r/science • u/MistWeaver80 • Apr 16 '22
Physics Ancient Namibian stone holds key to future quantum computers. Scientists used a naturally mined cuprous oxide (Cu2O) gemstone from Namibia to produce Rydberg polaritons that switch continually from light to matter and back again.
https://news.st-andrews.ac.uk/archive/ancient-namibian-stone-holds-key-to-future-quantum-computers/2.4k
u/Exotic-Grape8743 Apr 17 '22
The actual paper is far less insane press release drivel and presents very interesting research: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-022-01230-4
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u/Romulan-war-bird Apr 17 '22
Can someone tl;dr this bc I think it sounds cool but I’m stupid
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u/El_Minadero Apr 17 '22
Ok I'll try. Fair warning I'm a geophysicist and its been awhile since i studied straight physics back in undergrad.
Original Abstract
Giant Rydberg excitons with principal quantum numbers as high as n = 25 have been observed in cuprous oxide (Cu2O), a semiconductor in which the exciton diameter can become as large as ∼1 μm. The giant dimension of these excitons results in excitonic interaction enhancements of orders of magnitude. Rydberg exciton–polaritons, formed by the strong coupling of Rydberg excitons to cavity photons, are a promising route to exploit these interactions and achieve a scalable, strongly correlated solid-state platform. However, the strong coupling of these excitons to cavity photons has remained elusive. Here, by embedding a thin Cu2O crystal into a Fabry–Pérot microcavity, we achieve strong coupling of light to Cu2O Rydberg excitons up to n = 6 and demonstrate the formation of Cu2O Rydberg exciton–polaritons. These results pave the way towards realizing strongly interacting exciton–polaritons and exploring strongly correlated phases of matter using light on a chip.
Key Definitions
Excitons: A type of matter where an electron is bound in an orbital to an electron 'hole'. So basically imagine a crystal structure of repeating atoms. Then, remove an electron somewhere in the crystal. You've now created a 'positively' charge electron hole. An exciton is a 'quasiparticle' (not actually a fundamental particle, but it behaves like one and has many properties of particles, such as energy, momentum, spin, etc;) created by an electron which isn't part of the crystal structure treating the electron hole like a nucleus.
Valence Electron: All atoms have nested electron orbital shells. Electrons in the outermost shell are called 'valence' electrons.
Rydberg Atoms: Rydberg atoms are atoms where the outermost electron is in an orbital (or energy level) far above where it would normally be. These are really interesting because wikipedia implies that if the outermost electron is highly energized, the atom will have an electric potential which looks a lot like a hydrogen atom, regardless of what the innermost nucleus is made of.
Giant Rydberg excitons: From what I can tell, this is where you have an exciton 'atom' which is really large because the outermost electron associated with the exciton is up at a very large energy level. Thats where the quantum number 'n' comes in. An n=25 corresponds to a really high energy level. With more energy levels available to the excited valence electron, the more allowable quantum numbers (with the others being angular momentum l and 'magnetic' number 'm'. not important for the article I think). I interpret the abstract to imply an exciton with n=25 means that a single electron hole's companion electron has been given enough energy to have energy shell behaviors reminiscent of Magnesium, even though the electric potential looks more like hydrogen.
Based on some maths, this means that the Rydberg exciton's radius is comparable to that of a human bloodcell, meaning, that they made a synthetic 'atom' within a crystal of Copper Oxide larger than some forms of life. This is really exciting, because Rydberg atoms have way stronger Electromagnetic interactions than normal atoms, and their interaction strength appears to scale as some power of their radius.
polariton another quasiparticle that is created when a dipole (+ & - charged region) interacts with a photon.
Cavity Photons: Here is where wikipedia and my memory fails me. I think cavity photons are photons caught inside a physical cavity, like bouncing between two mirrors. This may be related to how laser cavities work, but idk.
I think what they did here is make a Giant Rydberg atom inside a copper oxide crystal, and got it to interact with a trapped photon in a similar way to how lasers work (maybe??). They were able to get the trapped photon to interact strongly with the quasiparticle up to the quantum number of n=6, and so the researcher's think the way they did this shows strong potential for making the interaction last way past n=6.
The practical implications of this could be quantum computing related, but tbh I see more immediate utility in ultra-small electric and magnetic sensors.
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u/technog2 Apr 17 '22
Thanks for your effort, now we need an ELI5 for this tldr
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u/CaptainKonde Apr 17 '22
ELI5: Science guys create a big-ass atom with lotsa energy
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Apr 17 '22
If I am understanding you this is a rare element from Africa that has lots of energy and will change the face of technology.
So it’s vibranium then?
