the wrestlers to call off their protest by forming an Oversight Committee, which was tasked with looking into the allegations against Brij Bhushan as well as managing the day-to-day affairs of the WFI.

The six-member committee, headed by boxing legend MCMary Kom, was given four weeks to come up with its findings. However, it submitted its report only in the first week of April. The committee has since been disbanded.

Following the fresh protests, the government declared the ongoing process for the WFI elections, which were scheduled for May 7, null and void. It also instructed the IOA to form an ad hoc panel that would conduct the elections within 45 days, and manage the WFIs everyday affairs until the new members take charge.

What are the findings of the Oversight Committee?

The report is still being examined, and has not been made public. However, the Sports Ministry on Monday shared the major findings following preliminary scrutiny of the report. The key points stated by the government were:Absence of a duly constituted Internal Complaints Committee under the Prevention of Sexual Harassment Act, 2013, and lack of an adequate mechanism for awareness building among sportspersons, for grievance redressal, etc;

Need for more transparency and consultation between the Federation and the stakeholders, including the sportspersons;

Need for effective communication between the Federation and sportspersons.

Though women have converted challenges into opportunities in the sports sector, certain hurdles still remain. Do you agree?

Other Important Articles Covering the same topic:

What the law says about filing of FIR in sexual harassment cases

Syllabus:

Preliminary Examination:Indian Polity and Governance-Constitution, Political System, Panchayati Raj, Public Policy, Rights Issues, etc.

Mains Examination:General Studies II: Indian Constitutionhistorical underpinnings, evolution, features, amendments, significant provisions andbasic structure.

Key Points to Ponder:

Whats the ongoing story On the 50th year of the basic structure doctrine that restricts the power of Parliament to alter the fundamental features of the Constitution, veteran senior advocate Fali S Nariman expressed confidence that the doctrine is here to stay. In an interview toThe Indian Express, Nariman said that even if tested again, the Supreme Court will defend the basic structure doctrine, which is now cemented in the Constitution.

What is 99th Constitution Amendment Act?

Who was the Kesavananda Bharati?

What is Doctrine of the basic structure?

Basic structure doctrine has mostly invoked the test to strike down an amendment when the Parliament has tinkered with judicial review and independence of the judiciary. Comment.

What are the features of the Basic Structure of Constitution?

What power is granted by Article 368 of the Indian Constitution?

Why is the doctrine criticised?

Other Important Articles Covering the same topic:

SHIELD AGAINST AUTOCRATS

Democracys sentinel

Kesavananda: case and its legacy

SC has used doctrine sparingly, pushed back against attempts to shackle judicial review

Previous year UPSC Mains Question Covering Basic Structure Theme:

Starting from inventing the basic structure doctrine, the judiciary has played a highly proactive role in ensuring that India develops into a thriving democracy. In light of the statement, evaluate the role played by judicial activism in achieving the ideals of democracy.(GS-2, 2014)

Syllabus:

Preliminary Examination:Current events of national and international importance.

Mains Examination:General Studies II: Important International institutions, agencies and fora- their structure, mandate.

Key Points to Ponder:

Whats the ongoing story The visit ofChinese and Russian defence ministersto attend a ministerial meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation this week in Delhi is drawing much attention. India, which is chairing the Eurasian regional forum this year, will have a range of bilateral problems to discuss with its fellow SCO members. These include the disengagement andde-escalation of the border confrontation with Chinaand Moscows supply of spares to the large inventory of Russian arms amidst the war in Ukraine.

What is SCO? Who are its members and possible future members?

Main objective of the SCO: to promote peace in Eurasia, its ability to cope with the intra-state and inter-state conflicts among the member states is now under scrutiny.

What are the issues which India has to face while chairing SCO?

SCOs paradox: Even as the Eurasian forum looks attractive to a growing number of regional states, its internal contradictions are casting a shadow over its strategic coherence.

Why is Russia both protector and predator?

If Russia is a protector of the Central Asian regimes, it could also be a potential predator. Russian leaders have often dismissed Central Asian states as artificial nations. President Vladimir Putins vision of a Russkiy Mir or the Russian world underlines Moscows special responsibility to protect Russian minorities beyond its formal borders. Unsurprisingly, no Central Asian neighbour has endorsed the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

To be sure, Russia is deeply entrenched within the Central Asian state system with strong ties to local elites and security establishments. Many Central Asians work in Russia and send valuable remittances home. Yet after Ukraine, the Central Asian states are looking to intensify their diversification strategies to reduce their reliance on Russia.

What about Chinas growing interest?

1. Some observers argue that Chinas growing regional influence will come at Russias expense, as Beijing becomes the senior partner in the bilateral relationship with Moscow after Ukraine.

2. Others point to the fact that Russia and China have drawn closer than ever before and that they have little reason to quarrel over Central Asia. Moscows muscle and Beijings money provide a sensible basis for their strategic division of labour in Central Asia to keep the Western powers out of the region.

3. A third argument agrees that China has no reason to replace Moscow as the main power in Central Asia in the near term, but it warns against underestimating Beijings long-term ambitions in the region. One straw in the wind is Beijings explicit support of the sovereignty of the Central Asian states.

