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Light that is sent into a photonic crystal, cant go deeper than the so-called Bragg length. Deeper inside the crystal, light of a certain color range can simply not exist. Still, researchers of the University of Twente, the University of Iowa and the University of Copenhagen managed to break this law. They steer light into a crystal, using a programmed pattern, and demonstrate that it will reach places far beyond the Bragg length. They publish their findings in Physical Review Letters.

Photonic crystals have a regular pattern of nano pores etched in silicon. They are typically designed to work as a mirror for a certain color range of light. Inside the crystal, light of those colors is forbidden. Even if youd be able to place an atom inside the crystal, that typically emits one color, it will stop emitting light. The so-called Bragg length is the maximum distance light is allowed to travel, according to a well-known physics law.

This property can be used for creating perfect mirrors for certain wavelengths, but it also helps improving solar cells. Still, if there is a sign that says forbidden anywhere, then it is always tempting to go there. This is what the researchers did, they proved that light can penetrate the photonic crystal, much deeper than the Bragg length.

They managed to do this by using light that was pre-programmed, and by using the small imperfections that always come with creating nanostructures. These imperfections cause light waves to be scattered randomly inside the crystal. The researchers program the light in such a way that every location inside the photonic crystal can be reached. They even demonstrate a bright spot at five times the Bragg length, where light is enhanced100 times instead of decreased 100 to 1000 times.

This remarkable result can be used for creating stable quantum bits, for a light-driven quantum computer. The forbidden effect can also be employed in miniature on-chip light sources and lasers.

The research was done in theComplex Photonics group of Professor Willem Vos. The group is part of UTs MESA+ Institute. The first author, Ravitej Uppu, who worked in this group earlier on, is now a Professor at the University of Iowa. The research collaboration was continued, also together with the University of Copenhagen. It was supported by Dutch Research Council (NWO) programs Stirring of Light, Free form scattering optics and Self-assembled icosahedral quasicrystals with a band gap for visible light, by the Applied Nanophotonics section of the MESA+ Institute and the Center for Hybrid Quantum Networks of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.

Reference: Spatially Shaping Waves to Penetrate Deep inside a Forbidden Gap by Ravitej Uppu, Manashee Adhikary, Cornelis A.M. Harteveld and Willem L. Vos, 27 April 2021, Physical Review Letters.DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.177402

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Breaking the Laws of Physics: Steering Light to Places It Isnt Supposed to Go - SciTechDaily

Madison is increasingly being noticed as a hub of tech innovation, inspired in part by UWMadison technology and graduates. Photo: Bryce Richter

From February through June, we will highlight the ways that UWMadison powers the states economy through research and innovation, educates the next generation and reaches out to Wisconsinites to improve their lives. Aprils theme is Innovation. Watch for more at #CantStopABadger and #UWimpact on social media.Your supportcan help us continue this work.

The strong growth of Madisons technology sector is drawing attention nationwide.

The boom is fueled in part by UWMadison, which provides cutting-edge research, entrepreneurial graduates and researchers, and a well-educated local workforce that motivates some employers to open offices in Madison.

In 2020, the countrys biggest tech migration increase took place in Madison, according to LinkedIn data published by Big Technology on December 17, 2020.

Madisons technology labor market grew 47 percent from 2014-2019, based on data provided to Wisconsin Public Radio by Lexi Russell, associate director of research and analysis for CBRE, a San Francisco investment company that tracks national real estate trends.

In addition to these statistics that show real growth, Madisons growth potential stands out: In 2019, the Brookings Institution and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation ranked Madison first out of 35 cities with the potential to become innovation hubs.

Several big technology companies have had offices in Madison for years, drawn by collaborations and recruiting opportunities at UWMadison.

Jason Fields

Google, Zendesk, and Microsoft are all here and all recruiting, said Jason Fields, a six-term Wisconsin State Assembly member who has been president and CEO of the Madison Region Economic Partnership (MadREP) since January 2021.

Google opened its first Madison office in 2007 and now has over 100 employees in Madison; principal scientist and site leader Jeff Naughton, a former UWMadison professor of computer sciences, told the Cap Times in 2019 that the Madison office allows Google to hire UWMadison talent.

Zendesks Madison team has grown from 5 employees in 2013 to over 300 in 2021, and the Madison office is Zendesks Midwest regional hub.

Microsofts Gray Systems Lab (GSL) is based in Madison, and the GSL team collaborates on research projects with UWMadison graduates and faculty who are affiliated with the lab. The team designs, develops, and evaluates novel database system technologies, focusing on transitioning the most successful concepts into Azure Data products. Microsoft also owns Madison-based video game development studio Roundhouse Studios.