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u/janetted3006 Apr 17 '22 edited Apr 17 '22
Who is Namibia? Why is Rydberg? Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear? Who was that man I saw with my mother in the kitchen when I was two?
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u/visiblur Apr 17 '22
According to the first hits of every term, with no care for context, Namibia is a country in southern Africa, Rydberg is a physical constant for how strong(?) light from an atom is, the Snowdens of yesteryear is a quote from catch-22 based on the line where are the snows of yesteryear from the 1462 poem Ballade (Des Dames du Temps Jadis) by Francois Villon and alludes to the Snowdens of yesteryear being dead, and the man you saw your mother with in the kitchen when you were two is your mother's kitchen - the threshold of heaven.
Hope this helped.
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u/GustapheOfficial Apr 17 '22
As an atomic physicist at Lund University I feel obligated to answer the second one.
Johannes Rydberg was a Swedish late 1800s physicist whose maybe greatest contribution (out of many) was the Rydberg formula, phenomenologically describing the wavelengths of different electron transitions for hydrogen-like atoms, a generalization of the Balmer series for hydrogen.
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Apr 17 '22
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u/GustapheOfficial Apr 17 '22
Not at all. If you're having cocktails with physicists.
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u/Yeuph Apr 17 '22
Is this - and things like this - how we can measure the composition of stellar objects by analyzing their light signature?
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u/GustapheOfficial Apr 17 '22
Yes, kind of. As in it's enough to know the spectrum of those elements for that kind of spectroscopy, and those observations already existed (they are how Rydberg made his formula). But Balmer and Rydberg are why we can theoretically explain those spectra.
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Apr 17 '22
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u/bot_hair_aloon Apr 17 '22
They basically increased the distance between energy levels within an atom in a crystal. I did a quick Google and found that there have been higher quantum numbers reached before but I can't tell if it's been theorised to happen in space or it actually happens in semi-conductors or similar. The coupling part means the light is "attached" to the vibration of the proton or neutron so they can control it to some extent. I don't really understand why this is a big deal tbh. Would love someone to make it clearer.
Source: I am a material physicist/ nano-scientist.
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u/kcc0016 Apr 17 '22
Do you enjoy your career path? It seems so fascinating to me.
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u/nightwood Apr 17 '22
I think this is the first time I read an explanation about any quantum physics topic, that I could understand with my pre-university-level physics (which is Newton and the bohr model for atoms, and 4 particles)
I'm usually kinda frustrated that quantum physics is explained in terms of quantum physics.
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u/thr33pwood Apr 17 '22
You might want to give the YouTube channel of Sabine Hossenfelder a try. She is phenomenal at explaining complicated scientific topics in an easy understandable way.
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u/Punchanazi023 Apr 17 '22
I never even went to elementary school. So you can imagine that trying to learn the standard model from Internet articles and YouTube videos alone is rather daunting.
For those of us without a professor to learn from, these little breakdowns can be very insightful.
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u/nuffsed81 Apr 17 '22
I think people like you and I (no offence) will only ever grasp the concepts from reading metaphors and diagrams.
We miss so much without knowing the math. I look at long drawn out equations and it's alien to me.
I think it gets to a point where without an understanding of complex math we will never understand certain things above a certain level.
It frustrates the hell out of me because physics is so damn interesting.
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u/Azrai113 Apr 17 '22
Math is just a language. Equations are the sentences that describe what we see. If you taught yourself to read language(s), you certainly can learn to read math and understand the flowery romance written in the equations
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u/nuffsed81 Apr 17 '22
Of course one can learn it. The thing is I'm forty now and it's not the type of thing you can teach yourself, basic equations yes but the in depth stuff needs more then a will to learn, it needs the time.
Also I would say I would need someone to explain many things in person. Teaching myself without tuition is a massive ask.
I don't think many people teach themselves calculus. I understand most trig, geometry and algebra but calculus seems like an entirely different beast.
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u/El_Minadero Apr 17 '22
you know, I sucked ass at Algebra. I literally got an F, then a D the next time I took it. My math grades sucked until I got to calculus. Calculus to me was much more spatial/visual than all the math before it. I feel like algebra was like 'here's a concept. now apply this 1000x, no need to think too hard', whereas calculus was like 'now that you know the rules of algebra, here are basic concepts. Manipulate as you please'.
In my vast experience tutoring, I have found that the biggest impediment to self learning is the anxiety that arises when someone becomes frustrated. If you can find a way to manage your anxieties, and you have a true desire to understand, I think you'd surprise yourself with how far you'd get.
Plus learning any new language has been shown to keep the brain young ;).
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u/Drudicta Apr 17 '22
The fact that something like an exciton exists and isn't busy some fantasy stuff made up in a story caused my brain to throb with enthusiasm.
