In the News: Stories in physics and science for the advancement of humanity that relate to
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A team of scientist from Germany, England, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands and Spain, in collaboration with the European Space Agency report a significant step towards satellite based quantum communication by transmitting an entangled photon over a distance of 144 km between the Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife via an optical free-space link. The transmitted photon was received in the Optical Ground Station of the European Space Agency, and the entangled partner photon was detected locally at the transmitter. We have succeeded in establishing quantum correlations under experimental constraints and conditions characteristic for a Space-to-ground experiment. This includes link efficiency requiring a high flux entangled photon source, atmospheric effects, active controlled compact transmitting telescope and an optical Space receiving telescope. The quantum correlations of the transmitted photons with its partner are sufficiently high to violate Bell’s inequality and are also used to generate a quantum cryptographic key. This distance exceeds all previous tests by more than 10-times the magnitude. The experiment fully exploits the distance limits for ground-based free-space communication, significantly longer distances can only be reached using air- or space-based platforms. The range achieved thereby demonstrates the feasibility of quantum communication in space, involving satellites or the International Space Station.
According to recent research, tiny clusters of atoms known as quantum dots may be excellent media for quantum teleportation, a physics phenomenon in which information — in the form of a quantum state, a very specific mathematical “signature” of an atom — can be transmitted almost instantaneously to a distant location without having to physically travel through space. Teleportation is one facet of quantum information science, a developing field that could have a major impact on computing and communications.
Forty-five million years ago an unfortunate fly got stuck in some tree sap and met a sticky end. Today the same fly is responsible for increasing energy efficiency in solar cells. By studying the fly’s eye, scientists have developed a new kind of light-capturing material.
Discoveries like this are examples from a burgeoning scientific field known as biomimetics — copying good designs from nature. Increasingly scientists and engineers are realising that nature, with the benefit of millions of years of evolution, holds the key to the very best ideas. To their astonishment the simplest living things are providing the inspiration for the most advanced, futuristic, and certainly the most eco-friendly and energy-efficient cutting-edge materials.
Plants soak up some of the 1017 joules of solar energy that bathe Earth each second, harvesting as much as 95 percent of it from the light they absorb. The transformation of sunlight into carbohydrates takes place in a million billionths of a second, preventing much of that energy from dissipating as heat. But exactly how plants manage this nearly instantaneous trick has remained elusive. Now biophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown that plants use the basic principle of quantum computing — the exploration of a multiplicity of different answers at the same time — to achieve near-perfect efficiency.
Electrons Caught In The Act Of Tunnelling
There are two ways of conquering a mountain. In classical physics, one must climb the mountain to get to the other side. That is not the case in quantum physics: objects can simply cross the mountain horizontally — by tunnelling through it.
Researchers have come closer to understanding how energy is retained in turbulent systems that self-organize — such as the atmosphere, the universe and plasma — after designing a simple experiment in their laboratory which creates 900 vortices in electrolytic fluid. In their latest paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, Dr. Shats and colleagues Dr. Hua Xia and Dr. Horst Punzmann detail how the powerful zonal flows that create the transport barriers, which in turn restrict the loss of energy from the system, are the result of turbulence self-organization in plasma. New inventions arising from this research will change the way we get energy.
Scientists have made a tiny pulse of light stop, jump from one group of atoms to another and then continue on its way. Harvard scientists have created a verifiable example of teleportation that is described as a true quantum leap. “When I saw the study I did not at first believe it,” said Michael Fleischhauer, a professor at the Technical University in Kaiserslautern, Germany. “It shows that we are entering a state of unprecedented control of coherent light and matter waves” that hold the promise of very real technological benefits.
At long last researchers have teleported the information stored in a beam of light into a cloud of atoms. More practically, the demonstration is key to eventually harnessing quantum effects for hyper powerful computing or ultra secure encryption systems.
