Global Energy Awards

Physicists Perform “Quantum Surgery” To Fix Errors While Computing Quantum computers promise powerful new capabilities, but their sensitivity to errors remains a major obstacle. Researchers have now demonstrated a method for performing quantum operations on protected logical qubits while continuously correcting errors, even during the operation itself. Credit: SciTechDaily.com By combining surface codes with lattice surgery, researchers have shown how logical qubits can be manipulated and entangled while remaining protected from errors.Quantum computers are often described as a glimpse of a faster, more powerful future. The catch is that today’s devices are fragile in a way ordinary computers are not. Their biggest headache is decoherence, the gradual loss of the delicate quantum behavior that makes them useful in the first place. When decoherence sets in, it can trigger two common kinds of mistakes: bit flips and phase flips. A bit flip is the more intuitive problem. A qubit that shou...

 The universe may be hiding a fundamentally unknowable quantum secret From the vantage point of quantum physics, the universe may in some ways be fundamentally unknowable. In quantum physics, every object, such as an electron, is matched to a mathematical formula called the wave function. The wave function encodes all the details of an object’s quantum state, which means physicists can predict what an object might do in an experiment by combining its wave function with other equations. But if we accept that the whole world is quantum – and many researchers do – then much larger objects ought to have wave functions, including the whole universe. This is a point of view that was previously argued by, for instance, physics luminaries like Stephen Hawking. Global Energy Awards Nomination link: https://globalenergyawards.org/award-nomination/... Visit Our Website: globalenergyawards.org Contact Us: support@globalenergyawards.org

Scientists Discover Crystals That Spin, Twist, and Heal Themselves These newly discovered spinning crystals twist, break, and heal themselves, revealing a strange new side of solid matter. It may seem hard to believe, but crystals made from spinning components are real. Researchers from Aachen, Düsseldorf, Mainz, and Wayne State University have examined these unusual materials and uncovered a range of surprising behaviors. The crystals can easily split into separate pieces, form unusual internal boundaries, and develop defects that researchers can deliberately influence. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the team describes how a unified theoretical approach can be used to predict new properties in systems governed by what are known as “transverse interaction” forces. Transverse Forces in Materials and Living Systems “Transverse forces” are not limited to laboratory materials. They can appear in engineered systems such as certain magnetic solids, but...

 A Fundamental Quantum Rule May Entangle the Entire Universe At the most fundamental level of physics, nature does not behave locally. Particles separated by vast distances can act not as independent objects, but as components of a single quantum system. Researchers in Poland have now demonstrated that this kind of nonlocal behavior, which stems from the simple fact that particles of the same type are indistinguishable, can be observed experimentally for nearly all possible states of identical particles. According to quantum mechanics, every particle of a given type, such as photons or electrons, is inherently entangled with every other particle of that same type, whether it is nearby or located in a distant galaxy. This counterintuitive idea follows directly from a core principle of the theory: particles of the same type are fundamentally identical. This suggests the existence of a universal source of entanglement that underlies the strange nonlocal properties of the quantum world...

 A Tiny Particle Flip Could Reveal New Laws of the Universe A major international research effort led by scientists at Sun Yat-sen University and the Institute of Modern Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is behind a new experiment called MACE. The goal is to investigate whether muonium, a short-lived system made of a positive muon and an electron, can spontaneously convert into antimuonium, its antimatter counterpart. According to current physics theory, such a change should never occur. Detecting it would signal a breakdown of lepton flavor conservation, a core principle of the Standard Model of particle physics, and would provide direct evidence of physics beyond today’s framework. “The conversion of muonium to antimuonium represents a clean and unique probe of new physics in the leptonic sector,” explains the research team. “Unlike other charged lepton flavor violation processes, this conversion is sensitive to ∆Lℓ = 2 models that are fundamentally distinct and could re...

 New AI models trained on physics, not words, are driving scientific discovery While popular AI models such as ChatGPT are trained on language or photographs, new models created by researchers from the Polymathic AI collaboration are trained using real scientific datasets. The models are already using knowledge from one field to address seemingly completely different problems in another. While most AI models — including ChatGPT — are trained on text and images, a multidisciplinary team, including researchers from the University of Cambridge, has something different in mind: AI trained on physics. Recently, members of the Polymathic AI collaboration presented two new AI models trained using real scientific datasets to tackle problems in astronomy and fluid-like systems. The models — called Walrus and AION-1 —can apply the knowledge they gain from one class of physical systems to completely different problems. For instance, Walrus can tackle systems ranging from exploding stars to Wi...