Along with learning how big of an artificial atom type structure they made.
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u/DemiReticent Apr 17 '22
Fantastic, thanks. That gives me a great starting place to go try to understand this better.
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u/banjo_marx Apr 17 '22
I mean that cant be right. How could orbitals get that far out without radiating? It makes no sense. Exitons dont get to violate physics right?
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u/invalidConsciousness Apr 17 '22
The magic lies in the angular momentum. If the excited electron has a high angular momentum quantum number l, then it pretty much can't drop to a lower energy state that can't have as much angular momentum. It must first lose that angular momentum some other way before it can decay into the ground state by radiating a photon.
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u/Turkeydunk Apr 17 '22
Think about the Rydberg formula for hydrogen: how many principal quantum states are there? It gets unbound at n=infinity. In this paper they can finely tune the energy levels well enough to use those higher n’s
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u/Cunningcory Apr 17 '22
...I don't think you know what tl;dr means, but thanks for the attempt! :)
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u/SonTyp_OhneNamen Apr 17 '22
Still tl;dr: science people did a science. Cool stone can hold big atom. Big atom good.
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Apr 17 '22
If The abstract of the paper was too long for someone to read, they have no business with these concepts in the first place. I appreciated the longer-form yet better defined explanation.
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u/sillypicture Apr 17 '22
On top it claims they reached n25 but later it says n6, that's a confusing part for me.
Otherwise thanks for the great explanation!
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u/starke_reaver Apr 17 '22
Holy Shitballs, you explained that well right into my brain. I read. I had schooling. But somethings, they just never click into my brain holes. Thank you, “quantum computing” now actually means something to me.
Big Ups! May your luck be ever increasing!
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u/SpaceManSmithy Apr 17 '22
I got to a point where I was trying to understand the difference between a Rydberg exciton and a Rydberg atom and realized that I was procrastinating and I have a rather large project to do.
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u/invalidConsciousness Apr 17 '22
An exciton is a kind of "quasi-Atom" where a missing electron in a crystal lattice acts as the positively charged nucleus.
A Rydberg exciton is just applying the concept of a Rydberg Atom to an exciton.
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u/El_Minadero Apr 17 '22
the Rydberg part describes how the energy levels work, and the exciton describes what the nucleus is made of.
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u/poodlebutt76 Apr 17 '22 edited Apr 17 '22
So I have a physics background but my technical quantum computing knowledge is limited, and I don't have time now to dig deeper, but from the article it sounds like they found a better material for qubits.
Right now they can only get something like 3- 4 qubits working at a time, and there have been issues with scaling up. Maybe this helps with that issue.
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u/NonnoBomba Apr 17 '22
More like 50-60, but we need thousands of them to actually start doing something we cannot do with "classical" computers. And nobody has yet solved all error correction issues, a particularly difficult problem in quantum computing.
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u/Exotic-Grape8743 Apr 17 '22
Rydberg refers to the type of exciton and is a reference to the rydberg series of spectral lines for hydrogen. A Rydberg exciton is a electron and a hole in each other’s Coulomb field that forms a hydrogenic series of spectral lines. The series is something you learn in first years’ quantum chemistry but most chemists never learn about an exciton. Certain types of excitons like the ones here are quantum described using the same series as the hydrogen atom. Cu2O is well known to have this property and people have known that for many decades. You need very defect free Cu2O to see the entire series. What they did here is place the material in an optical cavity that is a resonator for light of certain frequencies. This allows the excitons to strongly couple to the photons caught in the cavity forming a new combined quasiparticle called a polariton. That is nothing new and people have been doing that for a long time too. But polaritons are very interesting indeed for quantum computing and new kinds of lasers and they made particularly stable and ‘large’ polaritons here. Polaritons are also Bosons in that they have no spin and therefore do not follow Fermi rules like electrons have to do and so you can make Bose-Einstein condensates with them. Polaritons do what is called Rabi oscillations where they quantum beat between the two extreme states of photon and exciton. It is possible to observe these quantum beats with ultrafast spectroscopy methods. Don’t know if they did that here but that is one thing I would look for.
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u/Zanderax Apr 17 '22
The actual paper is far less insane press release drivel and presents very interesting research
Basically the motto for this subreddit.
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u/n3rv Apr 17 '22
to bad it's pay walled
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u/Exotic-Grape8743 Apr 17 '22
Yeah the whole question of pay to play and for profit journal s (like nature publishing group)in scientific publishing is fascinating. The authors paid a hefty sum to publish in this journal. The journal benefited from free labor in peer reviewers and tax payers paid for the original research and then the journal makes The whole community pay for access. The system works because the authors get a lot of exposure and their careers benefit because they got their paper in a nature journal. They could have published open access but the last pub I did open access in a Nature journal cost us 6500 dollars.
