r/technews • u/donutloop • 22h ago
Hardware New quantum chip taps into weird quasiparticles to get qubits to communicate over long distances
https://www.livescience.com/technology/quantum/new-quantum-chip-taps-into-weird-quasiparticles-to-get-qubits-to-communicate-over-long-distances46
u/anaveragebest 21h ago
The snozberries taste like snozberries
Edit: I’m sure this is a big accomplishment, but just like someone who studies quantum physics I don’t understand it
8
u/Zarde312 21h ago
Reminds me of this.
1
u/EnoughWarning666 20h ago
God what a horrible crop on that video. Did they just screen record a fucking tiktok and upload it straight to youtube???
5
u/bothering 16h ago
They’ve discovered a way to wirelessly send the organs of a proton to another machine instantaneously without any quantum issues gunking up the signal
4
u/anaveragebest 14h ago
I don't really have a clue what's going on, but if it lowers the cost of PC parts I'm all for it.
...Ok I'll see myself out now
2
u/bothering 14h ago
Itll take a decade and a half at least but since these are mainly for enterprise applications that would free up the supply of conventional chips for personal use so yea kinda
3
u/Buzstringer 13h ago edited 12h ago
it's pretty cool, if it's used as an on/off 1/0 signal, you could send data anywhere on the planet instantly, without cables, with enough processing power and storage read/write speeds on each side, you basically have unlimited data bandwidth at 0ms latency, which would be pretty cool.
1
u/kiselina1 11h ago
Not possible without travelling through time. Speed of light is the max speed of information.
1
u/Buzstringer 2h ago
thats the thing, nothing is traveling or moving, they are entangled.
thought experiment. imagine 2 tennis balls, one attached to each end of a 1-foot pole.
If you hold on to 1 tennis ball and move it up and down, the other tennis ball will move in the same way.
You can use a pole that will reach the moon and when you move the tennis ball on earth, because they are connected by the pole, the tennis ball on the moon moves at the same time. That is instantaneous, faster than light can travel, but nothing is actually traveling.
These Quantum particles act as if there is a pole between them, even though there is not, no-one really understands why, but its what they have observed.
and i believe it's a little more complicated because if one particle is spinning clockwise, they know that the other entangled particle must be spinning counter-clockwise even though they could be millions of miles apart.
1
u/kiselina1 2h ago
ok, but you cant use quantum entaglement for data transfer https://youtu.be/9oBiS_Yb9Ac
2
u/Buzstringer 16h ago
Or not instantaneously, you put it out on the line, and your friends see it. They look at it, they say, "Hey, I like that proton organ!" Maybe they send a proton organ. What have you just done? You’ve created an exchange. An exchange of proton organs. We call it Exchangeagram!
9
u/DarraghDaraDaire 20h ago
My grandparents generations were born in houses without electricity and died with smartphones which linked them to anyone in the world. Every decade for them was an exponential growth on the previous one. Technology (to me) feels like it has stagnated since around the late 2000s.
Sometimes I read about these things like AI solving unsolvable proofs, quantum computing, communication using quantum tunnelling, fusion reactors getting closer to real, detection of dark matter, highly targeted immune therapy etc, and I wonder are we on the cusp of some huge breakthroughs which will mean that I will see the same level of unbelievable technological growth in the remainder of my lifetime, as my grandparents saw in theirs.
I like to imagine that in thirty years we will look back on this time and think how we were so close to a runaway environmental catastrophe just as fusion became viable, or how it was so barbaric that the best ways we had to treat cancer was to infuse your body with poison and/or radiation and hope your healthy cells could outlast the tumour cells.
17
u/thievesthick 21h ago
Sure, but how will the government use it to make our lives worse?
5
u/rivertpostie 13h ago
I'm old enough to see revolutionary, liberating technologies emerge and be celebrated as great for humanity...
... and watch them slide into the things that chain us to our masters.
Remember when the Internet was a place where you could find any information and not a shopping mall of lies
3
u/thievesthick 12h ago
The internet used to be so fucking rad in the late 90s. Like the Wild West. I miss personal websites that were made for no other reason than as a hobby. I miss not everything you type being recorded somewhere forever.
E-ink writers like the kindle scribe would have been so cool for journaling before every company in existence was a data collection agency that also sells things sometimes.