For Your Information- Delhis engagement with the SCO all these decades was premised on Russian primacy in the region and Moscows support of Indias regional interests. For India, a strong and independent Russia is critical for maintaining the inner Asian balance. But Delhi is in no position to ensure Moscows strategic autonomy from Beijing; that depends on Russian strategic choices. Delhis burden in SCO must now be to protect its own interests amidst a rapidly changing regional power distribution in Chinas favour. That India does not have direct geographic access to the landlocked region makes that challenge a demanding one.

What is Indias regional interest?

What is the way forward for India?

Other Important Articles Covering the same topic:

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Syllabus:

Preliminary Examination:Current events of national and international importance.

Mains Examination:General Studies III: Science and Technology- developments and their applications and effects in everyday life.

Syllabus:

Preliminary Examination:Current events of national and international importance.

Mains Examination:General Studies III: Science and Technology- developments and their applications and effects in everyday life.

Key Points to Ponder:

Whats the ongoing story Aditya Nath Jha writes: Technology will change the way we look at labour, capital and skills.Employees will question the companys impact on the environment, gender parity, wealth sharing and other social issues. The business of business will no longer be limited to business.

Catchy Intro: If Marx were alive today and playing with GPT4, he would have been the first to notice that the nature of labour has morphed drastically since the mid-19th century from body to skill to brain.

What is a brain economy? How is it brain labour different from physical labour?

What has been the impact of technology in our lives?

Trade offs in the brain economy-

To facilitate a meaningful dialogue around the trade-offs in the brain economy, we need to first abandon outdated stereotypes of evil corporations, sinful profits and inhuman technology. The accompanying myth of man vs machine, created when labour meant the human body, needs to be laid to rest. Technology doesnt destroy jobs it creates jobs, liberates people and drives social progress. Whether we like it or not, advances in technology in the brain economy will always be a couple of steps ahead of politicians, bureaucrats, policies and laws. We will have to learn to deal with it.

What are the issues that need to be addressed?- Greedy corporations, ethical dilemmas, technology illiteracy (elaborate).

How can the obstacles be converted to opportunities?

What will give rise to societal brain?

For your information:

The relationship between capital and labour will change. Capital exploited physical labour and invested in skills. It will now chase and partner with the brains. The balance of power between capital and labour will become more symmetric. But markets will create inequality by assigning exponentially differential values to body, skill and brain.

In a country the size of India, its impossible to transition everyone to the brain economy overnight. The biggest component of the body economy in India is agriculture. We need our agriculture to be technology-enabled, not body driven. Inequality will remain, but its better to be unequally well off than to be equally poor.

But the bigger issue of inequality is the inequality between nations. In the brain economy, the alternative to technology and innovation is total irrelevance. To be a globally relevant player, India needs to embrace the concept of this new world of the brain economy, adapt its mindset and appropriate its resources accordingly.

Other Important Articles Covering the same topic:

The brilliance and weirdness of ChatGPT

Syllabus:

Preliminary Examination:Current events of national and international importance.

Mains Examination:General Studies III: Science and Technology- developments and their applications and effects in everyday life.

Key Points to Ponder:

Why in news? Last week, India decided to join in this global effort in a big way, by setting up a Rs 6,000 crore National Mission on Quantum Technologies and Applications. Development of homegrown quantum computers is one of the major objectives of the mission.

Historical Tidbit: Nature isnt classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, youd better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly its a wonderful problem because it doesnt look so easy, remarked Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist with a cult status, at a lecture at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1982. This lecture later published as a paper under the title Simulating Physics with Computers in which Feynman proposed the development of different, more powerful computers by utilising the quantum mechanical properties of matter, is often considered the original idea behind quantum computers.

Quantum computers Versus Conventional computers: What is qubit?

Why are Quantum computers not perfect?

Why is the scientific community excited by this mission?

The excitement in the scientific community about the Quantum Mission is because it allows India to join a global technology development race when it is still in the nascent stages. We are in the game. We have rarely been in the game (with regard to other technologies). Work on quantum technologies has been going on in India for the past 10 years, more vigorously in the last four-five years, whereas groups in some other countries have been working for close to three decades. We have some catching up to do, but this mission will help us do that. We have a fairly large pool of people with the right skills, said Rajamani Vijayaraghavan of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) who will play an important role in the computing node of the mission.

Knowledge nuggets:

The mission involves a cost of Rs 6,003.65 crore from 2023-24 to 2030-31, and aims to put India among the top six leading nations involved in the research and development in quantum technologies.

NQM will mainly work towards strengthening Indias research and development in the quantum arena alongside indigenously building quantum-based (physical qubit) computers which are far more powerful and are able to perform the most complex problems in a highly secure manner.

It will target developing intermediate scale quantum computers with 50-1000 physical qubits in eight years in various platforms like superconducting and photonic technology.

Satellite based secure quantum communications between ground stations over a range of 2000 kilometres within India, long distance secure quantum communications with other countries, inter-city quantum key distribution over 2000 km as well as multi-node Quantum network with quantum memories are among the other objectives of the mission.

The mission will help develop magnetometers with high sensitivity in atomic systems and Atomic Clocks for precision timing, communications and navigation.

It will also support design and synthesis of quantum materials such as superconductors, novel semiconductor structures and topological materials for fabrication of quantum devices. Single photon sources/detectors, entangled photon sources will also be developed for quantum communications, sensing and metrological applications.

See the article here:
UPSC Key- April 26, 2023: Know about SCO paradox, Quantum computers, Brain economy, and Water metro - The Indian Express