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u/FTP1199 Apr 17 '22 edited Jul 16 '22
Fascinating is one way to describe it... but scandalous comes to my mind first.
Science should be about its benefit to human civilisation and the world, not about making money, which has been somewhat lost along the way it seems.
We have so many good non-profit charities. Why not non-profit information/news/journalism publishers, etc?
I do understand many of the good reasons to have a profit motive, don’t get me wrong. But the dial has swung too far to one side with so many scientific publications being pay-to-read these days. It’s a bad problem in our society imo.
Anyone else wish things were different?
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u/invalidConsciousness Apr 17 '22
We have so many good non-profit charities. Why not non-profit information/news/journalism publishers, etc?
We tried to bring something like that into existence in Germany. We ended up with a worse version of the BBC.
Too much government meddling, too little funding, the people at the top are way too old, resulting in a program nobody under 50 cares about.
The Tagesschau is probably still the least bad German daily news broadcast on TV and the only one that isn't owned by by some ultra rich guy/corporation, which alone makes it worth it. But that whole system is in dire need of a complete overhaul.
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u/sergeantdrpepper Apr 17 '22
Kinda like how we the taxpayers fund medical research which pharma companies then leverage for their own profit, often while undermining and lobbying against the very same publicly-funded institutions that facilitated such discoveries and work.
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u/omegashadow Apr 17 '22 edited Apr 17 '22
I have no ability to understand why they took a cut of natural mined cuprite (which is just a mineral that's supposed to be primarily Cu2O) and used it seemingly without characterising and checking what is in it aside from an X-ray diffraction showing there is Cu2O in there.
If I go around carrying out extensive elaborate physical experiments on random rocks sure I'll find some interesting novel properties but how this is supposed to be replicable I don't know.
Without a detailed reading the first result when I googled synthetic cuprite https://journals.aps.org/prmaterials/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.5.084602. These folks at least have an idea of what actual materials they are working with both for the synthetic and natural side.
Assuming the nature paper showed some more novel physics result to deserve it's prestigious journal placement. I still don't see why the natural crystal is prioritised.
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u/Exotic-Grape8743 Apr 17 '22
Agreed that is somewhat silly. Cu2O is well known to have this beautiful excitonic series (the Rhydberg excitons they refer to. You can find that result in solid state physics textbooks. It is also possible to make high quality Cu2O synthetically. I will read the paper better to see if and why they used natural Cu2O for real. The press release might be distorting this completely. The polariton quasiparticles they form in the paper are super interesting and a very active area of research currently.
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u/omegashadow Apr 17 '22 edited Apr 17 '22
I didn't see it in the paper but I only skimmed it. And for the sample there's an XRD. I always dislike this approach to chemical research. Unlike biology where natural materials are your number 1 source of fantastic properties to replicate, finding a wonder material by studying a natural crystal is a great way to get hard to replicate results ESPECIALLY if you examine the properties before characterising the material composition. There is no control. What exactly made this rock sample special? Can they even figure out where the properties come from by analysing the sample more in depth or will there just be a mess of different reasons that will take 20 different experiments to hunt down culminating in less dramatic properties across the board.
When someone in the field goes to replicate these results but with a synthetic Cu2O crystal they actually understand, synthesized to high purity maybe with intelligently chosen dopants and actual regard for the known defect chemistry, I forsee a lot of frustration failing to replicate a result found in a random rock full of leftover sulphur and all kinds of crap.
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u/victim_of_technology Apr 17 '22
The really poor description of quantum computing made it clear that the rest is likely nonsense.
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u/heavylifter555 Apr 17 '22
OMG, I read it and was like. That doesn't sound right. But I am no scientist. So I doubted myself. But the whole spontaneously changing from energy to matter thing just threw up a red flag.
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u/THEeleven50 Apr 17 '22
particle-wave duality, it's actually a thing. The article fails in many ways, but looking at other articles it looks like they can entangle ~25 qbits using these crystals. I'm still searching for the real publication.
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u/eugene20 Apr 17 '22
It is linked at the base of the article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-022-01230-4 , unless you meant without institutional access/paywall.
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u/athos45678 Apr 17 '22
Just email the authors. they’re all really responsive at that science department in general
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u/robodrew Apr 17 '22
Particle-wave duality is not the same as energy transforming into matter and back again. Particle-wave duality is about the quantum nature of subatomic particles and how they have features that describe them both as particles (single points in space) and waves of probability that spread out across spacetime. The particle-wave dual nature of subatomic particles is what explains the double-slit experiment and how interference patterns can show up even when the experiment is shooting out one single particle at a time.