Edit: missed a couple words
9
u/Benimaru4636 21h ago
I know some of those words.
-3
u/Positive_Chip6198 19h ago
I know a quasi-fart is a shart and should be avoided. I wonder if the same goes for quasiparticles?
7
u/CasioDorrit 21h ago
Uh huh uh huh what
3
u/KatNeedsABiggerBoat 21h ago
That video game with the pyramid and the round orange dude and snakes in the eighties. Duh.
2
u/theStaircaseProject 19h ago
I refuse to believe anyone thought that was a fun game.
2
u/KatNeedsABiggerBoat 18h ago
Sis and I had the miniature arcade-style games. She had Q-Bert, I had Ms. Pac Man.
2
6
u/Aggressive-Hawk9186 21h ago
I wonder when they will release the next gen discombulator to fully use this tech
0
u/immellocker 20h ago
will be introduced by end of the year with fema camps for the unwilling and free suicide booths for the unhappy
2
u/TucoBenedictoPacif 21h ago
I’ve been reading about quantum computers for years at this point and I’m still not sure how the hell they operate and what they are allegedly capable of.
4
u/Aggressive-Hawk9186 19h ago
it's probably gonna be like AI, we hear about here and there for years and then "out of nowhere" it's a tech that will be existentially important and it's gonna be race to the bottom.
From what I read and I might be wrong, this might make a good part of encryption useless, this would be insane. And this is just a small part of it
3
u/tooclosetocall82 19h ago
Quantum computers have fewer (maybe none) practical uses for the average user. AI for all its faults does have use cases for people which is why it’s taken off. I think quantum will be more like the introduction of the mainframe, it had an indirect impact on most people by virtue of transforming how businesses operated, but the average person has never touched one.
1
7
u/Loose_Hornet4126 21h ago
They are able to create stock from thin air benefiting the shareholders
0
u/PestoPastaLover 20h ago
Seems to be working for AI, but at least with AI you can actually see it doing something instead of just hearing people talk about what it might eventually do.
Yes, the AI bubble is real, and boy, I can't wait for the day that shit show collapses. It reminds me of what happens after a hurricane when suddenly cars are cheap AF without disclosure of damage then the market gets flooded with them.
I think that's eventually going to happen with computer hardware too, especially RAM and GPUs. Right now everyone is throwing absurd amounts of money at AI infrastructure.
1
u/SanderMC24 17h ago
Quantum computers rely on the spin state of certain particles to store information (these are your qubits). Given the nature of quantum mechanics, these can take on any state between spin up (1) and spin down (0). So they essentially unlock the decimal point for computing, promising astronomically higher processing power if the technology is mastered.
Disclaimer: this is heavily simplified and based on my relatively limited understanding of quantum mechanics as a physics student, so may contain errors.
1
u/addctd2badideas 9h ago
Honestly, I feel like the companies and people that build and operate them don't really know fully how they work or what they're capable of.
1
1
1
1
u/Sudden_Cantaloupe_69 20h ago
“New doodledots tap into beebleberries to get queeficles to communicate over long distances”
2
u/patrickthemiddleman 20h ago
AI ELI5:
Imagine a quantum chip as a classroom where each qubit is a child who can normally whisper only to the child beside them. The researchers propose building a tiny vibration pathway through the chip, so a qubit at one end can influence a qubit farther away. The vibration travels through a thin layer of germanium. In quantum physics, one packet of that vibration is called a phonon.
The qubits in this proposal use holes—places where electrons are missing. Their quantum states are sensitive to tiny changes in the germanium’s shape, which is why the passing vibration could connect them. This matters because connecting distant qubits may make it easier to coordinate much larger quantum chips.
The headline needs a correction: this is a proposed design supported by modelling, not a working chip that has already made qubits communicate across 30 cm. That distance is an in-principle goal across a large wafer; researchers still need to build and test such a link.
19
u/EnemySpyBot 18h ago
TLDR: In current quantum computers, qubits (the basic units of quantum data) can only easily communicate with their immediate neighbours. To build massive, powerful quantum computers with millions of qubits, they need a way to share information across the entire chip so they can correct errors and process complex data.
The scientists created Quantum Phononic Links. Instead of relying on complex wiring or hardware, this system uses phonons – tiny, particle-like units of vibrational energy – to carry data between distant qubits.