These large tech companies help anchor Madisons tech startup community, which is largely driven by UWMadison.

Jignesh Patel Photo by: David Tenenbaum

UWMadison computer sciences professor Jignesh Patels first three technology startups, spinoffs of his research, were acquired by Teradata in 1997, Twitter in 2013 and Pivotal in 2015. His fourth tech startup DataChat, founded in 2017, makes data science accessible to anyone. The company has 20 employees and recently received $4 million in funding from Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

To drum up enthusiasm for tech entrepreneurship among UWMadison students, Patel launched the venture creation program CS NEST and the Creative Destruction Lab. He says having big tech companies in Madison burnishes the citys image as a technology hub.

It helps to have Microsoft and Google with big labs here, building core and leading-edge computer science technologies right here in Madison, Patel said.

Fields cites an additional way in which UWMadison fuels the Madison areas tech sector growth: the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF)s support for startups.

WARF files patents, licenses university technologies and invests in companies, like C-Motive Technologies, said Fields. Madison-based C-Motive Technologies was founded by Dan Ludois and Justin Reed, who both hold PhDs from renowned UWMadison research group the Wisconsin Electric Machines and Power Electronics Consortium (WEMPEC).

WARF Ventures funds promising tech startups based on UWMadison research, including AIQ Solutions, which came out of the University of Wisconsin Translational Imaging Research Program.

AIQ is a great example of how UW researchers teamed up to find a novel solution to a real clinical problem, attracted investment from Wisconsin venture funds, and built a product, said WARF Chief Venture Officer Mike Partsch. The companys software platform has the potential to revolutionize how clinicians treat complex diseases, starting with metastatic cancer. AIQs ability to make early predictions about both treatment effectiveness and toxicity risk will ultimately extend lives, while decreasing the money spent on expensive yet ineffective drugs.

UWMadisons leadership and expertise in fusion technology and quantum computing are frequently sought out by investors, and WARF recently invested in quantum computing startup ColdQuanta, which uses UWMadison technology in its product and raised $35 million last year. UWMadison Physics professor and Director of the Wisconsin Quantum Institute Mark Saffman is the Chief Scientist for Quantum Information at ColdQuanta. Headquartered in Boulder, the company has an office in Madison.

Teams of UWMadison alumni who launched startups in Madison have had successful exits. In 2018, ResMed acquired Madison-based Propeller Health, a maker of smart inhalers founded by UWMadison alumni, for $225 million. UWMadison alumnus Brian Raffel and his brother Steve sold Raven Software to Activision in 1997, and the company continues to produce video games for such well-known franchises as Call of Duty and Star Wars.

The Madison Region and UWMadison have produced great leaders in our tech space, said Fields. People understand that these well-known video games and other technologies were created in Wisconsin, and Madison is a great place to work, play, live long-term, and raise a family. These are the assets we have that I think draw people here.

Fields points out that its important to appeal to a diverse variety of tech workers who may want to move to Madison.

We all know the pitch to the guy from Stanford, but whats the pitch to the African-American, Latinx, or Hmong person to get them here? We have to send a message that everybody is welcome here, said Fields, who is also an angel investor and has personally invited the African-American founders whose companies he has invested in to move their businesses to Madison. Were talking about innovation, technology, and a welcoming environment. To Generations X, Y, and Z, diversity is important.

Several MadREP programs are designed to support a healthy technology sector, attract tech workers to Madison, and support the local community.

Were working on a broadband initiative and housing, said Fields. We have to have broadband in our surrounding areas and send the message that we support remote work.

MadREP is also working on a housing fund in partnership with developers, to attract people who want to stay or relocate here, coupled with a revolving loan fund that does gap financing, so underserved entrepreneurs have access to capital. That includes businesses that surround the technology ecosystem.

That makes a community whole and feeds into the culture, said Fields, adding that MadREP is also focused on supporting longtime residents who can benefit from jobs in technology and from roles adjacent to the technology sector. Kids are phenomenal at technology, and we can show them that they can be a part of this community and be leaders of where this community goes, and if our older population needs to learn a new skill set, technology can help level the playing field.

At UWMadison, the Dream Up Wisconsin competition fosters tech innovation for social good, and 2021 winner ConnectRx Wisconsin is a partnership with Epic that aims to integrated Dane County healthcare and social service systems by building on existing electronic health record technology. Second place winner Opportunity Calculator hopes to develop a mobile platform to give workers fast, accurate information about how career and training opportunities could affect their net incomes. Both teams have diverse leadership and community partners.