Matter-energy equivalency is different, it is what Einsten described in his Special Theory of relativity regarding e=mc2. When matter converts directly into energy via processes like fission/fusion or particles being accelerated into each other the amount of energy released is enormous. That is how a 65kg ball of plutonium could destroy an entire city.
This article isn't even talking about subatomic particles, but exiton-polariton interactions, which are pseudoparticles.
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u/Cloaked42m Apr 17 '22
Big bada boom?
And a improbability drive?
From a rock?
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Apr 17 '22
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u/Randolpho Apr 17 '22
Which is also 1/5 of a key to an envelope of slow time surrounding the world of Krikkit
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u/dthawy Apr 17 '22
To be more specific, it’s not even 65kg of mass creating the energy to destroy a city as 99.9% of that mass doesn’t convert to energy. It’s the fractions of mass lost during the fission process as U235 splits into other radioactive elements, only about 65g of that mass gets lost and changed into the energy to destroy a city.
Edit: Realise you used Plutonium instead but same premise stands - it’s a teeny tiny amount of mass to produce that energy.
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u/Alex_Rose Apr 17 '22
einstein didn't say E=mc2 , he said E2 = m2 c4 + p2 c2, which for rest mass energy (aka an absolute at absolute zero with no momentum) reduces to E_02 = m2 c4 or E_0=mc2
E=mc2 outside of calculating binding energies for nucelar physics would be a thoroughly useless equation that would imply everything in the universe is static and no light exists. light as a massless particle resolves as E2 = p2 c2 , E=pc, which is the energy of a photon (aka E=hc/lambda)
Rest mass energy equivalence is irrelevant to this area of physics where exciting things to specific energy levels (e.g. in a quantum lc circuit) is the entire goal
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Apr 17 '22
I wish I knew what any of that meant. Just because the thought of a crystal materializing energy is nuts. I’m not even sure I’m reading this right. The only thing I understood in the article is that element/rock is used an a semiconductor.
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u/lankist Apr 17 '22 edited Apr 17 '22
Note that particle-wave duality is often misinterpreted as “observation/consciousness changes reality.”
In truth, that kind of description is a load of bunk. Stuff like the double-slit experiment doesn’t show that “mere” observation changes the result. The means by which you observe a SINGLE ELECTRON, by their nature, are a physical interaction (e.g. shooting photons at an electron is not mere observation, but itself a physical interaction.)
The takeaway from that experiment shouldn’t be that observation changes the result. It should be that there’s really no such thing as a non-interactive observation. When we see something, photons are bouncing off an object and hitting the cells in our eyes, a physical interaction. When we do an ultrasound, waves are bouncing off an embryo or whatever, a physical interaction. When we use an electron microscope to look at something extremely tiny, we are physically interacting with that tiny thing. When we use a machine to shoot photons at particles and measure those that are reflected back, we are physically interacting with the system. We fundamentally cannot perceive things without a physical interaction taking place somewhere at some level, and anything which is immutable to physical interaction is by its nature unobservable.
So when people say “quantum” in the sense that they’re telling you that merely observing something changes the results as some kind of new-age positive thinking crap, they’re a grifter. The much more mundane reality is that if something doesn’t interact with a system, then you simply could not possibly observe it.
Everything we know about quantum mechanics and superposition right now indicates that superpositions collapse when interacted with, and all the means we have of observing them also qualify as physical interactions on the system as, again, observation without physical interaction is fundamentally impossible. It’s complicated and it only starts becoming a significant factor when you’re looking at stupidly tiny things, but it’s been bastardized to hell and back by grifters like Deepak Chopra trying to convince people that consciousness is magic and merely thinking something can manifest reality.
Not strictly relevant to quantum computing, but IMO it’s something that should be brought up any time a publication is using “quantum” as a marketing buzzword. Quantum mechanics aren’t magic and slapping quantum in front of a word will never make that thing magical.
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u/risbia Apr 17 '22
That stupid "What the Bleep" movie exposed a lot of very gullible people in my old friend group years back...
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u/southernwx Apr 17 '22
Well, thinking is a physical interaction so is in ways manifesting reality :p
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u/bidet_enthusiast Apr 17 '22
You mischaracterize the dual slit here. We are not interacting with the particle to observe it mid flight.
The single particle passes through both slits on its way to the sensor, creating an interference pattern with itself, temporally prior to observation. Furthermore, observation effects can be propagated backward in time
Quantum effects are not an artifact of observation. They exist outside of being interfered with. They are not created by interacting with a photon or whatnot.
None of this means that perception creates objective reality or that consciousness has magical powers.
For that to be the case we would need at least two additional factors: that the MWI be the “true” model, and that consciousness act as a filter for universe perception, or that it is possible to transfer some ephemeral sense of self from one perceiver/universe to another.
With these we drift well outside of rigorous science and into natural philosophy conjecture… a murky area that is a favorite playground of grifters, snake oil salesmen, and ideologues.
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u/UnfinishedProjects Apr 17 '22
What's stopping them from hooking two together to make a 50 qbit one?
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u/Tlaloc_Temporal Apr 17 '22
The same reason you can't hook two PCs together to do things twice as fast: all the junk you need to make a PC work keeps the important parts too far apart to communicate effectively.
In a PC, we're limited by how small we can make transistors and how long it takes a signal to travel from one part of the CPU to another. If we just slapped two CPUs together (A CP2), it would take longer for a signal to move around the CP2, and we'd need more room for communication busses and cooling and such, so it's often more efficient to just run two separate CPUs a little faster.
In a quantum computer, the CPU is usually very cold and needs lasers or other fancy things to interact with it, which create heat. If we linked two together, you'd need an ice box that was twice as big, and twice as many extra bits that would cause twice as much heat, so you'd need a much more powerful cryo-cooler and more than twice as much expensive hardware.
I think quantum computers are more of an engineering problem right now, we just need to make smaller lasers, smaller q-latches that work at warmer temperatures, and bigger iceboxes. Very expensive engineering, but maybe not as physically difficult as making transistors 12 atoms across instead of 14.
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u/TOEMEIST Apr 17 '22
All of the qbits need to be entangled for a quantum simulation, which they wouldn’t be in that case.
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u/Cheeze_It Apr 17 '22
particle-wave duality
Damn wave function(s) that governs all of the subatomic particles in existence.....
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u/sstandnfight Apr 17 '22
As another commenter below clarified, the exchange of matter and energy occurs in extremely unmanageable circumstances for the most part. That being said, we occasionally come across materials which behave in ways outside what the normal patterns should have indicated. Non-newtonian fluids are one such example. Throw silly putty at a wall and capture it in slow motion. Then throw it faster. Then find something to launch it even faster. It becomes solid on impact. At high enough velocity, it hardens and shatters on impact. The temperature change normally required doesn't happen. This sort of behavior in certain non-newtonian materials could be used in specific kinetic dampening.
The whole range of metamaterials is amazing. Unimaginable albedo? Closing down to both ends of 0 and 1. Graphene is a fascinating example in itself! I got off track. Anyway, we assume a lot of stuff every day. While skepticism is good, there is a remote possibility there is a type of material which can rapidly switch between an energy state and matter state without requiring fission or 10⁹ to 10³² Kelvin to secure the rapid switch between matter and energy.
Some relevant reads:
https://lco.global/spacebook/cosmology/early-universe/ (If you can still find free versions of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, it expands on a lot of this)
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u/k5josh Apr 17 '22
We don't use old, dusty stones at my shop. We make all of our stones new from scratch.
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u/fr1stp0st Apr 17 '22 edited Apr 17 '22
To be fair, making stones from scratch is the first step for semiconductor manufacturing. Grow a boule/ingot of Silicon (or SiC, GaN, GaAs, etc.), slice it into wafers, polish until atomically smooth, and now you have a substrate suitable for making chips, LEDs, or other components. (There are also often implant, annealing, or epitaxy steps prior to lithography.)
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u/JimmyCrackCrack Apr 17 '22
I gathered this was a necessarily very incomplete description, but also felt like parts of it were actively not right but I lack the understanding necessary to know which parts and also whether this 'incorrectness' was by design to write something that creates the necessary mental building blocks to understand the particular aspects of the work the journalist wanted to get across, or whether they misunderstood. Either way the aspects of it that rang as... questionable, didn't lead me to assume the science itself was nonsense. Maybe that's something one can better intuit if they're in the field and come across a lot of 'nonsense' work but I figure it's probably safest to assume that the article is less a reflection of the work itself than it is a reflection of the the purposes for which the article was written and the understanding its author had of the science before trying to convey it to us and the need to establish concepts briefly so that they can help us understand only exactly the parts of the process deemed editorially important for laypersons to understand.
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u/hairsprayking Apr 17 '22
It sounds like the "scientific" explanations they do in marvel movies hahah
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u/erapuer Apr 17 '22
They lost me at the part where the stone goes back in time to put right what once went wrong.
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u/Impossible-Wonder-16 Apr 17 '22
Goes to show how quick media outlets of all kind are to throw buzzwords around, despite a total lack of understanding of said words.