DreamUp Wisconsin offers the exciting opportunity for area innovators to apply tech-based strategies to increase the income of 10,000 Dane County residents, said director and UWMadison professor Lonnie Berger. We couldnt be more proud of the winning teams accomplishments and their commitment to both increasing family incomes and decreasing racial disparities in income and employment.

UWMadison contributes $20.8 billion per year to the Wisconsin economy, and UWMadison related start-ups contribute an additional $10 billion. Read morehere.

Continued here:
Madison's tech sector booms, driven by UW innovation UW-Madison provides cutting-edge research, entrepreneurial - University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Discovery Accelerator will serve as the technology foundation for Cleveland Clinics new Global Center for Pathogen Research & Human Health. Over the next decade, researchers will use IBMs cloud, robotics and quantum computing tech to remotely design and synthesise molecules, analyze the molecular features in viral and bacterial genomes to boost drug discovery, and break down and potentially obtain deeper insights from structured and unstructured data at a faster rate than ever.

Through this innovative collaboration, we have a unique opportunity to bring the future to life, said Tom Mihaljevic, M.D., CEO and president of Cleveland Clinic. These new computing technologies can help revolutionize discovery in the life sciences. The Discovery Accelerator will enable our renowned teams to build a forward-looking digital infrastructure and help transform medicine, while training the workforce of the future and potentially growing our economy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned one of the greatest races in the history of scientific discovery one that demands unprecedented agility and speed, said Arvind Krishna, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of IBM. At the same time, science is experiencing a change of its own with high performance computing, hybrid cloud, data, AI, and quantum computing, being used in new ways to break through long-standing bottlenecks in scientific discovery. Our new collaboration with Cleveland Clinic will combine their world-renowned expertise in healthcare and life sciences with IBMs next-generation technologies to make scientific discovery faster, and the scope of that discovery larger than ever.

Quantum will make the impossible possible, and when the Governor and I announced the Cleveland Innovation District earlier this year, this was the kind of innovative investment I hoped it would advance, said Ohio Lt. Governor Jon Husted, Director of InnovateOhio. A partnership between these two great institutions will put Cleveland, and Ohio, on the map for advanced medical and scientific research, providing a unique opportunity to improve treatment options for patients and solve some of our greatest healthcare challenges.

Source : Cleveland Clinic : Engadget

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First retail IBM quantum computer headed to Cleveland ...

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PsiQuantum and Globalfoundries have teamed up to manufacture the chips that will become part of the Q1 quantum computer.

Palo Alto, California-based PsiQuantum has plans to create a million-qubit quantum computer. Globalfoundries is a major chipmaker that will manufacture the silicon photonic and electronic chips that are part of the Q1.

The system theyre working on now is the first milestone in PsiQuantums roadmap to deliver a commercially viable quantum computer with 1 million qubits (the basic unit of quantum information) and beyond. PsiQuantum believes silicon photonics, or combining optics with silicon chips, is the only way to scale beyond 1 million qubits and deliver an error-corrected, fault-tolerant, general-purpose quantum computer. PsiQuantum wants to deliver quantum capabilities that drive advances with customers and partners across climate, health care, finance, energy, agriculture, transportation, and communications.

PsiQuantum and GF have now demonstrated a world-first ability to manufacture core quantum components, such as single-photon sources and single-photon detectors, with precision and in volume, using the standard manufacturing processes of GFs world-leading semiconductor fab. The companies have also installed proprietary production and manufacturing equipment in two of Globalfoundries 300-millimeter factories to produce thousands of Q1 silicon photonic chips at its facility in upstate New York and state-of-the-art electronic control chips at its Fab 1 facility in Dresden, Germany.

Above: A Globalfoundries cleanroom.

Image Credit: Globalfoundries

PsiQuantums Q1 system represents breakthroughs in silicon photonics, which the company believes is the only way to scale to a million or more qubits to deliver an error-corrected, fault-tolerant, general-purpose quantum computer.

The Q1 system is the result of five years of development at PsiQuantum by the worlds foremost experts in photonic quantum computing. The team made it their mission to bring the world-changing benefits of quantum computing to reality, based on two fundamental understandings. Globalfoundries is fast becoming a leader in silicon photonics, Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Patrick Moorhead said in an email to VentureBeat. Its announcement with PsiQuantum now adds quantum computing to its SiPho repertoire of datacenter and chip-level connectivity.

First, it focused on a quantum computer capable of performing otherwise impossible calculations requiring a million physical qubits. Second, it leveraged more than 50 years and trillions of dollars invested in the semiconductor industry as the path to creating a commercially viable quantum computer.

Globalfoundries Amir Faintuch said in a statement that we have experienced a decade of technological change in the past year and that the digital transformation and explosion of data now requires quantum computing to accelerate a compute renaissance.