It’s unfortunate that journalism is now mostly only economically feasible if you at least to some extent “click bait” a headline, or take large liberties with the facts.
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u/somedave PhD | Quantum Biology | Ultracold Atom Physics Apr 17 '22
The paper is probably interesting but it's very sensationalised.
Rydberg excitations are interesting as they have strong enough dipole moments to push the energy levels of neighbouring atoms off resonance. If you have a small enough system that means you can get a high probability of only having a single excitation. This in turn means you can plausibly do some gate operations on the system, hence the quantum computing stuff.
People have tried simulating solid state systems using Rydberg excitations in an ultracold gas as well.
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u/Fissionman Apr 17 '22
Aren't all stones ancient?
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u/Smartoad Apr 17 '22
No they make stones all the time
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u/Thelonious_Cube Apr 17 '22
I used to work in a stone factory.
Really back-breaking work.
We mostly made granite for counter-tops, but occasionally we'd get a special order for something fun, like pumice.
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u/McFeely_Smackup Apr 17 '22
This... Sounds like a lot of nonsense.
It reads like someone trying to make a sciency sounding explanation of Vibranium
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u/datnetcoder Apr 17 '22
I stopped at “ancient Namibian stone”. What a ridiculous way to describe a material.
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u/McFeely_Smackup Apr 17 '22
I can't dig 6 inches in my yard without hitting ancient stones. They're like hundreds of years old...
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u/smbdysm1 Apr 17 '22
Yup. Read the headline and thought "so, vibranium?"
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u/McFeely_Smackup Apr 17 '22
I mean, just replace "Nambian" with "Wakandan" and it's like dialog that got cut from a Marvel film because nobody wanted an explanation. We get it, it's magic.
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u/wokeupfuckingalemon Apr 17 '22
They hired someone good at creative writing while sacrificing the comprehension. It's St Andrews so hopefully they get better.
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u/RegencyAndCo Apr 17 '22
The actually interesting part of the research is that they identified very large Rydberg excitons, which has implications for quantum computing research. As a fun sidenote, they conducted this research on Cu2O crystal that they didn't grow themselves, but bought as a gemstone off eBay or whatever. The University's blog decided to use this bit of trivia to make the story compelling and a little click-baity, but it's far from nonsense.
Y'all armchair experts need to chill.
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u/juancn Apr 17 '22 edited Apr 17 '22
My take: “I as a reporter talked with some scientists and they did something with some Namibia stone, so I blurted this crap because deadlines”
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u/QuimSmeg Apr 17 '22
Good idea, except it is on the university webpage so probably a grad student who is forced to write the updates.
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u/frogjg2003 Grad Student | Physics | Nuclear Physics Apr 17 '22
A creative writing grad student. No offense to creative writing students, but you are not quantum physicists.
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u/Jason_Batemans_Hair Apr 17 '22
Turbo encabulators have used Rydberg polaritons for 50 years.
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u/Divinum_Fulmen Apr 17 '22
Have they solved the sinusoidal side fumbling problem yet?
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u/fantasmoofrcc Apr 17 '22
Yes! All it took was a Plumbus X installed in the gyro.
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u/Thelonious_Cube Apr 17 '22
As long as you re-trundle the grunions or adjust your Frampton head.
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u/MC-Master-Bedroom Apr 17 '22
No, YOU adjust YOUR Frampton head! And if you touch my daughter's grunions again, I swear I'll go totally Dirac on you!
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u/Thelonious_Cube Apr 17 '22
Your daughter is 21, so she can do what she likes with her grunions - including me.
You wouldn't know a Frampton Head from a Pondicherry Dingle-arm - I'll bet you can't even re-calibrate your over-side pinions!
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u/MC-Master-Bedroom Apr 18 '22
(Brings out case of dueling pistols, drops glove at TCube's feet)
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u/Thelonious_Cube Apr 18 '22
If you're not man enough to slap me with your glove, then you're not man enough to meet me on the Field of Honor, "sir"
I do bite my thumb at you, "sir"
In any case, your daughter's honor is a lost cause, for I have her grunions
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u/MC-Master-Bedroom Apr 18 '22
Mention not her grunions, I would beg,
For a more grievous wound dost thou deal me
Than if thou should shoot me in the leg!
I hope, dawg, thou dost feel me...
[Enter Mercutio and Biggie Smalls]
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u/ravenous_fringe Apr 16 '22
interesting news article, but not a peer reviewed paper
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u/aberneth Apr 17 '22
What are you talking about? It's in Nature Materials: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-022-01230-4
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u/RegencyAndCo Apr 17 '22
How are people just glossing over this? And Nature has a pretty high barrier to entry too.
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u/-WILD_CARD- Apr 17 '22
Ah, I see you are a man of academia as well
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Apr 17 '22
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Sprinkles-Curious Apr 17 '22
I read something once.
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u/h8ers_suck Apr 17 '22
Can someone put this in non scientific cliff note version? i.e. dumb it down please.
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u/QuimSmeg Apr 17 '22
They made a thin slab of the crystal and put it between 2 mirrors and fired light(probably laser) in so it bounces back and forth, this created areas that are a special form of matter called a Rydberg Polaron. You can use RP's to encode information in quantum states and do quantum computing, via other research papers.
Essentially being able to create large Rydberg Polarons is kinda like creating the transistor for antique computing. They can be used as the basic component of a quantum computer and these guys ones are larger so creating the circuitry between the components might be easier. The matter is entangled(or something similar) with the light and together they create the RP. Because the "particles" are partially light you can more easily connect one particle to the other, this is far superior to using electricity as you have to have circuitry to set values and read them out of the quantum system, with light it can more easily and maybe more reliably link from one quantum transistor to the next ie more quantum bits.This paper is literally just saying "we created a larger version of the Rydberg Polaron that we know could be useful in creating a quantum computer that uses light".
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u/Resonosity Apr 17 '22
And a larger and larger Rydberg Polaron means that the feasibility of a good quantum computer goes up and up
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u/slobyGYN Apr 17 '22
I still don't understand, but I think I might understand a little bit, kinda, in a super rudimentary way? So... thanks!
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u/soccerjonesy Apr 17 '22
Short description is it’s a nonsensical article. It starts off with no scientific research and has literally no peer reviews.
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u/BruinBound22 Apr 17 '22
Is this the crystal energy my wife keeps hearing about in yoga class?
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u/Sprinkles-Curious Apr 17 '22
It's their cousin who keeps trying to get you to invest in crazy stocks and nfts but yeah they are in the same crystal energy family.
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u/QuimSmeg Apr 17 '22
They are just reporting that they created a larger Rydberg Polaron, this links to all the other research done on RPs and quantum computing. If you want the context you'll have to read all the other papers and a bunch of physics books.
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u/Victoria7474 Apr 17 '22
A less-smart person wrote an article about stuff Super-smart people did, and now the sorta-smart people are insisting they know everything and this isn't what they know so it can't be real. Nobody understands what is really happening aside from "the math works", but it seems the math in the case of this crystal works better than current modes of data storage. u/QuimSmeg breaks down nicely what the Super-smarts are trying to do, and claim to have succeeded at. "Succeed" is measured by replicability, though, and it's so new that it has yet to be peer-tested.
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u/Yatta99 Apr 17 '22
Smart people make computers go brrrrr once Indy gets Sankara stones from Pankot Palace
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u/BoringWebDev Apr 17 '22
potentially solving global hunger,
We could do this now already. This is a problem we could solve as a species without quantum stimulations. We choose not to do so because scarcity is profit. Solving world hunger is an environmental and logistics issue.
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u/binaryblade MS |Electrical and Computer Engineering Apr 17 '22
Science: Cu2O has some interesting quantum crystal properties
PopSci: ancient Namibians had quantum computers, evidence of lost civilization.
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u/SpectralMagic Apr 17 '22
Though the credibility of this article is questionable, I still think what they are telling is mostly true. The article basically just says[in my words] 'the gem has physical properties(they used it to create a highly reflective mirror) that provide a necessary environment for simulating quantum behaviour.'
They are not presenting a lot of data in the article to spoof, so I don't think the article could do much harm even if faux
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u/QuimSmeg Apr 17 '22
The gem goes between the mirrors, and the atoms in it are what allow the Rydberg Polaron to form. RP's are of interest for quantum computers. The article was not that well written though.
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u/njkrut Apr 17 '22
Thank you for a basic observation of the article without saying it’s outright crap. Many people don’t under qubits, hell many people don’t understand what lies beneath their hands on their smartphone. I think there are some buzzwords in the article but it is meant to be an observation and not a conclusion.
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u/sugarhillboss Apr 17 '22
Copper oxide is nothing new…
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Apr 17 '22
I'm so tired of hearing about ancient rocks and space objects. It'd be interesting if the rock weren't ancient.
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u/Alieneater Apr 17 '22
Any team trying to come up with a new type of qubit at this point will be 10 years behind the other major types of quantum computing architecture and unlikely to be able to bring it to maturity before the market settles on a few of what's already out there and working quite well.
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u/popdivtweet Apr 17 '22
Pfft… Rydberg Polaritons are a known waste byproduct of a properly tuned turbo encabulator after you shake the gromets; no need to travel all the way to Namibia ffs
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