Globalfoundries silicon photonics manufacturing platform enables PsiQuantum to develop quantum chips that can be measured and tested for long-term performance reliability. This is critical to the ability to execute quantum algorithms, which require millions or billions of gate operations. PsiQuantum is collaborating with researchers, scientists, and developers at leading companies to explore and test quantum use cases across a range of industries, including energy, health care, finance, agriculture, transportation, and communications.

Pete Shadbolt, chief strategy officer at PsiQuantum, said in a statement that this is a major achievement for both the quantum and semiconductor industries, demonstrating that its possible to build the critical components of a quantum computer on a silicon chip, using standard manufacturing processes. He said PsiQuantum knew that scaling the system was key. By the middle of the decade, PsiQuantum and Globalfoundries hope to create all the manufacturing lines and processes needed to begin assembling a final machine.

PsiQuantum and Globalfoundries want to play a critical role in ensuring the United States becomes a global leader in quantum computing, supported by a secure, domestic supply chain.

Originally posted here:
GlobalFoundries and PsiQuantum partner on full-scale quantum computer - VentureBeat

May 4, 2021

Quantum science has the potential to revolutionize modern technology with more efficient computers, communication, and sensing devices. But challenges remain in achieving these technological goals, especially when it comes to effectively transferring information in quantum systems.

A regular computer consists of billions of transistors, called bits. Quantum computers, on the other hand, are based on quantum bits, also known as qubits, which can be made from a single electron.

Unlike ordinary transistors, which can be either 0 (off) or 1 (on), qubits can be both 0 and 1 at the same time. The ability of individual qubits to occupy these so-called superposition states, where they are in multiple states simultaneously, underlies the great potential of quantum computers. Just like ordinary computers, however, quantum computers need a way to transfer quantum information between distant qubitsand that presents a major experimental challenge.

In a series of papers published in Nature Communications, researchers at the University of Rochester, including John Nichol, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and graduate students Yadav Kandel and Haifeng Qiao, the lead authors of the papers, report major strides in enhancing quantum computing by improving the transfer of information between electrons in quantum systems.

In one paper, the researchers demonstrated a route of transferring information between qubits, called adiabatic quantum state transfer (AQT), for the first time with electron-spin qubits. Unlike most methods of transferring information between qubits, which rely on carefully tuned electric or magnetic-field pulses, AQT isnt as affected by pulse errors and noise.

To envision how AQT works, imagine you are driving your car and want to park it. If you dont hit your brakes at the proper time, the car wont be where you want it, with potential negative consequences. In this sense, the control pulsesthe gas and brake pedalsto the car must be tuned carefully. AQT is different in that it doesnt really matter how long you press the pedals or how hard you press them: the car will always end up in the right spot. As a result, AQT has the potential to improve the transfer of information between qubits, which is essential for quantum networking and error correction.

The researchers demonstrated AQTs effectiveness by exploiting entanglementone of the basic concepts of quantum physics in which the properties of one particle affect the properties of another, even when the particles are separated by a large distance. The researchers were able to use AQT to transfer one electrons quantum spin state across a chain of four electrons in semiconductor quantum dotstiny, nanoscale semiconductors with remarkable properties. This is the longest chain over which a spin state has ever been transferred, tying the record set by the researchers in a previous Nature paper.

Because AQT is robust against pulse errors and noise, and because of its major potential applications in quantum computing, this demonstration is a key milestone for quantum computing with spin qubits, Nichol says.

In a second paper, the researchers demonstrated another technique of transferring information between qubits, using an exotic state of matter called time crystals. A time crystal is a strange state of matter in which interactions between the particles that make up the crystal can stabilize oscillations of the system in time indefinitely. Imagine a clock that keeps ticking forever; the pendulum of the clock oscillates in time, much like the oscillating time crystal.

By implementing a series of electric-field pulses on electrons, the researchers were able to create a state similar to a time crystal. They found that they could then exploit this state to improve the transfer of an electrons spin state in a chain of semiconductor quantum dots.

Our work takes the first steps toward showing how strange and exotic states of matter, like time crystals, can potentially by used for quantum information processing applications, such as transferring information between qubits, Nichol says. We also theoretically show how this scenario can implement other single- and multi-qubit operations that could be used to improve the performance of quantum computers.

Both AQT and time crystals, while different, could be used simultaneously with quantum computing systems to improve performance.

These two results illustrate the strange and interesting ways that quantum physics allows for information to be sent from one place to another, which is one of the main challenges in constructing viable quantum computers and networks, Nichol says.

Tags: Arts and Sciences, Department of Physics and Astronomy, John Nichol, quantum computing, quantum physics

Category: Science & Technology

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